Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/307

Rh fact that none of them was transported to Botany Bay in that or later years. They were atrophied portions of the British land system when Australia was founded in 1788. For fully sixteen years the possession of lands granted or seized was as absolute as the English law ever allows it to be. Then the landholders, finding the large tracts already conceded insufficient for the development of the pastoral industry, applied for more, and themselves suggested in 1803 a plan of leasing crown lands which in the following year was legalized as "the first charter of squatterdom"; it was the beginning of a system that has brought under pastoral occupancy territories as extensive as the largest European countries. The land system formed part of or gave birth to a political organization. A host of so-called seigneurs imported into old Canada as much of the ancien régime as would bear the voyage. Manors in Maryland reproduced the feudal courts-baron and courts-leet. The great New York landowners, as inheriting both English and Dutch institutions, presided in such courts and were at the same time hereditary members of a powerful legislative order. The courts were dropped on the way out to Australia, but the political influence of the English landed aristocracy inhered in their representatives at the antipodes. As the Southern slavearchy, through its Washingtons and Jeffersons, Clays and Calhouns, was for three quarters of a century the driving force in American politics, the Australian squatterarchy for one generation or more ruled the seven colonies with a sway that waxed as the absolute power of the governor waned. It composed the legislature, appointed the judges, controlled the executive, and if the governor was refractory it sent him home. In both southern countries social life reflected its tastes and was the measure of its grandeur. It constituted "society," ran the races, gave the balls, and kept open house; the surrounding villages lived in its sunshine. Why could not this patriarchal state last, as it has lasted in Arabia for thousands of years and in Europe for centuries? In the Southern States it was brought to bankruptcy by the civil war. In Australia it collapsed before two enemies as deadly—a succession of droughts and a fall in the price of wool. The banker has his foot on the squatter's neck. If one may judge from the published maps, three fourths of the freehold land in the older colonies is in the hands of the money lenders. The once lordly runholder, who would have excluded from his table, or at least from his visiting; circle, any one engaged in commerce, is now the tenant of a mortgage company which began by using him too well and ended by crushing him unmercifully.

It is also brought to a close by the rise of the agricultural stage.