Country Life
ENGLAND VERSUS NEW ZEALAND.
An account reachei me from New Zealand (to which Lord Bledisloe, our chief agricultural spokesman, emigrates as Governor-General) of a young settler who has just bought a farm of some two hundred acres in the North Island. The land has cost him just over £30 an acre ; and he regards the price as moderate. It is unfenced internally and partly unfenced externally. It has no house. The production of the farm will in part be marketed twelve thousand miles away. Contrast with this a recent experience in England, one of many. A small farm, of fairly good soil, equipped with a house, situated within thirty miles of London, failed to fetch £27 an acre. To give a previously quoted example, an estate within sixty miles of ',London, containing farm houses, and cottages, accommodating a population of about one hundred and thirty persons, good farm buildings and roughly two thousand acres of land, is valued at £6,000 or less—a smaller sum than the two hundred acres of unfenced land in New Zealand. Can it really be true that land close to London is worth less than a tenth—a good deal less if the houses be reckoned—of the price of land in New Zealand ?
Previous page
