Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/99

 in "healthy neglect." So the live stock increased in spite of the forms of the "land board."

An impartial retrospect of the granting; system,, before it was systematised and encumbered with regulations, leads to the conclusion that with a just and intelligent governor, it was the best that could be devised for such a colony.

The attraction of a free passage, with free grants of land and the use of convict labour which were offered up to 1818, did secure a certain number of respectable colonists. The free grant of land made to emigrants, in proportion to their capital, and to prisoners who had served their term, during the governments of Macquarie and Brisbane, between 1788 and 1825, with the aid of convict labour, did colonise and cultivate the country. For instance, in 1821, the great road across the Blue Mountain to Bathurst was executed, and rendered practicable for wheeled vehicles. In 1822 the Hunter River District was a wilderness; in 1827, for a distance of 150 miles along the river, half a million acres had been surveyed, granted, or sold to settlers whose capital was estimated at from four to five hundred thousand pounds, and whose stock included 25,000 horned cattle, and 80,000 fine-woolled sheep. All the improvements, buildings, fences, and cultivation were effected by assigned servants, whom the government fed and clothed for the first eighteen months of their servitude. Nothing but convict labour could have done so much in public and private works in five years.

Considering the slight offences for which the majority of the prisoner population of New South Wales had been transported, between 1788 and 1825, there can be no doubt that had the free grants of land system been accompanied by measures for classifying, teaching, and Christianising the convicts, and for providing, from the destitute parts of the United Kingdom, such an emigration of women as would have equalised the sexes, the character of the colony would have been materially changed, and a population provided well calculated to amalgamate with and rise to the level of free emigrants, when the time came for abolishing transportation, and giving up the land which convicts had pioneered to the use of a free population.

But as it is difficult to obtain a succession of governors, able and honest enough to bear the responsibility of granting land when it comes to be of value, it is to be regretted that, when it was no longer considered necessary to bribe prisoners to honesty and industry by the prizes in the shape of a farm of wild land, we did not imitate the simple system by which, during half a century, the vast territories of the United States