In recent years, there has been a demand that these Crown tenants should be given the right to acquire the freeholds of their leases at the original valuation. The representatives of the old Conservative Party, knowing that the Government was committed to the leasehold, took up the cry of the freehold and made it echo in the colony. Political leaders and the newspaper press went gladly into the controversy. It raged through several sessions of Parliament, and resulted in the setting up of a Royal Commission, which, after spending several months in different parts of the colony gathering information, reported that, on the whole, the condition and position of the tenants were progressive and satisfactory, and that the land reserved under the Land for Settlements Act should remain for all time the property of the State. The members of the Commission were not unanimous in coming to that decision, but nine out of ten pronounced emphatically in favour of the State retaining the land it had purchased; four recommended that the tenants who had taken up ordinary Crown land, apart from the land for settlements scheme, should be allowed to acquire the right of purchase under stringent conditions after they had occupied their holdings for six years; and four recommended that all sales of Crown land of every description should cease. One urged that all Crown tenants, whether occupying ordinary Crown land or land resumed under the Land for Settlements Act, should be allowed to acquire the freehold, and one suggested that when a tenant’s improvements on ordinary Crown land represented three times the original value he should be given the right to purchase.
It was one of Mr. Seddon’s most marked characteristics that when the Government of which he was a member had decided upon a definite course of action, he followed it unswervingly. He defended the policies of other Ministers with as much courage and determination as he brought to bear on the schemes he himself put into operation. When Mr. Reeves went to England to take the Agent-Generalship, and the Arbitration Act was assailed, Mr. Seddon cared for it with as much solicitude and anxiety as Mr. Reeves would have shown; and when in recent years Sir John McKenzie’s land scheme was in danger from the attacks of the “freeholders,” Mr. Seddon, in a
