FIRST EDITION. The Wairarapa Daily. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1892.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XIII, Issue 4032, 8 February 1892, Page 2

FIRST EDITION. The Wairarapa Daily. MONDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 1892.

The Editor of the Wanganui Herald has written an article entitled," The Wail of the Land Grabbers," and we are somewhat surprised that the"leading Ministerial organ of New ZeaZealand, Ballanco's Ewe Lamb, should express itself in so vulgar a manner, We do not object to the Ministerial press being somewhat vulgar, but we should have thought thpt the leading light of the party would have chosen to be a little refined, and have avoided slang. We are, too, somewhat astonished (bat our contemporary btigmatises members of the Conservative party as "Wailing Land Grabbers," For some time past we have heard of no settlers belonging to this party grabbing at land,' As far as we are aware the persons indicated as wniler,s b.ave been wont Icb'iiy land in the open market at its fair value, to clear, fence, and grass it, arid to make it produce all that it is capable of yielding. Such men may wail, and may be land grabbers; but, pljjfe om sontemporary, we have heard notbicg sf the wailiug, and we cannot .quite understand where the grabbing come:

in. j-'roui our pontprnporarys p o i ni of view a man who bought 0 Jing of sheep at auction would ha 8 sheep 1 grabber, but if the writer were to o&ll liirn by such a name, he would probably be told that he was a fool, or even might be termed an "adjective" fool. The land grabbers ne have been accustomed to see in this district are men of a different type. Twenty of them, perhaps, form an association to mop up a nice bit ot land, say some three or four thousand acres, Some friendly negotiations with a Minister secures the oasis for the applicants, and they obtain a vested interest in it by a nominal payment. In many instances they : do not settle upon it, do not dear it, do liot fence ft, .dp not grass it; but they dispose of it at a fair profit to some genuine settler who has not been fortunate enough to Ibe ono of the association. This is the only kind of land grabbing that has come under our notice in this district of late years, butsurelv this

is not the kind referred to by our Wanganui contemporary. Residents in Masterton can pount men by tbe scoro who have become nominal settlers on these lines, men who have grabbed the land for speculative purposes only. We can fancy a Minister for Lands, after allotting a block to a score or two of men of this description, thanking heaven that he has wedded thirty or forty more men to the soil, on paper only of course, but the paper Jb Parliamentary paper, and answers his purpose wj)en he makes a Ministerial speech, Npw-a-days the big land grabbers have ceased to exist, but the little, ones are wonder-, fully active, and at no time in the history of the colony ha* there been so much nominal settlement by speculators connected with the Ministerial party.