(and there is wild grass almost everywhere) sheep can graze, and where there are succulent twigs cattle will fatten on them. The South American estancias and the ranches of Colorado, the cattle runs of Queensland and northern New Zealand, the sheep runs of Victoria and New South Wales repeat and perpetuate this stage. The genesis of it may even now be daily observed. A Manchester accountant who has never before been astride a horse will in twelve months learn the mysteries of cattle and sheep farming, then purchase a hundred acres or two from the colonial Government, gradually clear it of timber, build of his own trees, with no skilled assistance, a weatherboard cottage, and take home a swiftly wooed wife to lead with him a rather desolate existence in "the bush." Or (on a larger scale) a squatter,[1] who is commonly a gentleman by birth and education, comes out from England with inherited wealth, buys or leases from the Government a large inland tract of grazing land, takes with him flocks and herds, shepherds and stockmen, builds a bark or wooden manor house, and settles down to the life of Abram on the plains of Mamre. In earlier days, when the colony was in its infancy, he would not have had to purchase or lease his "run." One country after another saw the golden age of a would-be landed aristocracy. As Norman William parceled out all England among his nobles and knights, rulers of conquered countries were then mighty free with what did not belong to them. Possessing the authority of a sovereign, Columbus made lavish grants of land, and thus pacified his rebels. Charles II presented Carolina to eight proprietors. Baronies of twelve thousand acres in South Carolina, manors of twenty thousand acres in Maryland, were dwarfed by territorial principalities of more than a million acres in New York. The absolute governors of early Australia gave away wide tracts. When land was not given it was taken, on Rob Roy's principle. During the interregnum that followed the recall of the first Governor of New South Wales, military robbers seized fifteen thousand acres, and under subsequent administrations they continued their depredations. Land was held on various tenures. The first American forms were varieties of belated feudalism; of a hundred often strange and ridiculous emblems of suzerainty perhaps a dozen repeated Old World customs,[2]
Sir H. S. Maine has proved that nearly all the feudal exactions that maddened a whole people to mutiny in 1789 were then in force in England. How shadowy they must have grown is shown by the
- ↑ In its primary American sense the word squatter denotes the backwoodsman described in the foregoing paragraph. In its secondary Australian sense it means the large landholder now described.
- ↑ See an instructive article by Mr. Edward Eggleston, Social Conditions in the Colonies. Century Magazine, 1884, pp. 849, 850.
