The Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR P.M. Resurrexi. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1881.

Thames Star, Volume XII, Issue 4038, 7 December 1881, Page 2

The Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR P.M. Resurrexi. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1881.

The announcement that a portion of Messrs Foster and Grant's settlers are on their way in New Zealand waters to their new homes at Te Aroha will be a source of gratification to all our readers, while the intelligence that there are other men possessed of capital in Melbourne waiting for a passage to New Zealand, anxious to find homes in the North, is equally pleasing. The people of the Thames can say At Last ! There are those who will say it is no matter how our lands are settled if tbey are brought under cultivation and made taxable to the State. That there can be no harm in bringing' men of capital to New Zealand in order to cultivate the wilderness. Perhaps not; but this fact cannot escape recollection. Those lands that the new settlers will occupy and fertilize could hare been made profitable and permanent homesteads years since if the people on the Thames had only had a chance to become their purchasers. It is a melancholy fact that although the Premier talked about the ; eight or ten millions of Crown Lands in New Zealand open for settlement, that in no other colony of the Empire, nor in any portion of the United States, is the same difficulty experienced in obtaining land as is found in New Zealand. Why this should be the case is too long a story to tell ,at the present time, and while we hail the advent of the new settlers with pleasure we cannot but regret that old familiar faces, possessed of means and afflicted with earth hunger, have had to go to other portions of the colony or Empire to obtain those homes they were unable to acquire in the Upper Thames.