THE POLICY OF THE GOVERNMENT.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 5, Issue 1460, 18 August 1883, Page 4

THE POLICY OF THE GOVERNMENT.

Tlio following letter recently appeared in the Evening Post, but hardly received the attention ; which it deserved, as it was published on the ImoL pageof onr contemporary. We believe the author of it i.<..' vVairarapa resident: , To thk Editor. Sir,—lt may be fairly considered: that the Hall Government'was part and parcel of the present, and that no material change of policy or opinion has taken place since Sir J. Hall resigned or Mr Whitakor took his place.

The first business which the Hull Ministry had to consider was the depression of the colony in 1879-80. It is not needful to trace back the causes of that depression, but the result was to throw a large number of unemployed persons on the towns of the colony to an extent sufficient to cause considerable public excitement. The Hall Government committed at this juncture a serious mistake, The immigration policy was rudely stopped, In the Financial Statement of 1881, the Colonial Treasurer, referring to the deficiency of revenue in 1869-80, says —"ltarose chiefly from the great falling off in the sales of land and from a lavish and rapidly increasing expenditure I ,'' at ii time, in effect, of commercial digress. To the latter cause, no doubt, the Ministry applied the very natural and proper remedy of sharp economy; but to the former cause, I venture to think, they applied a. measure which was disastrous at tlie time and from the effects; of which we have not yet recovered, and shall not recover. I mean the stoppage of imigration; it was a serious blunder, It was not immigration in itself that was in any was tho cause of the decrease of land sales, The Ministers failed in their diagnosis of the disease. In a colony like this, with large tracts of valuable land, in many cases easily cleared, and of the most fertile description, which is only waiting for a population to develop its resources, it is ovident that there could not be a surplus population; that there could only be a surplus of a class of population unqualified by their want of experience and by their habits to occupy, or aid in occupying the land, or a deficiency of capital to assist them in its occupation and development. To stop tho stream of immigration and to disarrange tho machinery by which that stream was fed was the gravest error. It is probable, very probable, that the class of immigrants being brought in was of the wrong description. "It is probable that no xnllicient measures were taken' to secure the j class who were sure to succeed; that, instead of bringing immigrants who were fit to go at once upon the land and to the bush, persons were brought over who had no fitness but for town trades or town life; but these immigrants were here, and the only cound conrso to pursue was to thoroughly reform tho Immigration Department to expand it into an active agency, not only through England, Scotland, and Ireland, but throngh Northern Europe —to seek out for this purpose the best qualified agents in the different nations. At the same time, with the reform of the immigration system, should have b«en initiated a complete and radical reform of the land system. The land .system is a barbarous relic of the past, full of red tape and rotten traditions, with antiquated officials. The offices require a complete sweep out and a new personnel. The first fundamental mistake is the high price charged for the land. Is it likely that New Zealand can compete with the United States or Canada for the best class of settlers when the terms are so disproportionately great as against this colony! The States of the American Union assess an immigrant at his value. Those democratic Governments know that every able-bodied immigrant who brings an able brain or able hands is worth; at the lowest computation, £3O a year of added wealth to the community beyond what he consumes. They receive him with open arms, and offer him an unlimited selection of land. The Government of this colony allow an immigrant to land; they place before him tho meagre selection of a ffiw sections in some so-called township, the road to which is a hopeless quagmire, and they send him to an auction, at which it is the boast of the Land Board that they have squeezed out of him a most extortionate and exorbitant price. The man struggles on for a while, and either throws up his bargain in disgust or lives under a load of debt and with a sore heart. The Colonial Treasurer has stated that "settlement of small blocks of land cannot bo successfulwithout good roads,,' Here then we have the three needed reforms—wellselected immigrants, cheap or free land with wide selection and " good roads." By good roads, I mean roads wellformed, opened to north-west winds, and well molalled and kept in repair, winter aud summer. I venture to assert that if the Survey Office had been increased aud-amalgamated with the Public Works Office, and if the policy I have sketched above had been instituted in 1879, we should not now have been deploring a diminution of land sales, nor had a report ofbankruptcies so disastrous as that recently made by the chairman of the Chamber of Commerce in Wellington, while the 8000 emigrants, chiefly Swedes and Germans, that two months ago passed through Hull on their way to America might have been on their way hero to swell industrious Scandinavian population so eminently fitted for the colonisation of our North Island waste lands. It is only by colonising the wapte lands that the towns can be kept prosperous. There is a tendency always to a drift of a certain class of the population to tho towns, and nothing but proportionate development of laud rewurcea can keep this drift from the danger of want of employment. This, Sir, is the first head on which I assert that the Ministry completely failed to grasp the situation and showed a WHDto|reaJ statesmanship. TJif ppxt head with which I propose I to $Bl hj altogether in a different direction! I refer to the Representation Act. I have looked in vain in tho ppecches of Sir J. Hall for any inwfytjon of wide knowledge of tint

