the protection of their interests, and the keeping down of aspiring yeomanry.
The report of the committee on crown land grievances was the foundation of a fierce agitation on the part of the pastoral interests for the suppression of the obnoxious regulations as to the pastoral occupations, and for fixity of tenure. In this agitation, which was also directed against the £1 acre minimum, the whole colony joined. Public meetings were held in every part of New South Wales; petitions and memorials addressed to the home government were signed, sent to England, and placed in the hands of political men of influence; and influential organs of the English press were enlisted in defence of the great pastoral interest.
In the same year the whole Council adopted resolutions condemning the high price of land in the terms suggested by the committee.
In 1845 a fourth select committee reported against the 1 an acre Act, supporting their opinions with a great body of facts and statistics, and concluded by observing, that "the practical evils resulting from the augmentation of the upset price of land had already been fully developed in the Report on Immigration and the Report on Waste Lands in 1843, and in the Land Grievance Report of 1844, and in the opinions of your honourable Council, distinctly pronounced on the same subject, in the resolutions of the whole Council of the 17th September, 1844."
To complete the history of the land question we will add, that in 1847, under the administration of Sir George Gipps's successor, a select committee on immigration, of which Mr. Cowper was chairman, reported "the disastrous results and impolicy of the high upset price;" and also that a select committee, presided over by Mr. Robert Lowe (now so well known in England), made an elaborate report against the high upset price of land, to which we shall have occasion to allude more minutely in describing the compromise effected between the government and the squatters under the government of Sir Charles Fitzroy.
But Governor Gipps stood firm; determined to make war on the squatters, determined to maintain the obnoxious £1 an acre, and to carry out the spirit of the act which imposed it, by throwing, as he was instructed, all possible obstacles in the way of men of small capital investing their savings in land; and he was supported by the British Colonial Office.
For while the governor was courageously attacking the most wealthy and powerful body in the colony, he took no pains to foster that class of yeomanry which were the object of Sir Richard Bourke's peculiar care. He divided the land into large lots; discouraged small holdings,
