LAND IN AUSTRALIA.
AusniALIA has been the subject of various terrible predictions, each sufficient for the destruction of a state, and yet she has survived. The abolition of transportation, which was to have destroyed pro- perty and society, has become the very thing on which the colo- nists insist with the utmost obstinacy ; the price of land, which was to have kept out people, has not prevented the most enormous increase to population ever witnessed ; that sudden growth of the people was to have been punished by starvation, yet there is pro- bably no community upon the whole earth so amply provided even with the luxuries of life ; and now we have a new prophecy, that "an Australian Gracchus" is to rise and rescue society from the agrarian law which excludes the population from the land.
The Times describes the plan of pasture-licences as one devised by Lord Grey to evade another measure which was urged upon him for authorizing the absolute sale at a low price ; the people of Australia are represented as excluded from the land, and the de- nizens of Canvass Town, a temporary abode hastily put up near Melbourne, are compassionated as undergoing their peculiar hard- ships because they are excluded from the land by the impossibility of obtaining it. This extraordinary aggregation of circumstances is intended to create in the mind of the reader a notion, that some- how or other these poor people, " persons of small capital," are debarred from the possession of land by the high price.
Now the fact is, that the creation of a place like Canvass Town has as little to do with the price of land in Australia as the im- portation of Italian boys into London with the system of farm- tenures in England. The persons who are collected in Canvass Town were for the most part not brought for purposes of settle- meat; they were attracted by the gold—that wonderful discovery which has subverted the relations of land, capital, and labour, in Australia. There are none of the hardships experienced by the emigrants that might not have been predicted a priori on a know- ledge of that discovery. If we had been told, that in a very thinly- peopled country gold lay over an extent of thousands of square miles, we might have described beforehand the coming of an im- mense concourse from surrounding settlements, from other coun- tries, and from the parent land, the disturbances of prices, the dearth of food in spite of large spasmodic supplies, and all the other commercial irregularities as they have subsequently hap- pened. We might have predicted with tolerable certainty that numbers would have been drawn to that treasure-desert who would be unfit for the business of gold-finders—not bold enough, not sagacious enough, or in some other way doomed to disappoint- ment. Thousands have succeeded brilliantly; numbers have been disappointed ; many who were too feeble have gone into the hos- pital, the existence of which might have been predicted with equal certainty. And now when we find that there are shoals of persons in that dear place with small means, or sick and helpless, we trace it to the fact that cupidity has drawn to the spot a number of per- sons whose natural powers are not equal to the task. This has nothing to do with the price of land. The dearth, the want, the sickness, the mistaken emigration, are exactly to be pa- ralleled by deplorable cases in the early settlement of Wisconsin or Michigan ; only that in Victoria the impulse to mistaken emi- gration has been greater, and the results are crowded more into a concentrated view.
There is indeed a self-evident absurdity in making so much of the mere price of land in a country where other prices are in a far higher proportion, from the very fad that gold is plentiful to an un- paralleled degree. To suppose that a settler possessing really the in- tention and "capital" would lack the means of purchasing land at a pound an acre, in a country where the very beggar in the streets asks you not for a penny but a shilling, is enough to make any man of sense laugh in your face. If an English farmer were to say, "I can- not settle myself in life because I cannot buy the fee-simple of land for twenty pence an acre," you would have more than the parallel to the statement about Australia. Let us, however, take the case of any conceivable family in Canvass Town. We are to suppose that the intending settler has some pounds in his pockets on which be is existing at that unprofitable spot ; and that if he could he would proceed to settle on some land. We are not dealing with a case of mere labourers, because for them there is evidently no hardship ; a labouring man who can yet 70/. a year and rations can be under no painful restrictions in Australia. We will suppose that the settler has clothes with him ; but at all events, until his crops grow, he will want food, and he will want a house. Now, bread is worth from is. 6d. to 2s. the four-pound loaf at Melbourne ; and there is no country in the world where either building-material or the la- bour for building his house is so expensive ; the rent of a house or the purchase of one already standing being in proportion. Now, here we perceive the whole force of the fallacy : in the first demands for food and lodging, the settler will find the outlay to be so great as to think nothing of a small demand of 20s. or 25s. an acre for his land. If he intends to cultivate his land with a single pair of hands, he might do so, though it would be slow work as a means of providing for his family ; but, if he intends to play the capitalist farmer, he will want money for wages ; and then he must pay his farm-labourers 43/. or 50/., his housemaid (if he keeps one) 18/. or 261., his shepherd 35/. or 501., all with keep ; and these are reduced prices. In short, the actual settler in Aus- tralia who proceeds as a capitalist would require such sums for food, lodging, and labour of all kinds, that the price of the land would be set down with as little regard as in England we should. set down the price of salt in our household expenditure. It might go down amongst the "sundries."
