Page:The Coming Colony Mennell 1892.djvu/140

 way. Government may cheapen passages, and the philanthropists may aid in the choice of suitable emigrants, whilst it will be for the Land Companies to allocate the arrivals and afford them facilities for starting in the best way on a career which is to put rents and purchase-moneys into the shareholders' pockets.

Western Australia, as Sir Charles Dilke has argued, is an excellent field for colonisation experiments, and the Land Companies are the people to start them. When they have tried their hands, it will be time enough for the English organisations to put in their oar and profit by their example and experience. It is not for an amateur to set out the details of a suitable scheme. But the outlines are obvious enough. From what I gathered personally, and from the evidence taken before the Royal Commission, the consensus of expert opinion appears to be that mixed farming is essential—i.e., that sheep-rearing must be combined with grain-growing, with perhaps a little viticulture, and certainly some fruit-growing thrown in. To make this sort of mixed farming profitable the weight of expert opinion is equally on the side of a man having an area of from 500 to 1,000 acres at his disposal, and though, of course, there is some difference of view on this point, the general idea is that he should have a minimum of £500 as working capital. What disillusionises the better class of emigrant, and what makes him feel sorely that he has gone from the frying-pan into the fire, is when, on his arrival from the old country, he is confronted with the fact in all its nakedness that the farmhold to which he has looked forward so hopefully is, after all, only a slice out of an interminable forest, and that it will be two whole seasons before he can get even a small portion of it into cropping order, and that in the meantime money must be found for house­ building, clearing, fencing, and the keep of himself and his wife and family. What this means may easily be computed, but may not be so easily met. It is here that the Companies must step in, and in addition to supplying the raw (very raw) material of the land on a time payment system equally liberal with that of the Government, must to a certain extent prepare the farms for would-be occupiers, instead of giving them slices