# The Three Colonies of Australia/Part 1/Chapter 9

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London: Ingram, Cooke and co., pages 92–104
CHAPTER IX.
ORIGIN OF THE WAKEFIELD SYSTEM.
THE apparently digressive sketch of the colonisation of Western Australia and its lamentable results is rendered necessary by the fact, that on the failure of Western Australia a new theory of colonisation was floated into public notice and incorporated in our colonial legislation and administration.
It was in 1829 that a sensation was produced in the literary and political world of London by the appearance of a little book entitled "A Letter from Sydney," the principal town of Australasia (edited by Robert Gouger), which was soon known to be the production of Mr. Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Out of this book grew the "High-Priced Land System of the Three Colonies"—the monopoly of wild lands at a nominal rent, which the squatters now enjoy—the colonisation of South Australia and New Zealand—some good, and a world of misery, ruin, social and political estrangement, of which we have not yet seen the end.
This "Letter from Sydney," by far the most brilliant of the many works on colonisation by the same author, is now out of print. It contains so clear a statement of the origin, merits, and objects of a theory which was at one time accepted, supported, and acted on by almost every statesman, political economist, and journalist of eminence, that the following abstract of its contents will not be out of place.
The writer represents himself to be an English gentleman of large fortune and refined tastes, who has emigrated under the idea that an estate of twenty thousand acres in Australia would procure the same comforts, income, and consideration that an estate of a thousand acres would in England. He says—"I have got 20,000 acres for a mere trifle, and I imagined that a domain of that extent would be very valuable. In this I was wholly mistaken. As my estate cost next to nothing, so it is worth next to nothing. The trees on my property, if growing in any part of England, would be worth at least £150,000. The best thing that could happen to me would be the annihilation of all this natural produce; but the cost of destroying it would be at least £15,000." He then goes on to enumerate mines of iron and coal which would make him "a peer in England," but which are ​valueless for want of labour or roads. "I did not, you know, intend to become a farmer. Having fortune enough for all my wants, I proposed to get a large domain, to build a good house, to keep enough land in my own hands for pleasure grounds, park, and game preserves, and to let the rest, after erecting farmhouses in suitable spots. My mansions, park, preserves, and tenants, were all a mere dream. There is no such class as a tenantry in this country, where every man who has capital to cultivate a farm can have one of his own." He then graphically describes the miseries of a solitary life to a man accustomed to the elegant luxuries of civilised life. His "own man" leaves him, and invests his savings in a small farm. He imports labourers and mechanics from England, and they leave him without repaying the cost of their passage. He observes to a friend, "Were you a broken farmer, or a poor lieutenant, I should say, come here by all means; you cannot be placed more unhappily than at present, and you may gain by the change. But I am advising a man of independent fortune, who prefers his library even to the beauties of nature, and to whom intellectual society is necessary for his peace of mind. I thought at one time of establishing a dairy; but my cows were as wild as hyænas, and almost as wicked. I had no dairy woman, no churns, no anything that was wanted; and, above all, I wanted industry, skill, economy, and taste, for any such pursuits, or, at least, a drudge of a wife to supply those wants." He then paints an amusing although exaggerated picture of the want of intellectual society in a colonial town.
Having come to the conclusion that the colony would fall into total barbarism whenever the abolition of the convict assignment system should leave the colonists dependent on free labour, he proceeds to state the cause of these miseries—
"Fons et origo malorurti."
The whole evil, according to this unfortunate gentleman, of fortune without "industry, skill, economy, or taste for agricultural or pastoral pursuits," lies in cheap land, which produces dear labour, by drawing labourers into landowners, by promoting dispersion—by deterring men from renting land, as they prefer freehold. Dear labour obstructs improvements in agriculture, in public works, in arts, in science. There being no tenants and few servants, there is no easy, refined, intellectual class: mere mechanics, labourers, and even common farmers and poor lieutenants, such in fact as suffer privations in lands where labour is cheap, are the only persons who enjoy colonial life. With cheap land and dear labour, colonists could get the advantage of the presence of such emigrants as the letter-writer.
