cultural land, he will have to pay but £3 per annum as rent in advance, and will have to pay that only for five years! It is very alluring to the would-be freeholder. Let him not, however, suppose that because the land which he will buy is described as "agricultural," that he will find hedges and ditches, furrows and headlands, and the like. The land will be land just as nature has produced it, but it will be land which on survey shall be declared to be fit for agricultural purposes. In There is perhaps no feeling stronger in the mind of man than the desire to own a morsel of land. England efforts which have been made to enable the working man to become the owner even of the house in which he lives have hardly as yet met with much success. In the first place the price of land is too high, and in the second place the earnings of the working man are too low. In many cases in which the thing has been tried the creation of parliamentary voters has been the real object, and the possession of the freehold in the hands of the inhabitant has been no more than nominal. In England if a working man become a freeholder, he can hardly be free on his freehold. He cannot possess himself of the absolute property unencumbered by debt. If he feel the passion strong he must indulge it on some new-found soil, where the old forest still stands, where a man's work is as yet worth more than many acres. I do not know that he can do it anywhere on much better terms than in Queensland;-but he must understand that the land is cheap because the struggle required to make it useful is severe. The labourer who can live and save his money, who can refrain from knocking down his cheque, may no doubt in Queensland become the real lord of all around him and dwell on his own land in actual independence. As far as I have seen the lives of such men, they never want for food, are never without abundance of food. Meat and tea and bread they always have in their houses. The houses themselves are often rough,sheds at first made of bark till the free-selecter can with his own hands put up some stronger and more endurable edifice; but they are never so squalid as are many of our cottages at home. For a labouring man, such as I have described, life in Queensland is infinitely better than life at home. It is sometimes very rough, and must sometimes be very solitary. And Queensland is very hot. But there is plenty to eat and drink;-work is well remunerated ;-and the working man, if he can refrain from drink, may hold his own in Queensland, and may enjoy as much independence as is given to any man in this world. Before, however, I have quite done with this matter, I must refer the would-be emigrant to the statements made in the second chapter of this volume respecting emigration to Queensland generally. It is there shown that re-emigration from Queensland has been so common, that in the year 1869 Queensland lost not only all those who had come to her in that year from the British Isles, but 637 souls over and beyond that number. The natural argument to be deduced from this would be that men going to Queensland find that they do not like the colony. But in truth the late Queensland Emigration Acts caused this exodus by their own excessive liberality. These acts bid so high for emigrants, that men purposing to settle in New South Wales or New Zealand found that they could best make their way to these colonies by accepting the Queensland bounty. |