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 dis-
