Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/15

Rh "All very well for you to say, governor. Why should a poor beggar lose the one comfort he's got?"

"Right, my man," was the reply, "in this country, you should command luxuries as well as necessaries. But you will not find them in town. Here you have swarmed to manufacture for a population that does not exist. Go on to the lands and become producers, masters of your own destiny. With a prosperous people settled on the deserted plains and half-ringed forests, your workshops might furnish occupation; your warehouses cease to be clogged with unsalable goods, while folk are shivering. Your railways, extended by compliant politicians into every hungry corner of the land, might groan with freight, and the cry be for more labourers to harvest the golden store."

"All very well, old man, but how are we to get on the land?" asked one. "We haven't the price of an axe atween us."

"You want money, you rightly think. What, however, is capital, but pound placed beside pound, one day's labour upon another? Can't you put that together? Instead of this senseless parading about overgrown cities, might you not ascertain by practical experiment, whether a mode of settlement that has in other countries successfully identified millions with the soil might not be adopted? The occupation of our lands has been so far of a temporary nature. The squatter is the sojourner merely, that his name implies. God intended other use to be made of our richest lands than to be pastures for countless sheep. The selector, after destroying valuable timber, building a hut in an inaccessible corner of a ring-barked allotment, scratching a hundred acres of wheat into the sour soil and sitting down the rest of the year to see it grow,—the selector, I say, is not a permanent settler.