The Temuka Leader SATURDAY, APRIL 18, 1885. MR BALLANCE’S LAND SETTLEMENT SCHEME.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1329, 18 April 1885, Page 2

The Temuka Leader SATURDAY, APRIL 18, 1885. MR BALLANCE’S LAND SETTLEMENT SCHEME.

The Hon. John Ballance is at present somewhere ia Canterbury looking out for land whereon to settle working men. There is one thing that can be said of Mr Ballance : he means well ; he is sincerely and honestly working for the public good, and if success does not crown bis efforts it will not be for want of the desire to do what is best for the colony at large. Of the three leading Ministers (the others appear to be merely respectable M

Ballance is undoubtedly the most sincere in his devotion to the public interest. Sir Julius Vogel has ability, but he exercises it only in the direction which suits bis own purposes; he is as regardless of the public good as be is of the Polar star, excepts to the extent that contributes to his own power and popularity. As for Mr Stout, we cannot understand him. We once held him in high esteem : we have looked upon him as an ideal statesman ; but since his elevation to the Premiership be seems to have changed completely. Mr Ballance, on the other hand, does not seem to have suffered much through his close connection with Sir Julius Vogel : for he is, so far as we can see, as honestly desirous of doing the best he can tor the colony as ever he was. In a recent issue of the Lyttelton Times Mr Ballance is reported to have said in an interview with the representative of that paper : —“ It is perfectly true that here you have a noisy agitator or two, who lead a lot of idle, shiftless fellows by the nose. Froth and scam have a habit ot coming up to the surface. These men give a bad tone to all that is said about the unemployed and hard times. But I can assure you that since 1 have been here I have received deputations that show me there is something worse than that to deal with. It is nonsense to say that the distress here is all among the loafers—there is quiet want. Honest, sober, industrious fellows

—married men with families have come to me, and pot the case so soberly and so plainly that I am convinced the matter is serious. I may be blamed for starting theories, but I cannot help thinking that it is the way in which your Canterbury land system has been carried out that is the 'curse of the place, and which causes the congestion and poverty in your town. You hare advanced too rapidly down here, and are now ahead of the possibilities of settlement. Your big men have taken up all the spare land in the back country, and stagnation has set in. To tell you the truth, you are now doing a good deal of the colonisation of the North Island. Men have been going away from Canterbury in numbers. Every day I hear of them settling either on the West Coast or up in the Waikato. Now, that is something we do not care to see. We do not wish to draft away your population to the North Island as if you were an old, over-peopled country that must get rid of its surplus humanity. You know, I have heard plenty of people here abuse the unemployed for not jumping at work at 4a and 4s 6d a day. But some of those fellows who came to me were married men with six children, Now, I ask you if you think you would like the responsibility of keeping a wife and six children on that, when you had 8s house-rent to pay and were dependent on odd jobs—two days out of the week idle, perhaps—for your income.” This makes a strikingcontrast to the utterances of Sir Julius Yogel, who has the audacity to state that his own presence in the Cabinet for the last six months or so had the effect, of making the colony much more prosperous than it had previously been. It contrasts, in fact, strangely with the public utterances of most of our public men : for very few of them had the honesty to discriminate between thb hard-working man and the loafer before. Mr Ballance has put the matter fairly and honestly. There are a few noisy agitators amongst the Christchurch unemployed, but the great majority of them are honest, hardworking men, who would be most willing to work if they got the opportunity, and so it is throughout the colony. The remedy Mr Ballance has for this is a good one, but certainly not the best that he nould devise. He says : “ I propose whenever it is possible, to reserve from sale blocks of 10, 20 and 50 acres, as conveniently situated as may be to a railway, and within a reasonable distance of a market. These blocks will be offered on peipetual lease to laborers, who will be compelled by our terras to make their homes there. As far as possible, they will be placed in neighborhoods where there is work all round.” There is in this the evident desire to do good, but we are afraid it will not be so successful as it appears to Mr Ballance. It is simply the Village Settlement Scheme over again, with the exception that Mr Ballance proposes to lease instead of selling the land. There is this objection to Village Settlements : Working men are thus huddled together in one centre, and consequently it is necessary for them to leave home in order to get employment, This leads to the absence of the husband from the home, and to the cost of keeping up two homes; one for himself where he is working, and one for the family in the village. It leads also to domestic infelicity, to intemperance, and to other evils, which it would not be polite to mention. We have bo frequently explained our objections to the Village Settlement system that it is not necessary to go further into the matter now. If Mr Ballance took our advice, he would adopt the plan which we have frequently suggested—that is, settle a working man on every 200 acres of land. This would enable laborers to be always near their work and always at home