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.
