The Temuka Leader TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1887. LAND POLICY.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1663, 22 November 1887, Page 2

The Temuka Leader TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1887. LAND POLICY.

A pew issues ago we published a synopsis of the new Lamd Act which the present Ministry propose to introduce. Its leading feature appears to be to discourage the perpetual leasing system, although it does not attempt to abolish it altogether. Persons desirous of settling on the land shall be allowed to choose the tenure under which they shall take it. They shall be allowed to choose between cash purchase, deferred-payment purchase, or ptrpetuai leasing, and no man shall be able to acquire more than 640 j acres of first-class land, or 2000 acres of second-class land. Persons who take up land on deferred payment pay 25 per cent, more than those who pay cash for it: that is, supposing the cash selling price of the land was £lO, the deferred-payment price would be £l2 10s. This is a fearful handicap on the deferred-payment settler, and shows that the main ob-. ject of the policy is to sell the land right out to cash buyers and dis-, courage deferred payment and perpetual leasing as much as possible. But it is in the conditions imposed all the humor comes in. A cash purchaser of first-class land will be required to bring one-fifth of it into cultivation the first year; a cash purchaser of second-class land must make improvements on his holding equal in value to 10 per cent, of the purchase money, and another 10 per cent, in two years. Now, these conditions are strange and wonderful. A man who has paid cash and has acquired the freehold of a farm must still cultivate and improve it at the beck and call of the Government. Who has ever heard of such a silly proposal? Obviously the present Government must have taken this wrinkle from the Chinese. In China a man who does not cultivate a certain portion of his land every year is tied to a tree and publicly flogged. Perhaps when the Bill is fully drafted we shall find a clause in it authorising freeholders to be flogged for not cultivating their land. At any rate, the idea that six years after the Government has sold the land they shall have power to compel the purchaser to improve it is absurd. It is, however, obvious that such a thing cannot be done. When a man acquires the freehold of land he becomes master of it, and can improve it or leave it alone, as he thinks fit. The proposal is on a par with the balance of the Government policy. It is intended to delude the public into the believe that the Government have an eye to having the land properly brought into cultivation, but this h only a sham. The real object which will be gained by the Bill, if carried, is to give no man except a man of wealth any opportunity of settling on the land. In proof of this we have only to point out that they propose to abolish the Tillage Settlement system altogether. What does this mean ? Simply to shut up the land against the possibility of any working man ever being able to get a home on it. Really, the audacity of the proposal is astonishing. It is sufficient to take one's breath away. Never in all our experience have we come across any proposals so thoroughly at variance with Democratic ideas, and so antagonistic to the interests of the poor. If one characteristic is more marked than another in the proposals of the Government, it is utter contempt for the interest of the working man. Every item of their policy is devised to crush him, add reduce him to tfc# level of a miserable slave. He is not to get any chance of settling on the land; he is to get only from 2s 6 d to &a (Jd per day if he happens to be starving and requires to work on "unemployed" works, and no protection is to be given to industry. The policy is splendidly devised for making paupers of respectable working men if it is carried out in its entirety, but we trust it will not. Now, we know that some people think all this very good; they think that so long as the interests of the wealthy classes are looked after everything is right, but their day of reckoning will some day come. So sure as night follows the day Eadical reaction will set in if this policy is persisted in, and men will be elected to Parliament who will reverse the present order of things. In 1879 the Irish landlords resisted a proposal to give evieted tenants compensation for compensation for improvements. Short as the time since has been two Bills have been carried which not alone give compensation for improvements, but give the tenants considerable interest in the soil, and have reduced the rents of some of the landlords 50 per cent., while the value of the landlord's interest is not half of what it was in former years. The landlords who refused to give the very small concessions asked of them in 1879 have now to give ten times as much, in spite of themselves, while the probabilities ar« that they will soon be wiped out a together. They made a rod to whip themselves with in 1879, and those who are legislating in opposition po jthe wants and requirements of the people gf jhjsi colony at present will'

find that it will all revert back on themselves in the courae of time.