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Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XV, Issue 4452, 23 June 1893, Page 2

We are grieved that Dr. Hosking should admit (he possession of no \m than Three Thousand Eight Hundued acres of land. We can find an exouse for some—well, we are compelled to use Mr'A. W. Hogg's term --"Land-grabbers," but then these are men who have no lucrative profession to fall back upon, men who have never sat at the feet of the great Libertl Gamaliel and accepted tbe member for Masterton as their gujde, philosopher and friend, But why should Dr. Hoskinghave become a land-grabber ? We put it to him whether his block of land is not large enough for a special settlement and whether it would not be better for forty families to be domiciled upon it tbon that it should remain in tho possession of one absentee owner, Or we might go further and point out that if it were utilised as a Village Settlement, room could be found upon it fur at lenst three hundred village allotments. Would not Dr. Hosking, as a good Liberal, be happier if three hundtod families, say two thousand souls, dwelt on his block and he himself fell back upon his proper role of assisting to bring little villagers into '• the world. We hope Dr. Hosking iwill see the force of these arguments, not as coniisg from us, but as voicing the sentiments of his Gamaliel, the member for Masterton. Let him be consistent and allow his name to go doivn to posterity us the founder of the Hosking Special Settlement or the Hosking Village Settlement. As for that stili more distinguished landgrabber, Mr Meredith, we owe him an apology. We And on inquiry that the extremely delicate negotiation to which we referred was conducted by his son, Mr .Richard Meredith, and dot by himself. We think when ho wrote so indignantly about us the other day he might, as a mere matter of fairness, have pointed out Hint the error into which we fell was a somewhat natural ore, and that if we had named his son instead of himself we should have been perfectly corroct. He must have known that we should not have published such a report unless there had been some ground for it, and c»n we for one moment suppose that he was not aware of tho ground on which it was based ?