290 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



(and there is wild grass almost everywhere) sheep can graze, and 

 where there are succulent twigs cattle will fatten on them. The South 

 American estancias and the ranches of Colorado, the cattle runs of 

 Queensland and northern New Zealand, the sheep runs of Victoria 

 and New South Wales repeat and perpetuate this stage. The genesis 

 of it may even now be daily observed. A Manchester accountant 

 who has never before been astride a horse will in twelve months 

 learn the mysteries of cattle and sheep farming, then purchase a 

 hundred acres or two from the colonial Government, gradually clear 

 it of timber, build of his own trees, with no skilled assistance, a 

 weatherboard cottage, and take home a swiftly wooed wife to lead 

 with him a rather desolate existence in " the bush." Or (on a larger 

 scale) a squatter,* who is commonly a gentleman by birth and educa- 

 tion, comes out from England with inherited wealth, buys or leases 

 from the Government a large inland tract of grazing land, takes with 

 him flocks and herds, shepherds and stockmen, builds a bark or wooden 

 manor house, and settles down to the life of Abram on the plains of 

 Mamre. In earlier days, when the colony was in its infancy, he 

 would not have had to purchase or lease his " run." One country 

 after another saw the golden age of a would-be landed aristocracy. 

 As Norman "William parceled out all England among his nobles and 

 knights, rulers of conquered countries were then mighty free with 

 what did not belong to them. Possessing the authority of a sover- 

 eign, Columbus made lavish grants of land, and thus pacified his 

 rebels. Charles II presented Carolina to eight proprietors. Bar- 

 onies of twelve thousand acres in South Carolina, manors of 

 twenty thousand acres in Maryland, were dwarfed by territorial 

 principalities of more than a million acres in New York. The abso- 

 lute governors of early Australia gave away wide tracts. When land 

 was not given it was taken, on Kob Koy's principle. During the in- 

 terregnum that followed the recall of the first Governor of New South 

 Wales, military robbers seized fifteen thousand acres, and under sub- 

 sequent administrations they continued their depredations. Land 

 was held on various tenures. The first American forms were varieties 

 of belated feudalism ; of a hundred often strange and ridiculous em- 

 blems of suzerainty perhaps a dozen repeated Old World customs, f 

 Sir H. S. Maine has proved that nearly all the feudal exactions 

 that maddened a whole people to mutiny in 1789 were then in force 

 in England. How shadowy they must have grown is shown by the 



* In its primary American sense the word squatter denotes the backwoodsman described 

 in the foregoing paragraph. In its secondary Australian sense it means the large land- 

 holder now described. 



f See an instructive article by Mr. Edward Eggleston, Social Conditions in the Colonies. 

 Century Magazine, 1884, pp. 849, 850. 



