MR REES IN ENGLAND.

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume II, Issue 258, 9 February 1889, Page 3

MR REES IN ENGLAND.

MESSRS CROMBIE AND LARKINS BACK HIM UP. MR F. A. SOMERVILLE LEADING THE OPPOSITION. NOT A BED OF ROSES. [N.Z. HEBAM’s LONDON CORRESPONDENT.] London, Dec, 29. In my. last letter I referred to the report of a committee formed some weeks ago to investigate the merits of Mr Rees’ proposed colonisation scheme. Last Friday week a meeting was held at Exeter Hall for the purpose of considering this report. The chair was occupied by Mr David Crombie, an old New Zealand colonist, who addressed the meeting at some length on the scheme. The adoption of the report was moved by Mr Larkins, an old Auckland merchant, who paid a high tribute to Mr Rees’s character, and gave some interesting reminiscences of his own experience in Poverty Bay. He expressed the belief that a more suitable place could not be found in the whole of the colony for Mr Rees’s purpose than that which he had selected at Gisborne. The motion for the adoption of the report was seconded by Mr Courtney, of Taranaki, who referred to the opposition shown to Mr Rees’s scheme in certain quarters. He did not specifically indicate where these were, but declared that when the character of this opposition was closely scrutinised, it would be found to have emanated from the “ landshark clique”—people who had bought up large tracts of country from the natives without giving anything like its proper value and whose “ little game ” would be stopped by the action taken by such mon as Mr Rees.

After the report was adopted Mr Rees addresed the meeting, and detailed his scheme for the settlement of a farming community in Poverty Bay, but as the same will be familiar in the colony I need not reproduce his remarks. He quoted some striking instances in the rise in the value of land in the colony, particularly in the town of Gisborne, where land was bought from the natives at £2 an acre and subsequently sold for £BOOO an acre. At the conclusion of Mr Rees’ address a discussion was opened at tbe invitation of the chairman, and it was soon made apparent that the meeting as a whole was not fully in accord with Mr Bees' ideas. The first speaker who came from the body of the hall, handled the scheme very eeverely, and asked why Mr Boes should come to this country for labour to populate the waste lands of the colony when the larger towns of Australia and Now Zealand teemed with unemployed. Several speakers who followed also condemned the scheme.

The controversy between Mr F. A. Somerville, who has been criticising Mr Raes’ scheme in the Anglo-colonial press, under the signature of “ Poverty Biy,” is still ;oing on. It will be sufficient to say of it, lowever, that Mr Rees denies Mr Somerville’s statement that he has come to England not so much in connection with the colonisa-

tion scheme as on account of an appeal to the Privy Council concerning the affairs of the New Zealand Native Lands Company, and maintains that he is not over-sanguine in the estimates he formed of the profit likely to be realised by cultivating the lands on which he proposes to place the settlers.