The Borrowed Money.

He would now place another fact before them. They all knew that the country had borrowed about £30,000,000-that is apart from the unproductive expenditure of some £8,000,000 upon the unfortunate Maori war. These £30,000,000 had been spent in public improvements, just as the £13,000,000 had been. It all resulted in increased land values, and consequently only the land-owners secured the whole of it. The landless people had to pay more rent to the land-owners, because of the additional value given to the land by the expenditure of these £30,000,000, and to make matters worse, the interest upon the £30,000,000 had to be paid by the whole population. Thus, the whole country had to pay this interest, in order that the landless people might pay more rent to the land-owners. (Applause.) He would be much interested in seeing some of his opponents tackle these figures and show where he was wrong. He might be wrong, for he had no intention of professing infallibility. As he had said before, the present value of the freehold land of the colony was £76,000,000. In addition to the country practically paying back the purchase money in the form of additional value to the land, it had borrowed £30,000,000, and also put that into the pockets of the land-owners. Moreover, this class of men had received by the in-creasing numbers and enterprise of the colonists, another £33,000,000—of unearned increase—and by this means the whole of the £76,000,000 were to day in the pockets of the land-owners of New Zealand. In his opinion there could be no mistake about this fact. The landlords could not set up the claim that they had brought about this increase, when the presence of the population had added the whole of this amount.