desired to hold meetings on any subject of interest to the community. The inaugural ceremony was a very simple one and soon performed. It was decided to name the little settlement, which up to the present had done without one, by a word which all treasured perhaps above any other—‘Freedom’; and the hall was named The Hall of Freedom.
There were now six hundred persons on the sixteen hundred acres of land, with two hundred and twenty cottages and animal and vegetable life in abundance, all of which had been fully paid for except the steam plough upon which the balance of their payment was not yet due. Even many of their foes admitted that was good work to be accomplished in one year by people who had started together comparatively penniless. But their brightest days were yet in store.
XVII.
Another year had passed over the settlers heads. During that time their little community had enormously increased. Two thousand of them were already settled on the land, of which they had over 4,000 acres, which was more than two acres to each individual, being more than double the area that the people of Japan possess, where 34 million people are supported in comparative comfort on 33 million acres; the directors considered that over two acres per individual would be ample, as every acre was being used, and none held in idleness for speculative purposes. They had erected 500 cottages; their live stock amounted to 500 head of cattle, 60 draught horses, a number of saddle horses that some of the selectors had brought up on their private account, 30,000 fowls, a quantity of turkeys, besides a few dogs, goats, and other domestic animals, and a large number of bees. Their productivity was already becoming somewhat important. They were exporting monthly £600 worth of eggs, £350 worth of butter, and vegetable products of all kinds to the extent of over £2,000. And now the directors purchased 640 acres on the banks of the Murray River, about nine miles from the former site. This they settled in the same way as they had done at the Freedom community. The new settlement, which was called Equity, was opened with a batch of two hundred settlers, for whom fifty cottages had been built, and who took with them the usual stock of implements, utensils, seed, live stock, and provisions. This month they paid the balance of £690 due on the steam plough and erected a large steam factory at Freedom, at a cost of £1,000. In this factory was a large churn capable of making 410lbs. of butter in about five minutes, the various requirements for canning and preserving fruits, besides different machinery that supplied power for many industries of the settlers and saved their labor.
The directors continued to extend and develop both of the settlements by constantly purchasing fresh land, and sending more members upon it, until at last the number of Pioneers remaining in Melbourne was very small indeed, and the day was fast approaching when that unfortunate city would see them no more. It was now thirty-five months since