​The remedy propounded in 1829, (repeated with equal confidence in 1849,) is to make land so dear that labourers shall not be able to obtain posession of land "too soon"—to affix to all colonial land what Mr. Wakefield calls in another work a "hired labour price." And further, that the money for which the land sold should be devoted to the importation of the redundant labour of the mother country an importation which he advises should be conducted with a view to the greatest benefit of the capitalist,—that is to say, it should consist entirely of young married couples under five-and-twenty years of age, unencumbered by children or parents. "Family Colonisation" had no charms for Gibbon Wakefield.
Thus supplied with ample cargoes of healthy young labourers of both sexes, debarred by a sufficient price from becoming freeholders, the writer of the letter from Sydney "promises that the capitalists shall find ample profitable employment for their capital, shall concentrate population, carry on model farming, cultivate art and science."
But he anticipates one important question which he answers thus:—
"It becomes clear that the object we have in view may be attained by fixing some considerable price on waste land. Still, how is the proper price to be ascertained? Frankly, I confess I do not know. I believe that it could be determined only by experience." This was in 1829. Twenty years later, in 1849, after having experimented on New South Wales, and on three colonies in New Zealand, and provided for all his relations in snug colonial berths, he says,—"It is here that I have been frequently and tauntingly required to mention what I deem the sufficient price; but I have hitherto avoided falling into the trap which that demand upon me really is. I could do that certainly for some colony with which I am particularly well acquainted, but I should do so doubtingly and with hesitation, for the elements of calculation are so many and so complicated, in their various relations to each other, that in depending on them exclusively there would be liability to error."
We may observe that this caution in naming price only extended to books and pamphlets, as Mr. Wakefield never hesitated to assure those who bought lots of land in his model colonies that they would enjoy all the advantages it was presumed a sufficient price would confer. Therefore, of course, the colonising purchasers, seeing Mr. Wakefield in constant communication with the managers of each colony, took it for granted that 12s. in South Australia, or 20s. at Wellington, New Zealand, or 30s. at Nelson, and £3 at Canterbury, according to the colony, was the "sufficient price."
At the period when this theory, in every respect so plausible, was ​propounded, there were no adverse critics except mere colonists, and they were silenced with a jest, or a sneer at their selfish jealousy. And it is not extraordinary, for seldom has a chapter of political economy been clothed in language of such eloquence as adorned and enlivened the pages of the "Letter" from Sydney. It contains passages—(the picture of the Italian girl—the journey from Alexandria to Genoa)—so beautiful, so warm, so real, that one cannot help regretting, for the sake of his own happiness and reputation, as well as of his numerous colonising victims, that Gibbon Wakefield had not devoted himself to writing novels and travels, instead of puffs, paragraphs, articles, pamphlets, and books in praise of joint stock and lottery colonisation.
But Mr. Wakefield had to assist him in propagating his tenets not only the charm of "style," but of personal fascination, with a more than Protean adaptativeness, which rendered him the friend and bosom adviser of Republicans and Radicals, Whig and Conservative Peers, Low Church and High Church Bishops. Five secretaries of state for the colonies—Lords Glenelg and Stanley, Monteagle, Aberdeen, and Grey—have been more or less his pupils; the influence of his writings—even quotations from them—are to be found in their despatches; while so late as 1850, he led, or rather sent captive, to Canterbury, New Zealand, a crowd of educated victims. Energetic, tenacious, indefatigable, unscrupulous, with a wonderful talent for literary agitation, for simultaneously feeding a hundred journalists with the same idea and the same illustrations in varying language, for filling eloquent, but indolent, orators with telling speeches; at one time he had rallied round him nearly every rising man of political aspirations, and secured the support of nearly every economical writer of any celebrity. He has shaken a ministry, founded and distributed the patronage of at least two colonies, and left the seeds, after nearly exciting open rebellion in a third.
