Part 26 (1/2)
Escaping suddenly from these low a.s.sociations, the word came to be applied to graziers who drove their flocks into the unsettled interior, and thence to those of them who received leases from the crown of pastoral lands.
The squatter is the nabob of Melbourne and Sydney, the inexhaustible mine of wealth. He patronizes b.a.l.l.s, promenade concerts, flower-shows; he is the mainstay of the great clubs, the joy of the shopkeepers, the good angel of the hotels; without him the opera could not be kept up, and the jockey-clubs would die a natural death.
Neither squatters nor townsfolk will admit that this view of the former's position is exactly correct. The Victorian squatters tell you that they have been ruined by confiscation, but that their neighbors in New South Wales, who have leases, are more prosperous; in New South Wales they tell you of the destruction of the squatters by ”free selection,” of which there is none in Queensland, ”the squatter's paradise;” but in Queensland the squatters protest that they have never made wages for their personal work, far less interest upon their capital. ”Not one of us in ten is solvent,” they say.
As sweeping a.s.sertions are made by the townsfolk upon the other side.
The squatters, they sometimes say, may well set up to be a great landed aristocracy, for they have every fault of a dominant caste except its generous vices. They are accused of piling up vast h.o.a.rds of wealth while living a most penurious life, and contributing less than would so many mechanics to the revenue of the country, in order that they may return in later life to England, there to spend what they have wrung from the soil of Victoria or New South Wales.
The occupation of the whole of the crown lands by squatters has prevented the making of railways to be paid for in land on the American system; but the chief of all the evils connected with squatting is the tendency to the acc.u.mulation in a few hands of all the land and all the pastoral wealth of the country, an extreme danger in the face of democratic inst.i.tutions, such as those of Victoria and New South Wales.
Remembering that manufactures are few, the swelling of the cities shows how the people have been kept from the land; considerably more than half of the population of Victoria lives within the corporate towns.
A few years back, a thousand men held between them, on nominal rents, forty million acres out of the forty-three and a half million--mountain and swamp excluded--of which Victoria consists. It is true that the amount so held has now decreased to thirty million, but on the other hand the squatters have bought vast tracts which were formerly within their ”runs,” with the capital acquired in squatting, and, knowing the country better than others could possibly know it, have naturally selected all the most valuable land.
The colonial democracy in 1860 and the succeeding years rose to a sense of its danger from the land monopoly, and began to search about for means to put it down, and to destroy at the same time the system of holding from the crown, for it is singular that while in England there seems to be springing up a popular movement in favor of the nationalization of the land, in the most democratic of the Australian colonies the tendency is from crown land tenure to individual freehold owners.h.i.+p of the soil rather than the other way. Yet here in Victoria there was a free field to start upon, for the land already belonged to the State--the first of the principles included under the phrase, nationalized land. In America, again, we see that, with the similar advantage of State possession of territories which are still fourteen times the size of the French Empire, there is little or no tendency toward agitation for the continuance of State owners.h.i.+p. In short, freehold owners.h.i.+p, the Saxon inst.i.tution, seems dear to the Anglo-Saxon race. The national land plan would commend itself rather to the Celtic races: to the Highlander, who remembers clan-s.h.i.+p, to the Irishman, who regrets the Sept.
Since the Radicals have been in power, both here and in New South Wales, they have carried act after act to encourage agricultural settlers on freehold tenure, at the expense of the pastoral squatters. The ”free selection” plan, now in operation in New South Wales, allows the agricultural settler to buy, but at a fixed price, the freehold of a patch of land, provided it be over forty acres and less than 320, anywhere he pleases--even in the middle of a squatter's ”run,” if he enters at once, and commences to cultivate; and the Land Act of 1862 provides that the squatting license system shall entirely end with the year 1869. Forgetting that in every lease the government reserved the power of terminating the agreement for the purpose of the sale of land, the squatters complain that free selection is but confiscation, and that they are at the mercy of a pack of cattle-stealers and horse-thieves, who roam through the country haunting their ”runs” like ”ghosts,” taking up the best land on their ”runs,” ”picking the eyes out of the land,”
turning to graze anywhere, on the richest gra.s.s, the sheep and cattle they have stolen on their way. The best of them, they say, are but ”c.o.c.katoo farmers,” living from hand to mouth on what they manage to grub and grow. On the other hand, the ”free selection” principle ”up country” is tempered by the power of the wealthy squatter to impound the cattle of the poor little freeholder whenever he pleases to say that they stray on to his ”run;” indeed, ”Pound them off, or if you can't, buy them off,” has become a much used phrase. The squatter, too, is protected in Victoria by such provisions as that ”improvements” by him, if over 40 on forty acres, cover an acre of land for each 1. The squatters are themselves buying largely of land, and thus profiting by the free selection. To a stranger it seems as though the interests of the squatter have been at least sufficiently cared for, remembering the vital necessity for immediate action. In 1865, Victoria, small as she is, had not sold a tenth of her land.
In her free selectors, Victoria will gain a cla.s.s of citizens whose political views will contrast sharply with the strong anti-popular sentiments of the squatters, and who, instead of spending their lives as absentees, will stay, they and their children, upon the land, and spend all they make within the colony, while their sons add to its laboring arms.
Since land has been, even to a limited extent, thrown open, Victoria has suddenly ceased to be a wheat-importing, and become a wheat-exporting country, and flouris.h.i.+ng agricultural communities, such as those of Ceres, Clunes, Kyneton, are springing up on every side, growing wheat instead of wool, while the wide extension which has in Victoria been given to the principle of local self-government in the shape of s.h.i.+re-councils, road-boards, and village-munic.i.p.alities allows of the junction in a happy country of the whole of the advantages of small and great farming, under the unequaled system of small holdings, and co-operation for improvements among the holders.
