only for pasture. The high-priced symmetrical system, condemned by Sir Thomas Mitchell, doomed many districts to sheep, where villages and agriculture would have been found of great value not only in extending population and civilisation but in providing food for the gold diggers.
The result of the policy inaugurated by Lord Stanley, carried out and still approved by Earl Grey, was to make the humbler class of the Australian population as loose as possible on the land, vagrants instead of settlers. The condition of the country would have been infinitely less critical, if for the last ten years the successful emigrants had been encouraged to settle as much as possible on land instead of investing their savings, if not in drink, in stock, or in tours on the coast. Freeholds, easily obtained, would have stimulated marriage, and those who resorted to gold hunting would have returned successful or unsuccessful to their homesteads.
Another result pregnant with evil looms in the future. The best land for settlement and cultivation in the neighbourhood of a gold-field may be held on lease by a squatter, who having held it for a nominal rent during the lease may claim to purchase it in a block at a price which, considering the enhanced value, will be nominal! It will not be surprising if the men enriched by gold-digging, who saw themselves before the golden age of Australia excluded from freehold by .squatters, runs, and the £1 an acre lots, grow rather discontented, when under the new order of things they again meet their old friend the squatter still in the character of a monopolist, with power to buy for £1 land worth ten which he has held on lease for a rent of one-fifth of a penny, when it was well worth in 100 acre lots 5s. or 10s. an acre. But these are questions we must leave the colonists and their Parliaments to settle. Fortunately, we have not Earl Grey at the Colonial-office to fan up the flames of insurrection; for we learn from his apology for his "Colonial Policy," that in 1832 the universal evidence of the colonists against his land system had not shaken his original convictions; he considered "that the working of the Act (of 1842), far from showing that there was anything erroneous in the views of those by whom it was recommended and passed, seems to have proved the soundness of the principles on which it was founded. At the same time, some improvements in its detail were suggested by experience." And he proceeds to quote the Act of 1846, and the orders in council, which we have dissected, as specimens of "improvements in detail." [1] A
- ↑ Vol. I., p. 314, Earl Grey's Colonial Policy.
