little further on he says, "those who contended that instead of adopting the squatting ordinances the minimum price of land ought to have been reduced, asserted, that by the regulations the squatters were virtually put in possession of land which could never be resumed if wanted. Experience has, however, demonstrated that there was no ground for such an apprehension. Already in Victoria above £20,000 has been laid out by one individual, in purchasing the fee-simple of land which had been occupied as a run by another person." Earl Grey's illustration is most unfortunate, but characteristic of the careless manner in which he collects the few "facts" with which he embellishes his narrative. In the case cited no lease had been granted to the occupier of the run, no lease could be granted, inasmuch as it was within the settled district of Melbourne. Leases are for 8 years and for 14 years, and no lease granted under the ordinances has yet run out. The purchase in question consisted of land, which from its quality and situation, if put up for auction in convenient lots even at an upset of one shilling an acre, would have fetched more than the sum paid under the special survey system, in one block, viz., £20,000 for 20,000 acres without competition. This purchase gave the purchaser the right of pre-emption and of pasturage over three times as much more land, which was worth to rent altogether at that time one thousand pounds a year.
Earl Grey says (vol i. page 317), "there can be no doubt that by reducing the price as much as would be necessary to meet the views of the chief opponents of the present system, a powerful impulse would be given to the spirit of land jobbing."
For our own parts we cannot conceive any system more calculated to promote land-jobbing than that which retains good agricultural land as sheep walks, until such time as the spread of population raises the demand high enough to tempt a capitalist speculator who lays out twenty thousand pounds in order to make sixty, by retailing to actual cultivators, without adding a shilling to the value of the land, by roads, buildings or fences.
And that is the system Earl Grey approved and maintained in office, and still approves in his unwilling retirement.
We have deemed it right to give the history of the land question at great length, with full quotations from colonial evidence on the subject, because its past and proximate effects on the condition of the colonists, and their relations with the parent state, fill a place in colonial annals not less important than the anti-corn law struggle in the political
