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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 65

Land Question

Land Question.

Touching the land question, you will expect from me a few words. And I would say that I am as anxious as anyone to see the lands of the Colony occupied by people; but I would like to see these people settled there also in comfort. There is a page 137 balance which must be maintained between production and consumption, and unless that is maintained neither agricultural, commercial, nor mining labour can hope to be repaid. I do not deny that out of land under very various social circumstances a certain amount of rude plenty can be got, but this rude plenty has, I suspect, been chiefly acceptable to poets. In fact much of this land talk is a sort of advocacy of the old agricultural system of political economy which Adam Smith combated and completely overthrew, and which he considered as more absurd than even the mercantile system which sought the wealth of all nations in commerce. If freetrade in land is thought undesirable, and the consequent probability of large estates, then there is no way to prevent this but to pass and enforce a law prohibiting the owning of any land by any person beyond a certain extent. Let the country be divided into farms suited to the climate and the surface, say of 100 acres near the town, and of 200 if agricultural and further off, and of 2, 3, 4, or 5000 if hilly and broken ground. Enact that no one shall own more than one of these farms at the same time. There is no other way to prevent the creation of large estates besides this. It would have to be provided, if land came to anyone by will or by mortgage, that such be sold within a certain time, or failing that it would have to be page 138 purchased at a valuation by the Government, Before, however, introducing the change, I would approve of a plebiscite being taken of the people of New Zealand. The natural and commercial way, however, of dealing with an article when it gets scarce in a country is to raise the price of it. This, for reasons not very maifest, has not been done with land. Other measures have been tried apparently from a humane point of view. But humanity and economy are not so often at variance as many imagine. When a high price is paid for land, and the money expended in roads, the high price is high to the bona fide settler more in appearance than in reality. Through adhering to neither the one nor the other course above advised the land laws have always been in a state of costly confusion. As to the lands which have been already sold, and owned in many cases in much larger blocks, I am not prepared to interfere. When the land was sold and bought it was not provided that the future owner should obey the seller ever afterwards as to how he should farm it. I do not like to see slovenly farming, or lands lying in pasture when they could be economically tilled, but I am not prepared to nag or dispossess the owners on that account Many large land-owners and land-owning companies have done better for the public and for working men than they have done for themselves. I am no friend page 139 to very small farms. The famines of Ireland, India, and China, which are so disastrous, are caused, I believe, in the main by these small farms, and the weak vegetarian economy which they can only offer to their possessors. Men seem only too prone to degenerate towards this small farming. We should remember that we cannot safely do without both the animal and the vegetable world as a defence against famine. If we have only the vegetable, a hot wind or a bad season brings death and desolation at once. It is not perhaps to be feared very much that the British or their Colonies will ever sink to the status of small farmers. Their seafaring genius and their love of room, it is to be hoped, will never leave them.

As to land nationalisation, I regard it as an absurdity, and no way likely to add to the national wealth, which is the product of labour and the sweat of the brow and the brain. That the Government is likely to make any better use of the rents than the individual, few it seems to me, will be found to believe. The system of perpetual leasing I regard also as unnecessary and uncalled for. If land is not sold for money, then money must be borrowed to provide roads. The interest falls on the Colony at large. And this is unfair to those who have already bought land. I think it is very likely that the rents will only be paid for a page 140 short period, and that the system will cure itself out of existence. The Government should appoint certain sharp and active factors to see that the conditions of the leases are carried out, otherwise both tenant and rent may some day be wanting. It is needless also to point out that when the tenants become numerous enough, the rent collector may be resisted. Yet if I might advise the large land-owner, I would tell him that should he decline to sell his land in farms, he should lose no opportunity of leasing it at a fair rent. The law of love requires us to look not alone on our own things but also on the things of others; and where a man is ready to improve land and produce additional food therefrom, his wishes should if possible be met at least half way.