Cheap Land & Skill to Use it.

ALTHOUGH wool prices were sometimes high the chief factor in the prosperity of squatters was the cheapness of land — always provided the owner had the skill to use his land. Laying down a farm in English grass was a good investment in the hands of a competent farmer, but in the simpler business of running sheep on native pastures a man might draw £2,000 a year from an investment of £6,000. In fern country there were difficulties both in under-stocking, when the fern would get out of hand, and over-stocking, when the sheep, though they trampled out the fern, might have too little feed. The farmer was always at the mercy of natural disaster, and the most prosperous-looking squatters, on vast estates, were often hopelessly burdened with mortgages.

Refrigeration (introduced in 1882), irrigation, swamp reclamation, and more intensive methods of agriculture greatly increased primary produc­tion, in which the new items, frozen mutton and butter for export, were now important. But it was difficult to buy land, partly because values were pegged high by excessive loans to owners. Certainly men who did not mind hard work could make fine properties by breaking in bush selections in districts, like the Manawatu, opened up by new railway construction; but the farmer who wanted a quicker return for his efforts could not find land to work.

Wool was falling from its place as the principal export. This lost the squatters their economic and then their social and parliamentary prestige. In the long run refrigeration might have restored these, had it not first brought irresistible pressure to bear on the land monopoly of the squatters. The Liberal or Progressive party came into power in the nineties. In sympathy with the general desire to dispose of social problems of every sort, Mr. Seddon's Government dealt with the land question.