Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/616

Financial considerations arrested the proposed official settlement. But private speculators stepped in. Mr. Thomas Peel, with others, offered to provide shipping to carry 10,000 emigrants to Swan River at the rate of £30 a-head. In return they asked for grants of land, of which they calculated the value at 1s. 6d. an acre. They were to receive 4,000,000 acres for £300,000. They offered 200 acres free of rent to each male emigrant. The scheme was not carried out, but it led to another in which Mr. T. Peel was the leader, and of which the Government approved.

Captain Stirling was to be Governor of the first free settlement in Australia. No convicts were to go thither. Immigrants were to receive, in the order of their arrival, grants of land proportioned to the capital they were prepared to invest. They were to satisfy the Governor as to the capital they possessed, and to receive 40 acres for each £3 of invested money; but they were not to receive the grant in fee simple until they had expended at the rate of 1s. 6d. an acre in improvements. There were conditions of reversion to the Crown in case of default of expenditure. To Mr. Peel were assigned a quarter of a million, with possible extension to a million, of acres on condition of taking out emigrants, at a graduated scale, by which for all persons over ten years of age Mr. Peel was to receive 200 acres. The Governor might acquire a hundred thousand acres. He landed on the 1st of June, 1829, to found the new settlement; and before the end of 1830, thirty vessels had arrived with more than a thousand claimants for acres. Captain Stirling did what he could to satisfy them; but what he did was of no avail. In proportion as a man had more land he was in more difficulty as to its use.

Every man's neighbour was in dim distance. Spread over wide tracts, and commanding no labour, the puzzled landholders had neither roads nor markets. They gazed in stupor at their unprofitable wastes. The old problem of labour assumed a new phase under new conditions in a new land. Land—the presumed wealth of the colony—could purchase no labour, and yet land was the commodity with which it had been hoped to buy everything. Con-