EFFECT OF SPECULATION. 103 must refer to it here only to show how the speculation of the South Australian Company affected the progress of New South Wales and Port Phillip. The South Australian adventurers were a camaraderie,* who, although ridiculously ignorant of the practical arts of colonization, as they afterwards proved to the sorrow and ruin of thousands, were adepts of the first water in the arts of puff publicity and parliamentary canvass. They knew how to get up a company, float paragraphs, gather great public meetings, fascinate and cram the ablest writers of the press, agitate Parliament, pack a committee, manufacture a case, and bamboozle the public. Canals and South American mines had been exhausted; railways were not yet sufficiently advanced, and yet too much advanced to form the subject of speculation; colonization was a new theme; the ignorance of the public made it an admirable one in the hands of a skilful charlatan like Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the John Law of colonization. The large fortunes realized in Australia-the stories of convicts with thirty and forty thousand pounds a year-the visits of a few of the sheepowning plutocracy-the flattering accounts of travellers-attracted attention to New South Wales, at a time when, under the influence of the dire calculations of Malthus, and the evil results of the old poor-law system of unlimited out-door relief, the well-to-do English world was oppressed by the nightmare of a surplus pauper population devouring the landholder and fundholder, and reducing the land to one vast potatofed poorhouse. But there were drawbacks in the unsavoury name of Botany Bay, and the pickpocket character of its population; in the fearful amount of crime reported by colonial judges; and, worst of all, in a tariff of wages daily rising, which were exacted by free emigrants for their services, in spite of the anti-wages combination of the old white slaveowning colonists. In 1829 an aristocratic adventurer had, with the assistance of a Sydney money-lender, endeavoured to retrieve his fortune by obtaining a grant of land, and conducting an army of helpless gentlemen and ladies, with still more helpless clodhoppers, to the banks of the Swan River, in North-Western Australia, where with the worst possible arrangements the worst possible colonists found themselves planted in the most remote corner of an unexplored continent, on a dangerous port, on barren sand with poisonous pastures, and thickets full of hostile savages-land so barren, and pastures so poisonous, that the exertions of nearly half a century, with large assistance from public funds, have not yet enabled Western Australia to pay the expenses of government, or the cost of imports. Port Phillip had more sheep in one year after the first white party landed from Van Diemen's Land than Western Australia in five-and-twenty years. The increase of sheep depends not on the terms on which land is sold, but on the condition in which grass grows. If pastures are plentiful, so are sheep; if scanty, poisonous, or wanting in water, they perish as surely as a Wakefieldite colony unpuffed. On the success of New South Wales, and the failure of Swan River, the South Australian scheme was floated. Give us, said the projectors to the legislature and the speculative public, the territory we mark on the map; the right of imposing a sufficient price on the land, and of applying it to the importation of labour; and we will render labour cheap by the exclusion of labourers from the possession of land, concentrate society, introduce agriculture as scientific as that of Great Britain, in addition to the productions of Spain and Italy, and reap all the profits that have been reaped in New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land without the taint of convict labour, or "the dispersion of the semi-barbarous squatter;" and we will produce a state of society so prosperous and so charming, that the neighbouring cheap-priced convict colonies shall hasten to follow our example. As they desired so it was granted to them, and under "South Australia" we may read how bands of youths and maidens, and old men who had not gained wisdom with their grey hairs, went singing in triumph to sit down in a sandy plain and spend two years in gambling for town lots and village lots, with their own and with borrowed paper money; and how they sank into a slough of despondency, and were only saved by resorting to the people and pursuits they had been taught to despise. But to New South Wales two results arrived through the exertions of the South Australian interest, an interest much more successful in its parliamentary tactics than in its colonizing operations. First, the sudden abolition of the assignment system and transportation a righteous act, most rashly performed to the injury of this country and the criminals, to the ruin of Van Diemen's Land, and the great eventful gain but temporary loss of New South Wales. Secondly, the raising of the price of land from 5s. to £1, and foundation of a grievance the effects of which, in a moral, social, and political point of view, are far too serious to be easily or rapidly calculated. PRICE OF LAND. It came about in this manner. 105 When the land of New South Wales was thrown open for sale in unlimited quantities, at a minimum of 5s. an acre, all who had occupied superior land, with or without licence, sought to purchase their occupations; many rounded off their grants, and took in large slices of barren land for uniformity, for pasture, or for water. Others, who had had neither influence, nor patience, nor time to wade through the dreary forms of the bureaucrats and martinets under Governor Darling, indulged in freehold as soon as it became a mere matter of money. During the first years, from 1831 to 1836, the assignment system was a great encouragement to purchase land, because with convict labour and a commissariat purchaser, and a roadmaking government, it pays to cultivate agricultural land. The discovery of Port Phillip brought into the market a greater quantity of good land close to a port than had ever been for sale before. The example of the South Australian land speculators was also infectious, and land speculation, town lots, streets, squares, villages, became the rage. The news of the avidity with which colonists and absentees purchased wild land, which the government imagined it had been giving away for many years, soon reached the eyes and ears, and inflamed the palms, of the colonial officials. None are more slow to spend, or greedy to grasp, than