Livro The Founding of South Australia; As Recorded in the Journals of Mr. Robert Gouger, First Colonial Secretary

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of time ensue.

Free grants of land had been made in enormous quantities, and had been selected before the colonists sailed. One individual had been granted half a million of acres, and as he naturally selected his lot close by the port, other emigrants had to go beyond this vast and most eligible tract before they could settle.

Ultimately land was sold, but at the ridiculously low price of one shilling and sixpence per acre, and consequently, as everybody who went out was thus enabled to become a landed proprietor, no labourers were found to cultivate the soil.

The result, which far-seeing men had apprehended was soon realised. The scheme was an all but total failure. The renewal of interest in colonisation at the period of which we write was due, in great measure, to Mr.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who advanced the theory that free grants should be entirely abolished; that Crown lands should not be sold at a low price; that hired labour could never be obtained side by side with great cheapness of land; that the exchange of land for labour was the only method of realising a just proportion between land, labour, and capital; and that the universal sale of land, instead of land-grants, and the exclusive employment of the purchaser's money to promote education, should be the principle upon which colonisation in the future should be based.

Eobert Gouger, who at one time had been almost induced to cast in his lot with the Swan Eiver Settlers, saw at a glance, in the light ofthese new theories, the rotten basis on which that colony was founded, and without hesitation gave up all thought of settling there, and unreservedly adopted the principles of colonisation as laid down by Wakefield.

To a man of Gouger's energy, to see a thing as practicable was to set to work and prove...