THE WAIL OF A CROAKER

Gisborne Standard and Cook County Gazette, Volume III, Issue 327, 20 July 1889, Page 2

THE WAIL OF A CROAKER

There is very often a tendency in those who have not themselves been successful in life to grumble at their lot and carp at the achieve, ments of their more fortunate fellow-men. They cannot see the force of the round-peg-in-a-square-hole argument, but needs must blame their own shortcomings upon the district in which they reside. For downright impudence and unwarranted assertion it would be hard to find an equal for Mr G. Stubbs, in the doleful tale which he made to the Hawke’s Bay Waste Lands. Ha was not content with drawing a long face like that of a child about to take an allowance of Epsom’s invigorator, and bewailing his own miserable lot; oh, no, that would not be sufficiently sweeping; it is more to his own purpose, he thinks, to slander the district, and pay no heed to the possibility of frightening a better class of people from coming and settling in it. Things have certainly been bad, but not worse than in other places in the colony, and Mt Stubbs uses the tar brush with more liberality than wisdom, Capital progress has lately been made in the settlement of our lands, and if more wise native land laws were in existence this would be one of the most prosperous districts in the colony. The wail of Mr Stubbs is thus referred to in Napier :— t‘ A Gisborne land agent who appeared before the Waste Lands Board in connection with a certain transaction did not draw a very prosperous picture of how land matters stood

in the Poverty Bay district. He stated that the whole district was suffering from a terrible depression, suoh as we did not experience in Hawke’s Bay. Hawke's Bay was going ahead rapidly, while in Poverty Bay it was extremely difficult to get a little money together: The Land Board should give settlers there a little more consideration than they did, as land was taken up there under very difficult circumstances from what it was here. A settler who got laud from the Board in the Hawke’s Bay district was looked upon in Poverty Bay as a lucky man, while in Poverty Bay, if a selector took up a section, the land returned him very little. In Hawke’s Bay for every pound spent the selector had returned to him twenty.five shillings, in Poverty Ray every pound put into the laud only returned hiip ten shillings.”