Page:The State and Position of Western Australia.djvu/58

 was entered into by the Government with some merchants, who engaged to prevent, by their importations, the prices from rising above a fixed standard: but the smallness and variableness of the demand operated to frustrate this measure likewise.

Experience has shown that the system of free grants, which was the first adopted in Western Australia, is decidedly injurious to the prosperity of a settlement, from the facility it affords to persons possessed of comparatively little capital, to acquire extensive tracts of land, the greater part of which, for want of means, they cannot use for agricultural or pastoral purposes. It also occasions the too wide dispersion of the settlers; thus necessarily increasing the expense of government, and, at the same time, producing serious inconvenience to the farmer.

To counteract these evils, several causes have been in operation. On the distribution of land to the first settlers on the Swan and the Canning, a remedy was provided by a judicious arrangement on the part of the Governor, restricting the river frontage of the grants to a seventh or an eighth of what it would have been, had they been given in squares; and as, for the convenience of water carriage, and from the superiority of the land, all erected their dwellings on the banks of the rivers, the settlers were thus brought as near each other, as if the grants had been reduced to the square of this narrow frontage on the rivers. Chiefly owing to this arrangement it happens, that on the Upper Swan, near where the river debouches from the gorge of the hills, there are thirteen grants, each from 2000 to 7000 acres in extent; the farthest removed of which is within a mile and a half of a central point—and on nine of them are the habitations of their respective proprietors. By another Government regulation, persons entitled to large grants are restricted to a limited quantity of land on the rivers in question, and are