Page:Ashburton•Scotter•1972.pdf/97

glad to find a purchaser, and that the latter had obtained much of the Lagmhor land recently offered by the government because there was no other applicant.^[1] These statements, though possibly true, hardly justified the signing of a false declaration. Indeed, six years earlier, John McLean had made a pitiful show of justification before the Lands Board when defending a similar abuse of such concessions for settlement purposes.

Under these conditions, the remaining land on the plains, perhaps 80,000 acres, was bought from the Crown. Considerable areas were being sold, too, out of the estates. For example, William L. Allen, manager of Acton for the New Zealand and Australian Land Company, disposed of 9000 acres between 1882 and 1891 and Duncan Cameron made his first sale out of Springfield in 1902. But the complaint was raised continually that these sales were made to established farmers and resulted in few more men going on the land. Longbeach was, to some extent, an exception. By the time Grigg and Russell dissolved partnership in 1882, the estate was reduced to one-half of its original 30,000 acres, and much of the portion sold was closely occupied by new farms.

The demand that more men should be placed on their own farms was one of the loudest political cries of the 1880s. In Ashburton, the demand was provoked by the contrast between the prosperity so evident in closely settled Wakanui and Longbeach, that is east of the railway line between Chertsey and Hinds, and the great, empty sheep-walks over most of the rest of the county, by the treatment of labourers on many of the estates and, perhaps most immediately, by the exodus to the North Island of farmers’ sons and workmen intent on acquiring farms of their own yet unable to pay the prices demanded locally for suitable land. In 1892, I. R. C. C. Graham^[2] reported that thirty families had left the neighbourhood of Ashburton for the North Island in the previous eighteen months.

Few would deny that production on some of the estates was more economical than on many of the small farms or that some of the largest land owners were leaders in agricultural improvement. Nor could anyone dispute that the estates provided work for large numbers of men. But labourers and contractors could rarely marry and rear families under the more satisfactory conditions they could expect if placed on their own farms. The social