CHAPTER V.
COLONIAL DEMOCRACY.
Payment of members by the State was the great question under debate in the Lower House during much of the time I spent in Melbourne, and, in spite of all the efforts of the Victorian democracy, the bill was lost.
The objection taken at home, that payment degrades the House in the eyes of the people, could never arise in a new country, where a practical nation looks at the salaries as payment for work done, and obstinately refuses to believe in the work being done without payment in some shape or other. In these colonies, the reasons in favor of payment are far stronger than they are in Canada or America, for while their country or town share equally the difficulties of finding representatives who will consent to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to Ottawa or Was.h.i.+ngton, in the Australias Parliament sits in towns which contain from one-sixth to one-fourth of the whole population, and under a non-payment system power is thrown entirely into the hands of Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Hobarton. Not only do these cities return none but their own citizens, but the country districts, often unable to find within their limits men who have the time and money to make them able to attend throughout the sessions at the capital, elect the city traders to represent them.
Payment of members was met by a proposition on the part of the leader of the squatter party in the Upper House to carry it through that a.s.sembly if the Lower House would introduce the principle of personal representation; but it was objected that under such a system the Catholics, who form a fifth of the population, might, if they chose, return a fifth of the members. That they ought to be able to do so never seemed to strike friend or foe. The Catholics, who had a long turn of power under the O'Shaughnessey government, were finally driven out for appointing none but Irishmen to the police. ”I always said this ministry would go out on the back of a policeman,” was the comment of the Opposition wit. The present ministry, which is Scotch in tone, was hoisted into office by a great coalition against the Irish Catholics, of whom there are only a handful in the House.
The subject of national education, which was before the colony during my visit, also brought the Catholics prominently forward, for an episcopal pastoral was read in all their churches threatening to visit ecclesiastical censure upon Catholic teachers in the common schools, and upon the parents of the children who attend them. ”G.o.dless education” is as little popular here as it used to be at home, and the Anglican and Catholic clergymen insist that it is proposed to make their people pay heavily for an education in which it would be contrary to their conscience to share; but the laymen seem less distressed than their pastors. It has been said that the reason why the Catholic bishop declined to be examined upon the Education Commission was that he was afraid of this question: ”Are you aware that half the Catholic children in the country are attending schools which you condemn?”
The most singular, perhaps, of the spectacles presented by colonial politics during my visit was that of the Victorian Upper House going deliberately into committee to consider its own const.i.tution, with the view of introducing a bill for its own reform, or to meditate, its enemies said, upon self-destruction. Whether the blow comes from within or without, there is every probability that the Upper House will shortly disappear, and the advice of Milton and Franklin be followed in having but a single chamber. It is not unlikely that this step will be followed by the demand of the Victorians to be allowed to choose their own governor, subject to his approval by the queen, with a view to making it impossible that needy men should be sent out to suck the colony, as they sometimes have been in the past. The Australians look upon the liberal expenditure of a governor as their own liberality, but upon meanness on his part as a robbery from themselves.
The Victorian have a singular advantage over the American democrats as being unhampered by a const.i.tution of antiquity and renown.
Const.i.tution-tinkering is here continual; the new society is continually reshaping its political inst.i.tutions to keep pace with the latest developments of the national mind; in America, the party of liberty, at this moment engaged in remoulding the worn-out const.i.tution in favor of freedom, dares not even yet proclaim that the national good is its aim, but keeps to the old watchwords, and professes to be treading in the footsteps of George Was.h.i.+ngton.
The tone of Victorian democracy is not American. There is the defiant way of taking care of themselves and ignoring their neighbors, characteristic of the founders of English plantations in all parts of the world; the spirit which prompted the pa.s.sing, in 1852, of the act prohibiting the admission to the colony of convicts for three years after they had received their pardons; but the English race here is not Latinized as it is in America. If it were, Australian democracy would not be so ”shocking” to the squatters. Democracy, like Mormonism, would be nothing if found among Frenchmen or people with black faces, but it is at first sight very terrible, when it smiles on you from between a pair of rosy Yorks.h.i.+re cheeks.
The political are not greater than the social differences between Australia and America. Australian society resembles English middle-cla.s.s society; the people have, in matters of literature and religion, tastes and feelings similar to those which pervade such communities as those of Birmingham or Manchester. On the other hand, the vices of America are those of aristocracies; her virtues, those of a landed republic. Shop and factory are still in the second rank; wheat and corn still the prevailing powers. In all the Australian colonies land is coming to the front for the second time under a system of small holdings, except in Queensland, where it has never ceased to rule, and that under an oligarchic form of society and government; but it is doubtful whether, looking to the size of Melbourne, the landed democracy will ever outvote the townfolk in Victoria.
That men of ability and character are proscribed has been one of the charges brought against colonial democracy. For my part, I found gathered in Melbourne, at the University, at the Observatory, at the Botanical Garden, and at the government offices, men of the highest scientific attainments, drawn from all parts of the world, and tempted to Australia by large salaries voted by the democracy. The statesmen of all the colonies are well worthy of the posts they hold. Mr. Macalister, in Queensland, and Mr. Martin, at Sydney, are excellent debaters. Mr.
Parkes, whose biography would be the typical history of a successful colonist, and who has fought his way up from the position of a Birmingham artisan free-emigrant to that of Colonial Secretary of New South Wales, is an extremely able writer and deep thinker. The business powers of the present Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales are remarkable; and Mr. Higinbotham, the Attorney-General of Victoria, possesses a fund of experience and a power of foresight which it would be hard to equal at home. Many of the ministers in all the colonies are men who have worked themselves up from the ranks, and it is amusing to notice the affected horror with which their antecedents have been recalled by those who have brought out a pedigree from the old country.