Page:A colonial autocracy, New South Wales under Governor Macquarie, 1810-1821.djvu/359

 It has been comparatively easy to show how autocracy brought about its own peculiar difficulties, to see in particular instances the difficulties of administration, of legislation and of jurisdiction. The faults and follies of "personal" Government, the gradual growth of political interest, the powerful sentiment of budding nationality, all these are plainly written in the history of the period. Criticism too of many sides of governmental activity has been called for, and the lines of that criticism, and the suggestion of alternative policy, have for the most part been obvious enough. But, looking at the subject as a whole, the task of criticism becomes infinitely greater.

By the foundation of New South Wales the Government offered a solution of the two problems of how to people a new country and how to get rid of convicted criminals. The experiment proved in the end a remarkably successful one, and it had from the beginning one great advantage. The method placed upon the Government the responsibility for the welfare of the prisoners and thus indirectly of the whole country, and for this reason New South Wales received in its early years a greater share of attention and revenue than any previous British Colony at the time of its establishment.

The introduction of free settlers was probably inevitable, but their introduction gave a distinct character to the Colony's development. The double enticement was held out to them of free labour and free land. But in agriculture pure and simple the convict labour was found to be inefficient, and it was thus impossible to carry out the policy of granting land in small holdings. The use of convict labour led directly to an increase in pastoral farming, to the aggregation of small freeholds into large sheep runs, and to an ever greater area of Crown grants. Especially after 1821 the pastoralist with his thousands of acres began to take the place of the farmer with his few hundreds as the real instrument of colonial progress. Macquarie fought against this tendency, trying to hold the small agriculturist, emancipist or free, above the sheep-farmer, but he could not (though he did his best) bring servile labour to an end, and so long as this lasted his attempts were bound to fail.

The presence of a convict population, the growth of capitalist farming, and the increasing area of land granted away by