Page:History of Australia, Rusden 1897.djvu/617

tractors, surveyors, and others were to receive payment in the same barren element of exchange. Many immigrants had property of some kind, but few carried with them the means of building houses, or commanding labour. Land in proportion to attracted capital was the loadstone; but the attracted capital in vain sought congenial employment. There was no hope of profit from it. Some settlers fled from a colony whose hardships were intolerable. The few sheep and cattle seemed likely to fall a prey to the teeth of the few colonists, and starvation would ensue. Some who fled retained their grants nominally.

Mr. Peel, after taking £50,000 and 300 servants to the colony, was left without a servant, while his property was wasted; and when it had been wasted, the servants who had abandoned him returned, starving, to demand employment and food. He, the victim of an experiment to which he had so largely contributed, was as helpless as the men who had abandoned him. The inexorable laws of co-relation between capital and labour had never been more notably violated, or more notably avenged themselves. Governor Stirling was driven to seek assistance from England in an emergency which neither he nor his employers comprehended.

The root of the failure was to be explained by a man then rising into notoriety—Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Commencing his career by being convicted of abduction in 1826 (unattended, however, by the coarser constraints sometimes resorted to), this remarkable man became the life of a Colonization Society, whose labours were to influence, though not control, the Colonial Office, the Parliament, and colonists. They furnished ideas; and in a world of red tape and routine, to furnish an idea is to create. Wakefield's first trumpet-sound in the arena of colonization was an anonymous letter,^[1] published in London in 1829. Grasping the subject with a master hand, embellishing his brochure with touches of power and the raciness of reality, he arrested attention and partly com-