subject ho was dealing with. When it was -resolved- to discard "the Haw system imd other fanciful electoral schemes, and not to admit of am!, minority vote, there practically remained only one great principle which* was worth maintaining, viz., -not to reduce the size of where it was keep themdarge. Of. course, I mean large in a-relative'-sense, or, to put it otherwise, to retain entire those electorates whose homo-' geneousness allowed of such treatment,; If Siv„ J. Hall and his Ministry were' not entirely ignorant of the.nrinciplo of the English and French electoral 1 systems, they at least acted as- if they' were so. Strange to say at .the very timo when the Representation Bill was in progress the same question was being ardently, keenly, fought in France under the terms 'Scrulin de fete' and ' Scnitin d'arrondissemwit,' and as if to take away all oxciiso for ignorance, an article appeared in the .Nineteenth Century Review, setting forth with the greatest precision and clearness, and with the ability of ii-thoroughly-informed writer, the'effeots of the policy which Sir J. Hall and his Ministry inaugurated, and in terras which applied word for Iword to the case of the New Zealand members of the House of Representatives—a condemnation of that policy as striking as it was conclusive. I will not weaken it by attempting to quote from it. It; remains a lasting reproach to those who neglected its warnings, In England wo know well tho evil of narrowed constituencies. The larger the constituency the less the bribery and corruption. It is for Haokney that tho blind Postmaster-General is returned froe of all cost, and for Birmingham that John Bright has sat for years at an election cost never exceeding £3O. I have now but one more subject on which I will claim your forbearance; Irefer to the unstatesmanlike conduct of the Colonial Treasurer. Tho Colonial Treasurer is apparently a man of highly receptive mind—a mind capable of assimilating large supplies of figures furnished by the various Treasury departments, and also of assimilating tho plausible schemes of' theoretical publicists. It is with the latter receptivity that I have to do, Some timo ago, a restless parson published a scheme of national compulsory insurance, with what effect on the Colonial Treasmer's mind, wo have all been made aware. Then Mr George published a hook, entitled ■' Progress and Poverty." I don't know whether most to commend the ingenuity of the arguments contained in that book, or to condemn the flippant sneers at Adam Smith, Stuart Mill, and Ricardo, men whose names should at least have protected them from the suggestion that they were either fools or rogues because they differed from this Latter Day p: ophet of a new political economy. But I must confess that I was filled with a feeling of disgust when the writer, descending from his high pedestal of principle, completely 1 conceded the impossibility of carrying 1 bin doctrine into effect, and proposed to make terms with the property owners, 1 whom he repeatedly styled " robbers," 1 and compound with them for their • robbery by the levy of a tax. On tho f strength of this book, the Colonial ! Treasurer goes on a stumping tour and ' starts, in plain words, by telling the I people that he had come to ascertain i their opinion, and among other things "how about land nationalisation T ' "He didn't think the time had quite 1 come, Eh! what did they think f ' and so on,

A child's earliest lesson is not to play with fire, not to play with edge tools. Is the Colonial Treasurer approaching a second childhood that he, a responsible Minister, goes recklessly with such a message as this uninvited to a public meeting 1 if he had not read the book, why did he moot the question 11f he had read the book still more was he to blame. It was his duty as a Responsible Minister either to leave the question untouched, or if he and his colleagues really believed that the question was a practical one, demanding a solution at their hands, to declare their policy in a statesman-like: manner. Your readers, will, I think, concede that cause has been shown for serious mistrust of the present Ministry that they are dabbling in questions they have not the ability to understand nor the courage to face openly. If the State guarantee of title to. land granted to settlers is to be repudiated, lot it be done, but at least let it be done by the express will of the people and not by this little oligarchy on the Ministerial benches The present Parliament was not elected' to deal with a question which involves the ruin of thousands and a vast disaster to the colony. I protest in the name of the thirty-three thousand grantees of land in this colony, and in the name of the people whose interests are bound up in theirs, against Buch a tampering with the question aB that of the proposal for railway lands resumption, and I assert that if the Minister of Public Works and the Colonial Treasurer have in their minds any sneaking idea of throwing cakes to Cerebus, of yielding in this proposal, the principle of taking from property this famous unearned increment, with a view to quiet Sir George Grey, or the agitators in the chief towns of the colony, they are guilty of an act of treason to tho settlers, and are daily fraudulently disposing of lands to purchasers, alleging a guarantee of absolute, indefeasible title to freehold by tho State, which title they are now busy in undermining, and are preparing the road to render utterly worthless.

I have trespassed too long upon your space, I can only conclude with the expression of an earnest hope' that out of the yet untried and uncommitted members or the House may be fo'rried a compact and strong 'Opposition* which shall perform the best duties of an Opposition in the vigilant control' over every Bill that comes' : 'befor'e 'the House, and a statesmanlike criticism; of the acts and sayings of the Ministerial benches. WhetheriUsjtoolatcf to stop the creation of the.- Kaih&y Department into a new portfolio,' I know not, but I cannot buttbiiiki that so' utterly unnecessary an »ct should bo opposed to' the utternibßti' Tho suggestion that the business of the

Mho Works and Railways has be-.come.of''-toogreat:magnitude.iorllie capacity, of \ should be inverted, or it should be stated that the capioity; of ! the»Mmisier'js unequal to, his:dutjieß. . WJien one considers' the magnitude,,of,',business in charge of American and.European Ministers, the state.mefltttnat'this burden is too great for a New Zealand Minister would be ludicrous, if itidid ;riot excite - pity. It is high 'time* that some : change" took place, and ; if we'iannot .produce giants' for .the management of ,our affairs,. let usnot.be contont with pigmies, ; ; !i;; ii,„i ;....!■. ••ylam (fee., "■/'■'' : ' > ! '■' : ;, '. i ' ;0 ; ,,::,r,;! '- ' 'PußLlcbiA.'^';