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 labourer takes so great a share that he soon becomes a capitalist.… Few, even of those whose lives are unusually long, can accumulate great masses of wealth.” The labourers most distinctly decline to allow the capitalist to abstain from the payment of the greater part of their labour. It avails him nothing if he is so cunning as to import from Europe, with his own capital, his own wage-workers. They soon “cease … to be labourers for hire; they … become independent landowners, if not competitors with their former masters in the labour market.” Think of the horror! The excellent capitalist has imported bodily from Europe, with his own good money, his own competitors! The end of the world has come! No wonder Wakefield laments the absence of all dependence and of all sentiment of dependence on the part of the wage-workers in the colonies. On account of the high wages, says his disciple, Merivale, there is in the colonies “the urgent desire for cheaper and more subservient labourers—for a class to whom the capitalist might dictate terms, instead of being dictated to by them.… In ancient civilized countries the labourer, though free, is by law of nature dependent on capitalists; in colonies this dependence must be created by artificial means.

What is now, according to Wakefield, the consequence of