But one hard unvarying undercurrent of fact destroyed the edifice of fame and fortune which seemed rising under the influence of Gibbon Wakefield, with his troops of friends, his fiery orators, his city bankers, his well-descended nobles, his bishops of all hues—Whig, Tory, and Trimmer—Hinde, Exeter, and Oxford. The results of his theory, his best arranged plans, were, invariably disastrous. His disciples only continued his disciples as long as they sat at the desk critical, speculated within reach of Threadneedle-street, or reclined on the soft benches of the Houses of Parliament. No sooner did the colonisers become colonists than they renounced him and all his works.
​We are willing to admit Gibbon Wakefield's first experiment in colonisation was perfectly legitimate, although the manner in which he hunted down all who ventured to question his views was as inexcusable as the recklessness with which he sacrificed established colonies in order to prop up his model speculation. For like the Bourbons, he forgets nothing and learns nothing, fiercely implacable, he has neither candour, nor truth, nor humility. In 1849, in order to float off his Canterbury colonisation scheme, he published "The Art of Colonisation," a volume of 500 pages, which, as regards the land question, is merely an amplification, in a diffuse style, with the same arguments and even the same illustrations, of the theories so fervidly propounded in 1829. Not a sentence, not a word, does the book contain of Mr. Wakefield's twenty years' experience, during which he had directed the colonisation, with successive variations in detail, but always on the "sufficient price," or "hired labour price" system, of four colonies—South Australia, Wellington, Nelson, New Plymouth, beside planning half a dozen others. Not a hint that the "Wakefield theory" had, in every colony in which it had been attempted, ruined all those who put faith in it, and been acknowledged to be absurd and impracticable by the intimate friends and brothers of the theorist.
In New South Wales the year 1830 was marked by a change from the complicated system of sales at quit rents and free grants to uniform system of sale by auction at 5s. an acre, which, in effect, except for choice lots, was a fixed price of 5s. an acre, for practically there was no competition. Whether this change was brought about by the ventilation of Mr. Wakefield's theories, it is impossible to say.
The announcement of land for sale by auction at the minimum upset price of 5s. an acre soon brought money into the government chest. Those who had occupied land of a superior quality near their grants purchased their occupations; others rounded off their grants, and took in slices of land for the sake of uniformity, for a natural boundary for pasture, or for access to water; others, who had not had either influence or patience, or time to wade through the dreary forms of Governor Darling's land board, indulged in freehold .as soon as it became a mere matter of money. This was especially the case with a considerable section of the emancipist population.
Governor Bourke had distributed a number of ten-acre grants on the alluvial flats of rivers among poor prisoners of good conduct before the sales by auction were sanctioned. ​During the years between 1831 and 1836, great encouragement to purchase land was held out by the facility for obtaining the labour of prisoners without favour on fixed terms; by the large purchases of produce by the commissariat; and the activity with which the governor prosecuted road-making wherever land was settled. The result was a rapid and annual accession of funds to the colonial Treasury.
The news of the avidity with which both colonists and absentees purchased wild land, which the government imagined it had been giving away for nothing, or for a nominal price, ever since the foundation of the colony, appears to have inflamed the imagination of the colonial department of Downing-street; and very soon the Colonial Office began to think and act as if 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 public was mad on railways, there were parties who believed that because one or two lines paid 10 per cent., all lines would pay 10 per cent., and therefore wished government to buy up and complete the whole net-works of iron roads, and pay off the national debt with the profits.
In like manner, in the course of a few years after the publication of Mr. Wakefield's theories, the whole colonial possessions of Great Britain were surveyed, on maps only, priced, and offered for sale at sums per acre in which intrinsic value formed no element of the calculation.
The one part of the Wakefield theory for which the author deserved credit, was the application of part of the purchase money of land to the introduction of free emigrants in equal numbers of both sexes. Thus, preparation was made for substituting free for convict labour.
The first five years of land sales at 5s. an acre, including the acreage sold by Governors Brisbane and Darling, and paid for in those years, amounted to £176,435, of which the last year amounted to £89,380. During the same period £31,028 only was expended in introducing 3,079 emigrants.
