MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1881.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 3, Issue 953, 19 December 1881, Page 2

MONDAY, DECEMBER 19, 1881.

The Opposition have a craze about land. They hold that no individual should possess any; that there should be one landlord in New Zealand—the State; and that every man who makes liis living off the soil should be a tenant. Sir George Grey hoisted this theory as his land flag, and most of those who belong to what is called the Opposition have adopted his idea, and wear his colors. By making the land free they hope to produce something like an equality between man and man in New Zealand. This, however, is a wild dream. It is not the possession of land or the non-possession of it which makes one man rich and another poor. It is the industry and thrift of one man and tho idleness and extravagance of another that, in the race of life, separates all competitors, and the confiscation of all hinds to the State is just as efficacious a remedy for class distinctions as Holloway's ointment is for a splinter in a wooden leg. The '-'overnment are doing the best they can to settle working men on land under such conditions that they may remain on it and prosper. The Opposition cannot teach Ministers anything on this score, and so, hitting out wildly, they say turn everything in the colony upside down, Take all the land of the rich and let it out to the poor. One man among them—a poet, a dreamer of dreams, who lias succeeded in getting into the House—says the land should be like the air we breathe, like the rain from Heaven, the common birthright of all. A poet may be excused for talking such nonsense, A jingling rhymer is not expected to remember that the value of land depends upon its productiveness; that, unlike the air and the rain, it has to be cleared and sown and cultivated. It is precisely because land is not like air or rain that it must, in political economy, be treated on a different basis. Such men raise a cry about alienating nil i he land from the State, as if the land were of any use to man or mortal till it was alienated from the State. Talce (wo blocks of country, say, in the Wairarapa—one in private hands, the "ther the property of the State. The alienated land brings, perhaps, £IO,OOO every year into the country, which money flows through the pockets of half the settlers in the district, while I he unalienated soil does not bring in a single penny, Men like Mr Bracken would tie up all the land in the '■ountry in a napkin and bury it. Poor Ireland is of course dragged in to show up the evils of a country possessing landed proprietors. If every acre in Ireland were divided among the peasants of that country to-morrow, in a few years time they would be as badly off as ever, It is not the ownership of land which makes one country rich and another poor. An artificial transfer of land will not, without it makes the land more productive, benefit any community. If the Opposition would assist the Government in carrying out their scheme of settling land or endeavor to provide a better one, they might do some good for the

country. How far the Opposition is serious on their land views it is iruposible to say. If, howover, they mean to carry them into effect they threaten to put the shutters up on New Zealand, to stay the flow of English capital which has made the country what it iB, viz., the most vigorous young colony in the world and the best field in all the earth for the working man, They mean also to force the best settlers in the colony to realise their capital and invest it in other communities where it will be moro secure; and with the withdrawal of capital want and misery would fall on all classes of people left m the laud, It is the old old story people who have little or nothing want to pull down to their own level those who possess land, money, and houses. The drones would rob the bees of the honey whieh they have so laboriously gathered. The Opposition are the cuckoos of the country. They have no nests of their own, and they covet those which have been built by others. Their cuckoo notes rings through the land, but there is too much common sense in the country to allow cuckoos to prevail.