THE Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR O'CLOCK P.M. Resurrexi. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1871.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3379, 21 October 1879, Page 2

THE Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR O'CLOCK P.M. Resurrexi. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 21, 1871.

Onb of the great question! of the present day is undoubtedly the land question. No matter which quarter of the globe i» turned to, the unsolved problem of the hour is seen, or its effects felt; and like a serpent with, many heads, it defies the attacks of Reform. The older countries of the world feel the necessity of an immediate alteration of the laws relating to land tenure; but from the multiplicity and conflicting nature of the interests involved, it is felt that little short of a revolution will be required to alter the present abnormal agrarian condition of many countries to their natural state. Great Britain is a fair example of the unnatural state referred to. England of the present day belongs to the few, while the many who call themselves Britons and free men, are in the most abject and grovelling poverty, and glad to flee from the serfdom of the mother country to shores where the blighting influence of illiberal laws relating to land tenure hare act ytt been felt. Great

Britain has been 800 years weaving the net around herself. The feudal system nourished the budding evil, and assisted by the laws of entail and succession, and similar enactments, the land tenure of the country has arrived at a condition that will bsffle the efforts of a generation of political economists to unravel. Prior to the Revolution, France was in a condition analagous to Britain of the present day. The land was owned by a proud and insolent aristocracy who had ground down and tyrannised over the peasantry for centuries. The country was suffering from a desperate disease, and a desperate remedy was evidently necessary. The country was plunged in the horrors of a sanguinary revolution; but when the cloud of war and bloodshed had disappeared, the cause of the evil ceased to exist. Peasant proprietors owned the bulk of the land, and France became a happy and prosperous nation. The land tenure of Belgium and Prussia presents a similar picture to Frsnce. These countries are prosperous, and the origin of their wealth can be easily traced. Here in New Zealand the question is like wax in our ' hands, we can mould it as we wish—mould it for stupendous results, for good or evil. The latter contingency can easily be avoided. We have plenty of models om which to build the fabric of our future welfare, and if New Zealand is ever to realise our aspirations, the laws relating to its land tenure must be such as will enable every man to settle on his own land, if desirous of so doing. Speaking before the Gaelic Society recently on this great question, Professor Blackit, the Scottish political economist, says :—" We must buckle ourselves to the readjustment of these laws; and he contended that by universal admission they were in some respects the worst possible, and directly calculated to keep up rather than to break down the unnatural antagonism of interests between the lords of the land and the occupiers of the soil to which our present abnormal agrarian condition was mainly attributable. We must, said the Professor, look upon the accumulation of large estates in the hands of a few as an exceptional phenomenon, which a wise legislature will think it a plain duty to counteract rather than to encourage; and this can easily be done when the duty is once clearly acknowledged, by modifying the law of succession, by rendering illegal all testamentary dispositions of land under whatever guise to persons not yet living, by declaring war, root and branch, against the entail system, by removing without mercy the artificial hindrances which our system of conveyancing lays on the transfer of landed property, by adjusting our laws of land tenure, so as to make them always lean with a kindly partiality to the weaker rather than to the stronger party in the contract, by setting a strict limit to the spouting propensities of idle gentlemanship in every case when it tends to encroach on the industrial use oi the soil by imposing a swinging tax on all absentee proprietors, as persons who, while they drain the* country of its money, make no social return to the district from which they derive their sooial importance ; and, finally, if it should be necessary, by establishing a national fund for assisting small tenants and crofters in favourable situltions to buy up their tenant-right and constitute themselves into peasant proprietors with absolute ownership. In the natural course of things, if Britain is not to be ruined, these changes must come; and it were the wisdom of our aristocracy, than whom as a whole a more respectable^ body does not exist in Europe, to take the lead in a series of well-calculated reforms tending to give more independence and manhood to the cultivators of the soil, rather than by opposing them to the flame of a great agrarian revolution which may break out volcanicalty and overwhelm them perhaps at no distant date." j