Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/102

 CHAPTER IX.

ORIGIN OF THE WAKEFIELD SYSTEM.

HE apparently digressive sketch of the colonisation of Western Australia and its lamentable results is rendered necessary by the fact, that on the failure of Western Australia a new theory of colonisation was floated into public notice and incorporated in our colonial legislation and administration.

It was in 1829 that a sensation was produced in the literary and political world of London by the appearance of a little book entitled "A Letter from Sydney," the principal town of Australasia (edited by Robert Gouger), which was soon known to be the production of Mr. Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Out of this book grew the "High-Priced Land System of the Three Colonies"—the monopoly of wild lands at a nominal rent, which the squatters now enjoy—the colonisation of South Australia and New Zealand—some good, and a world of misery, ruin, social and political estrangement, of which we have not yet seen the end.

This "Letter from Sydney," by far the most brilliant of the many works on colonisation by the same author, is now out of print. It contains so clear a statement of the origin, merits, and objects of a theory which was at one time accepted, supported, and acted on by almost every statesman, political economist, and journalist of eminence, that the following abstract of its contents will not be out of place.

The writer represents himself to be an English gentleman of large fortune and refined tastes, who has emigrated under the idea that an estate of twenty thousand acres in Australia would procure the same comforts, income, and consideration that an estate of a thousand acres would in England. He says—"I have got 20,000 acres for a mere trifle, and I imagined that a domain of that extent would be very valuable. In this I was wholly mistaken. As my estate cost next to nothing, so it is worth next to nothing. The trees on my property, if growing in any part of England, would be worth at least £150,000. The best thing that could happen to me would be the annihilation of all this natural produce; but the cost of destroying it would be at least £15,000." He then goes on to enumerate mines of iron and coal which would make him "a peer in England," but which are