But in 1835 two events occurred which materially affected the colonising fortunes of Australia. A party of stockowners from the Island of Van Diemen's Land, in which the accessible pastures had been nearly all appropriated, crossed Bass's Straits, and established themselves on the shores of Port Phillip Bay, on the River Yarra Yarra; about the same time squatters, pushing on westward over the plains of Maneroo, gradually extended their pastures overland, while whalers settled at Portland Bay in the same district. And before the government of New South Wales, within which this territory was included under ​Governor Phillip's commission, acknowledged the existence of the settlement of Port Phillip, many thousand sheep and cattle were feeding over the finest plains that had yet been discovered in the vicinity of a natural port. These "unauthorised squatters," as they were called in a despatch, poured into the new land with such rapidity that the home government was very unwillingly obliged to sanction the measures for their recognition and settlement which had been taken by Governor Bourke.
At the same time that the Tasmanians were swarming across Bass's Straits, and the pastors of New South Wales were marching overland with their flocks to this and other new lands of promise, in England a commission had been issued, an act of Parliament obtained, and a charter granted for colonising South Australia (the unexplored tract of land, traversed by a river which the adventurous Sturt had descended and ascended in 1829, and named South Australia), on the "sufficient price" principle propounded by Gibbon Wakefield in his "Letter from Sydney."
The history of the origin, rise, progress, fall, and revival of South Australia, will be found duly chronicled in the chapter devoted to that province. We refer to it here in order to show how the speculations of the South Australian colonisers affected the progress of New South Wales and Port Phillip.
Their scheme was floated on the success of New South Wales and the failure of Swan River.
Give us, they said to the legislature and the stock-jobbing 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, 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 shall tell 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 the South Australian interest—an interest much more successful in its parliamentary tactics than in its colonising operations—in the course of a few years succeeded in raising the price of land successively from 5s. to a minimum of 12s. and 20s.; in inoculating the Colonial Office with their own notions as to the value of wild land and the injurious effects of dispersion; and in suddenly, without due preparation, abolishing the assignment system, which supplied the greater part of the pastoral and agricultural labour in the colony.
So early as 1834 the Earl of Aberdeen, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, appears, from a despatch addressed to Governor Bourke on the subject of the vast extensions of the pastoral interest in every accessible direction, but especially toward the unexplored Port Phillip district, to have embraced Mr. Wakefield's doctrine as to the banefulness of dispersion. Both the theorist and the statesman were applying the rules of an agricultural to a pastoral state of society. They were looking to the condition of the Lothians, when they should have been studying the history of the Patriarchs. And although the squatting system was then in its infancy and not one-third of the territory was then explored that has since been occupied, Lord Aberdeen expressed a strong opinion "that it was not desirable to allow the population to become more scattered than it then was."
In 1836 a committee of the House of Commons, appointed under the influence of Mr. Wakefield's parliamentary disciples, made a report in favour of that gentleman's principles of colonisation, after hearing evidence which consisted almost entirely of witnesses interested in the South Australian speculation, and which did not include a single colonist from New South Wales. After this report, Lord Glenelg, then Colonial Secretary, authorised the Governor of New South Wales to raise the price of land to 12s. if he thought fit.
The replies of Sir Richard Bourke on the two questions of "dispersion" and price of land, place him in the first rank of colonising statesmen; they display a degree of foresight which we can now duly appreciate:—
"Admitting," he said in answer to Lord Aberdeen, "as every reasonable person must, that a certain degree of concentration is necessary for the advancement of wealth and civilisation, 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 be found practicable, by means of the sale of land in situations peculiarly advantageous, however distant from other locations, by establishing townships and ports, and facilitating the intercourse between remote and more settled districts of this vast territory, to provide centres of civilisation and government, and thus gradually extend the power of social order to the most distant parts of the wilderness."
In answer to the suggestion for raising the price of land, made at the instance of Colonel Torrens, chairman of the South Australian speculation, who found "semi-barbarous" Port Phillip a serious rival to his model colony:—
"Whatever minimum is fixed, there will be found instances in which land acquired at that price without opposition will prove a cheap bargain; but such is not often the case. Land even of very inferior quality, happening to possess a peculiar value to the individual purchasing in consequence of its proximity to his other property, finds a sale solely on that account, cannot be considered as cheaply obtained, even at the minimum price. The cases in which land is sold without opposition, from ignorance of its marketable value on the part of the public, or from the secret agreement or friendly forbearance of those otherwise interested in bidding against each other, must diminish yet more and more as the colony advances in wealth and population; nor are such accidents, even if they were more numerous, deserving of much consideration. It is upon general tendencies and results that all questions of public policy are to be decided.