The gold discovery which overturned all the nice calculations about arrangement of price, adjustment of emigration, and so forth,
has created difficulties of its own ; it has disturbed all the relations of production, but has also provided the means of readjusting: the disturbance. The mass of mankind first view these things theoretically. The writer sitting in his closet can understand that at if a gigantic treasure-trove will attract people to the spot like flies, many will be unfitted for business, and that thus in a nch land numbers will be beggars, and numbers in a hospital: but the vulgar will not perceive those self-evident truths until the beggary and the hospital exist. It is only now, after there are beggars and invalids crowded in Victoria, that the public under- stands how people intending to play the capitalist without capital, or intending to play the digger without physical "bottom," must not venture thither. Even of those who ate gone to be dui- appointed, and who are better suited for other things, there is in- evitably a transition state of irresolute or desponding unemploy- ment; but such persons become a reservoir whence the labour finds its way to a better occupation. This, which might have been cal- culated by the economist a priori, is simply a brief statement of the facts in Australia.
For the truth is, that there is no difficulty in obtaining land, and it is a delusion to represent that any difficulty exists. In the paper to which we refer, by a laxity of expression the words " Victoria " and " Australia " are spoken.of almost as if they were convertible terms ; but even in Victoria the practical difficulty has not been created by the system of pasture-licences, but by certain local mistakes of the Government. The licences do not prevent purchase, though they may slightly impede it in some settlements ; for there are local distinctions. The right of commonage over waste lands in the settled districts is overridden by a right of pur- chase, with a very short notice ; in the unsettled districts the leaseholder can hold for the term, claim compensation for actual improvements, and he has a right of preemption. But the temporary occupation of land in the unsettled districts does not affect the spread of real settlement ; the less, since the leaseholder must be actually a landowner in a certain propor- tion. It has been the custom in the principal colonies of Australia to put up land at 20s. an acre, with a small fee for certain incidental expenses, which may be reckoned at 6d. In Victoria it is the custom to offer it, at quarterly sales, in sections of a square mile, or at the least in half-sections; and, probably through some neglect to keep the surveys in advance, it has not been offered in sufficient quantity. Speculators have thus been enabled to buy up the amount in the market and then to sell it again at a profit. This has created some inconvenience; but to those settlers who have attempted the experiment of settling in the immediate vicinity of the gold-diggings, the difficulties have evi- dently been due not to the original price of the land but to the high prices of other things, to the difficulty of obtaining labour, and to the unsettled state of society. In South Australia, the sole difficulty arises from the high price of labour; and that is indeed so considerable, the attraction of the gold being so constant and great, that no conceivable adjustment of prices and emigration- funds could at once check the abstraction. Nevertheless, in that colony, where the sections are only eighty acres each, and sales are held every week, and where the average auction price is 28s. an acre, small allotments have always existed ; and it has been remarked that the settlers have returned to their land even after a visit to the gold-field. Labourers have in like manner delayed their visits to those regions, avowedly for the purpose of com- pleting their engagements to their employers. The average weekly sale in South Australia may be called about 1500 acres. By degrees, as both a priori reasoning and experience agree in showing, the difficulties occasioned by the gold will be cured by the gold. After the discovery of that astounding mass of crude capital, the first thing was to get it diffused amongst the commercial classes. A test that so much has been satis- factorily accomplished, is supplied in the testimonial recently given to the manager of the South Australian Bank, for conducting that establishment safely through the crisis. As soon as that diffusion of capital was effected, the means of paying such wages as would counterpoise the attraction of the gold-digging were supplied ; and now, independently of the hardships which experience has shown to be inseparable from gold- digging, it is found that the mere money profit proves to be nearly as great in the occupations of the ordinary handicrafts, of sheep- caring, or of domestic employment The proper distribution of industry will be better understood by the industrial classes as they gain experience. In the mean time, the gold of Australia stands forth to the world likg the gigantic golden lettering on the sign- board of a great trading house to symbolize the affluence of the establishment, and that will continue to contract the emigration which will overflow from the gold-fields to the genuine settlements of Australia. In those gigantic operations, Government, with its limited means and more limited ideas, can do little, except to re- move obstructions, and to secure that information shall find its way to all practicable emigrants in the parent land.
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