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 however, Sir Charles Dilke preferred to form his own estimate of Australian public men. If the impartial critic turns to the measures passed into law, or agitated for, by the democratic party, he will also find that the aim, even if the means be sometimes indefensible, has in every case been to make the colonies a permanent abiding-place for a happy, prosperous, and contented community. This was undeniably the intention of the popular struggle against the squatters for possession of the Crown Lands. The pioneer squatters were no doubt a very vigorous and picturesque body, but it is only a rightful social evolution that their place has been largely taken in the more favoured and settled parts of the continent by a much more numerous and equally worthy generation of farmers. It has often been pointed out that some of the legislative enactments, known as popular Land Acts, have been the means of handing over vast tracts of country in fee-simple to the identical "Squatter" class who were previously content to be Crown tenants. To some extent this is true, but it has only been effected by the squatters resorting to "dummying" and other dubious practices; and if this class have profited in pocket by these means, to them also