officials. Excellent, admirable, generous men in private life seem tainted by official contact. No sooner does a nobleman or gentleman become invested with an official responsibility than he conducts the business of the nation in a peddling, greedy spirit, which would ruin an English estate, and has ruined many Irish ones. He grasps all, and gives nothing. Recommend to the lords of the Admiralty or the Woods and Forests the erection of something—a dam, a sluice, a breakwater-that, costing £1,000, will reclaim twenty thousand fat acres, and "my lords have to inform you that they have no funds for such a purpose;" but be so ill advised as to execute works giving value to a whole neighbourhood, and then ask my lords to sell a piece of before valueless mud flat, especially if my lords' influence in Parliament be needed, and the mud becomes, in official eyes, so much solid gold. In Australian land the Colonial Office thought that it had discovered an exhaustless treasure which could be sold in any quantity, and at any price they chose to fix; just as in 1845, when all the British world was mad on railways, because one or two lines paid £10 per cent., there were parties who believed that the national debt might be paid off by the government purchasing up all railways—a dream unexecuted, and since dispelled by a universal average dividend of 34 per cent. Sir Richard Bourke was one of the few official personages who had the wisdom to comprehend the true uses of colonial land, to appreciate the value of the small farmer as well as the great flockowner, to remain undazzled by overflowings of a treasury filled by the madness of speculating land purchasers, and the courage to dissent from the crotchets of the colonial ministers to which his successor so obsequiously assented. His despatches, which we disinter from the voluminous blue books which form the obscure records of the legislative progress of Australia, teem with proofs of his wise conciliatory spirit and sound far-seeing views on questions which at this hour would threaten the connection between the colonies and the mother country, if we were still afflicted of Greys and Stanleys for our colonial ministers, and Gipps' and Darlings for colonial governors. In 1834 the Earl of Aberdeen, infected by Mr. Gibbon Wakefield's crotchets and fallacious evidence on the banefulness of dispersion and the possibility of enforced concentration, addressed a despatch to the Governor of New South Wales, in reference to the efforts then made to colonize Port Phillip, to the effect "that it was not desirable to allow the population to become more scattered than it then was." (At that time the squatting was in its infancy, and not one-third of the country since occupied had been explored.) Sir Richard Bourke replied in a despatch dated 10th October, 1838: it would have been well if our Colonial Office had studied and understood the full force of the warning : Admitting, as every reasonable person must, that a certain degree of concentration is necessary for the advancement of wealth and civilization, and that it enables government to become at once more efficient and more economical, I cannot avoid perceiving the peculiarities which in this colony render it impolitic, and even impossible, to restrain dispersion within limits that would be expedient elsewhere. The wool of New South Wales forms at present its chief wealth. The proprietors of thousands of acres find it necessary, equally with the poorer settlers, to send large flocks beyond the boundaries of location, to preserve them in health throughout the year. The colonists must otherwise restrain the increase, or endeavour to raise artificial food for their stock. Whilst nature presents all around an unlimited supply of wholesome pasture, either course would seem a perverse rejection of the bounty of Providence. Independently of these powerful reasons for allowing dispersion, it is not to be disguised that government is unable to prevent it. The question I beg leave to submit is simply this: How may government turn to the best advantage a state of things which it cannot wholly interdict? It may, I would suggest, be found practicable by means of the sale of land in situations peculiarly advantageous, however distant from other locations, and by establishing townships and ports, and facilitating the intercourse between remote and more settled districts of this vast territory, to provide centres of civilization and government, and thus gradually extend the power of social order to the most distant parts of the wilderness." Oh, that such words of wisdom had sunk deep into the ears of our legislators, and proved antidotes to the charlatan, swindling tricks of those who mapped out and sold, on a flat-paper plan, barren sands, forest-covered precipitous hills, and rocky, shingly shores! But, besides home theorists, Governor Bourke had to contend with colonial monopolists in the shape of great land and flock owners, who, forgetting their own or their fathers' original insignificance, grudged every acre and every herd of flock that fell into the hands of hardworking men; for they thought and said then, what many of the same class think, although they do not dare to say it now, that it was the duty of working men to work, and not aspire to independence. The governor saw through the selfishness of those who considered the colony their patrimony, and was not led away by a cry against the poor men who fed small flocks or a few cattle on wild land. His judicious measures, although less equitably carried out than he planned them, recently produced a revenue of upwards of £60,000 a year. He observes (18th December, 1835): "Another cause to which Judge Burton attributes the prevalence of crime in this colony is the occupation of waste lands by improper persons. The persons to whom Mr. Burton alludes, familiarly called 'squatters,' are the objects of great animosity on the part of the wealthier settlers. It must be confessed they are only following in the steps of all the most influential and unexceptionable colonists, whose sheep and cattle stations are everywhere to be found side by side with the obnoxious squatter, and held by no better title. I trust I shall be able to devise some measure that may moderate the evil complained of, without putting a weapon into the hands of selfishness and oppression. And again, in September, 1836:— * "There is a natural disposition on the part of the wealthy stockholders to exaggerate the offences of the poorer classes of intruders upon crown lands, and an equal unwillingness to suit themselves to such |