"The lands now in the market form a surplus, in many cases a refuse, consisting of lands which in past years were not saleable at any price, and were not sought after even as free grants.
"By deciding to dispose of them at 5s. an acre, it by no means ​follows that they will be sold at a higher rate. The result may be to retain them for an indefinite time unsold, a result more certain in consequence of the alternative at the settler's command of wandering over the vast tracts of the interior. A facility for acquiring land at a low price is the safest check to this practice. The wealthiest colonists are continually balancing between the opposite motives presented by the cheapness of (then) unauthorised occupation on the one hand, and the desire of adding to their permanent property on the other. The influence of the latter motive must be weakened in proportion to the augmentation of the upset price.
"It is possible that the augmentation of the minimum price would have the injurious effect of checking the immigration of persons possessed of small capital, desirous of establishing themselves upon land of their own"
"We shall hereafter show that all Sir Richard Bourke's predictions were realised. To this hour, in the midst of settled districts, large tracts of land remain the haunt of wild dogs and vermin, which are no more likely to be worth 1 an acre in twenty years to come than they were twenty years ago, unless they turn out to be gold fields.
Parallel with the new arrangement, which enabled every man with money to buy a farm, and filled the colonial treasury to overflowing, the pastoral system, which, at the least possible expenditure for labour, raised a vast exportable produce in wool, was extending itself both east and west, daily discovering new pastures, and driving the emu, the kangaroo, and the aborigine before armies of soft-fleeced merinoes.
In the early days of the colony, landowners grazed near their grants without paying anything for what in fact was valueless except to them. As the population of Sydney increased a charge of 2s. 6d. per 100 acres was imposed on wild lands, conveniently situated for pasture.
No instance occurred of refusing- this privilege at this rent on unoccupied land until the time of Governor Darling, who refused to permit the editor of a paper which had ridiculed his government to rent additional land for his increasing herds.
Beyond the boundaries of settlement—colonially "the bush"—no rent was charged, and until Governor Bourke took the matter in hand, club-law prevailed. It was not unusual for a great squatter to drive a small one out of a district of peculiar richness in grass or water by what was called "eating him out;" that is to say, sending such a flock as would, in four-and-twenty hours, devour every blade within many miles of the small settler's hut, until Sir Richard Bourke, to a certain extent, ​extended the operation of the law beyond the boundary. He seems to have been the only governor, with the exception of Macquarie, thoroughly impressed with' the necessity of encouraging and protecting against the prejudices of the great settlers a class of agricultural yeomanry. It was the policy of Sir George Gipps, acting under his instructions, to throw every impediment in the way of freehold farms for those who, not rich enough to become great flockowners, were not willing to become mere shepherds. Governor Bourke saw through the selfishness of the colonial monopolists, in the shape of great flockholders, who, forgetting their own or their fathers' original insignificance, grudged every acre and every head of stock that fell to the share of hardworking men; he was not led away by a cry against the frugal peasantry, who fed small flocks or a few cattle on wild land. He observes, in a despatch of 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 restraints as are essential to the due and impartial regulation of this species of occupancy. Of the former disposition I have had ample proof in the result of an inquiry lately instituted as to the number of ticket-of-leave holders in unauthorised occupation of crown land. The dishonest practices of this class of persons in such occupation had been represented as one of the principal evils which required a remedy. I have, however, discovered from the returns of the magistrates, which I called for, that not more than twenty to thirty ticket-of-leave holders occupy crown lands throughout the whole colony, and of these a great proportion are reported to be particularly honest and industrious."
