fixity of tenure with compensation for all improvements by which the value of the land would be permanently enhanced, such as dams, tanks, wells, &c.—the lot of the farmer in New South Wales might be enormously advantaged, and it is in this direction that the friends of the farmer must work, and the hare-brained twaddle we hear about a protective policy for the farmer, which would tax him heavily on every implement of husbandry for the benefit of an insignificant section of weak-kneed manufacturers, which would seek to force him into a continuance of his present unequal fight with Nature, in which he vainly tries to grow products for which his soil and climate are not so well adapted as those of his competitors in more favoured neighbourhoods, and which, in a word, seeks to sap his energies, rouse his worst passions, inflame his discontent, and make him less self-reliant and enterprising, instead of encouraging him to patient investigation and intelligent experiment. All this irresponsible chatter, I repeat, by impracticable theorists and hobbyists, all the protection conventions, vain-glorious challenges to public debate, and organized stumping of the country by fluent farmers' friends, who perhaps don't know the difference between a plough and a pickaxe, would not do one tithe the good that one experimental farm would do. In fact, by distracting men's attention from practical measures, and raising clouds of dust on theoretical issues for purely personal political ends, these self-dubbed saviours of the farming interest do irremediable harm.
