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be that the greatest part of the 440,000 acres disposed of under the Company’s contracts would be thrown into the market at similar prices; in which case it is unnecessary to say there would be no buyers from the Crown at £1 per acre. On the other hand, if the absentees had new and valuable districts thrown open for them wherein they might take the best of position and soil, as the residents had done in the old districts for their compensation, no land fund for some time could be reasonably expected from sales of second rate land at a minimum price of £1 per acre.

Whether, therefore, the whole of the 440,000 acres disposed of under the Company’s contracts were chosen in the best parts of the good and of new districts; or the purchasers, by being forced into only the present district were driven to throw a great proportion into the market at low prices; or as a middle course, the right of selection with Company’s landorders was allowed to be exercised for an indefinite time at sales of Crown land; there could hardly be a reasonable hope of reviving the land fund for a very long period.

The foregoing considerations have led your Committee to the conclusion that the offer made in the Bill, of obviating the claims to the immediate delivery of such a vast quantity of land, into Government scrip available at future sales of Crown lands throughout the greater part of New Zealand) is the only plan by which the various difficulties enumerated above may be avoided. It is itself surrounded with comparatively few difficulties, and is attended by many advantages. It affords, in the opinion of your Committee, the means of immediately closing all claims under contracts with the Company; relieves the actual colonists (on whom such an obligation would most unfairly rest) from the necessity of expending immediately large sums on surveys, chiefly for the benefit of persons who will never be resident in the colony: will save to the public a great amount of land without injury to the Company’s purchasers, and very materially to lessen absenteeism, and increase the proportion borne by the population to the alienated land to give facilities, never hitherto existing in these settlements for the real colonist to obtain land, and substitute uniformity of system for the loose and varying schemes adopted under the Company; and even promote emigration hither, which the unsettled state of the land question has for years discouraged and prevented.

It was objected by one of the witnesses examined by your Committee, that there is something deceptive in issuing scrip which purports to give a right to purchase land from the Crown, while there is not good land enough immediately to redeem the amount of scrip issued; and that the purchasers will be no gainers by receiving inconvertible Company’s scrip in exchange for inconvertible Government land-orders.

In reference to this objection it may be remarked in the first place—that the scheme consists in an open offer, to be voluntarily accepted or not, secondly—that the Government being indebted, under arrangements over which it had little control, for an immense quantity of good land which it cannot immediately provide, proposes to compromise that debt by giving a bond which may be presented at any time to any and every Government land office in return for not being required to provide the whole immediately, the public wav[ing] its strict right of compelling and selection in whatever land may be now to give, and in a very limited time, and offers an entirely unrestricted choice and an indefinite period for its exercise. The offer, therefore, so far from being a deceptive one, is equally advantageous to both parties. And it must be remembered, that there is no difficulty whatever in the way of providing an ample extent of good land by and bye: there is merely a great inconvenience and attempting to provide it now; the public therefore by the scheme of scrip merely avoids that present inconvenience without by the smallest degree evading the ultimate fulfilment of the whole obligation. And even if, after issuing the scrip, the public were suddenly required to redeem the whole at once in land, it would of course be in no worse position than the Company has left it now.

But while the proposal is so far equally advantageous to the purchaser and the public, the latter will obtain a further advantage without an injury to the purchaser. The public being on the one hand freed from the obligation of immediately finding at a very great cost a large extent of land, and the purchaser obtaining on the other hand an extended choice and more time for its exercise, Government can then adopt the only plan that ought ever to be pursued in a new country, namely—that of surveying and laying out from time to time as demand existed or was anticipated only the best and most available land from position and soil, and of leaving inferior land till the other, by being occupied, gave a value to it. For this good land it would often be entitled to ask a higher price than £1 per acre, at which rate the scrip was issued; and to the extent of whatever higher price was obtained, a quantity of the scrip would of course be absorbed. The value of the land being no longer nominal but depending on demand and many other tests of value, it would be often better worth the scripholder while to give the higher price in new districts opened by Government, than £1 per acre in a district which was not in demand and where, as at Rangitikei, the very best land, from there being a glut in the market, was only worth five shillings an acre. All the witnesses examined by your Committee on this point agreed in the opinion that the effect of the scrip would be to save a great deal of land to the public by higher prices being realised at Government sales; and this of course would be most seen in sales of town and suburban land.

Further, your Committee believe that the scrip would tend to remove in a great measure the evils of absenteeism. They have evidence on the one hand that the existence of a large absentee proprietary, and the dispersion of the colonists’ lands thereby caused, have been complained of as among the greatest defects in the Company’s schemes of colonization: on the other hand, some witnesses have maintained that it is desirable to force the absentees to keep or to reselect their lands, in order that they may be taxed for the benefit of the residents’ land undispersed among them. The inconsistency has needless arisen from a superficial examination of the question. The two arguments, indeed, taken together, resolve themselves into a proposition, that although absenteeism is an evil in the abstract, it is expedient to have absentees for the mere object of taxing them. But it happens that the scrip scheme really meets both alternatives.

For it would have two effects, among others: first—if the scrip were not re-exchanged for land by absentees, the evil of absenteeism would of course be checked: secondly—if it were, the land would (supposing taxation to be established) be subject to be taxed as well as if it had been selected by a Company’s landorder. It appears to have been forgotten, however, that if the absentees’ lands are to be taxed to benefit the lands of colonists interspersed among them, nothing would be easier than for the former to escape any such liability, by exercising their right of reselecting in some district where there were no resident landowners at all.

Now the actual proportions (under the preceding estimates) of the land held under contracts with