Out of this despatch grew the pastoral or crown land rents, which ​produced, the year before the gold discovery, upwards of forty thousand a year, and which—although less equitably worked than Sir Richard Bourke intended, or would have permitted had he remained long enough to adapt the details to the circumstances of the colony—had, doubtless, a great effect in stimulating the growth of the pastoral resources of Australia.
Sir Richard Bourke divided the wild land or bush, beyond the boundaries of the settled districts, into "squatting districts," each under the charge of a "Commissioner of Crown Lands." An annual licensing fee was charged to each squatter for his occupation, and a poll-tax on his stock. Advantages of pre-emption were, by custom, conceded to the discoverers of new pastures. In arranging this system, it seems Sir Richard Bourke did not expect to obtain a greater revenue than would defray the expenses of the machinery which superseded club law by magistrates and police. Thus it will be observed that under Governor Bourke, the means of obtaining either the absolute possession of land in fee-simple, or the use for pastoral purposes, were systematised and simplified. It ceased to be a matter of favour, of complicated form, or of bribery to subordinates; and what was still more important, and directly reverse to the policy of his successor, the administration was conducted on the principle that the possession of land could not be made too easy to those who were disposed to occupy or cultivate it.
Sir Richard believed that he was best serving the interest of his sovereign by promoting the prosperity of colonists of all classes, by permitting them to follow their pursuits in their own way, so long as they did not injure each other. He did not think a few acres, more or less, were of the least consequence to the crown; he thought capital would be better employed in the hands of the colonists than in the treasury of the colony; therefore he never attempted like his successor to extract the uttermost farthing by haggling at land sales, or dreamed of treating worthless, limitless forests as if they were plantations of English oaks, or of laying claim to such waifs as "Australian guano." In fact he believed that he was serving the crown by administering the colony for the benefit of the colonists; he did not pretend, like Cyrus, to force upon them a garment they did not like, or to teach them how to transact their own business.
But while these reforms were being so wisely carried out, and cultivation among small proprietors and sheep-feeding among the rich was daily adding wealth and stability to the colony, the Home Government, worked upon by the parliamentary evidence, the literary agitation, and ​the so far successful speculations of the South Australian interest, became inoculated with most extravagant ideas of the value of wild lands, and of the necessity of asserting, with the utmost rigour, the rights of the crown to everything worth or supposed to be worth a shilling. There were many excuses for an infatuation which has since cost colonists dear in Australia, New Zealand, and Natal, and induced this country to make expensive wars on the Maories and Boers, besides keeping up expensive colonising establishments at such wretched outposts as the Falkland Islands.
In the new colonies of South Australia and Port Phillip, enormous prices were given by infatuated speculators for town and country lots, and for a time enormous profits, or apparent profits, were realised. A land mania very soon infected New South Wales. This mania was supported by an influx of emigrants from England, with capital and without experience. Into the details of this mania we shall enter more precisely in a future chapter. It is enough for our present information to observe that after a time all ranks and ages were carried away by the infatuation. Everything rose in price; the colonial treasury was overflowing with the produce of land sales. These funds the governor placed with the banks. The banks, over supplied with capital, extended their accommodation, and credit became almost unlimited. Imports rose enormously. To those who did not look below the surface, there were all the outward and visible signs of prosperity produced by the change from grants to sales. In 1837, the last year of Sir Richard Bourke's government, the land sales produced upwards of £120,000.
It was about this time that we see a sign of the fatal idea of the intrinsic value of wild land which had begun to make way in the Colonial Office, in the refusal of the Secretary of State for the Colonies to permit a meritorious pilot, who had rendered essential services, to be rewarded according to colonial custom by a grant of fifty acres. The secretary, Lord Stanley, saw no reason for so bestowing her Majesty's land, the said land being worth nothing to the state, although much to the pilot. From that time forward rigid adherence to a theory substituted ingratitude, or money payments, for the previous convenient payment of fifty-acre grants.
* ↑ The great flockowners had not at that time appropriated the term squatter to themselves, &s they did soon afterwards. Before Bourke's time they chiefly fed their flocks on grants.
* ↑ By valuing wild land at a farming price, it became easy to put a Governor on the estimates instead of a lieutenant with a file of marines.
Footnotes