Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/124

 class of men, driven to the wall between the land-jobber and the government, who excite my sympathy; and if the latter had had a monopoly of water, they might with as much mercy have sold it by auction by twenty butts at a time, under the specious pretence of limiting the supply to the demand, allowing the monopolist to purchase at the high price which his command of capital empowered him to offer, leaving it to him to retail it in gallons-full to the consumer at a ruinous advance.

I recollect the dismay with which the announcement of a land sale at the end of 1840 was received by some of the minor fry of speculators at Melbourne. This was put off by the governor, and the mischief was staved off for a time. But when Lord John Russell's measure was announced, making all surveyed land open to selection at £1 per acre, the bubble burst, and the ruin of the men who had speculated in land with borrowed capital was from that day certain, no matter what became of the purchase-money, and whether it were expended in immigration or otherwise; just in the same way that a merchant who had speculated to the same extent, and under similar circumstances, to obtain a monopoly of sugar, would be ruined by an arrival in the market of an unlimited supply. I do not say that all men who speculated in land did so with the object of creating a monopoly: many were, no doubt, deceived by the fictitious price which land attained through the arts of others. Nor do I by any means, in what I have said above, wish to insinuate that Sir George Gipps was aware of the oppressive tendency of this system.