2 9 z POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The colonial latifundia gets broken up for the same economic reasons 

 as that of the mother country. Whenever from the increase of popu- 

 lation wheat-growing becomes more profitable than grazing, land 

 rises in value, and vast sheep walks are subdivided into two-hundred- 

 acre farms, which are put under the plow. The transition may be 

 retarded in some countries and altogether arrested in others. Nasse 

 has shown that, in consequence of the moisture of the climate, there 

 was in the sixteenth century a continual tendency in England to 

 revert from agriculture to pasture. The light rainfall, high tempera- 

 tures, and unfertilized soil will forever keep nine tenths of Australia 

 under grass. Most of the mountainous north and the glacier-shaved 

 portions of the south of New Zealand must be perpetual cattle runs 

 and sheep walks. A century or perhaps centuries will pass before 

 much of the light soil of Tasmania, hardly enriched by the scanty 

 foliage of the eucalyptus, is sufficiently fertilized by grazing to grow 

 corn. Rich alluvial or volcanic lands are put under the plow, with- 

 out passing through the pastoral stage, as soon as markets are created 

 by the advent of immigrants. There is a cry for farm lands. Com- 

 panies that have bought large estates break them up into allotments. 

 When they or other large landholders still resist pressure, the radical 

 colonial legislature accelerates their deliberations by putting on the 

 thumbscrew of a statute which confiscates huge cantles of their land. 

 Or the colonial Government, if socialist-democratic, purchases exten- 

 sive properties, which it breaks up into farms and communistic vil- 

 lage settlements. Over wide tracts the agriculturist, great and small, 

 takes the place of the pastoralist. He holds his lands under a variety 

 of tenures. New South Wales, in its search for an ideal form, has 

 flowered into fifteen varieties. Other colonies are stumbling toward 

 it more or less blindly through a succession of annual statutes. 

 Where land is abundant the tenure will be easy. In North America 

 nominal quitrents were general ; the system was long since introduced 

 into South Africa, and it has lately been imported into New Zealand 

 in spite of all previous experience to the effect that such rents can 

 not be collected. Mr. Eggleston remarks that in the United States 

 the tendency was to " a simple and direct ownership of the soil by 

 the occupant." Since those days Henry George has come and (alas!) 

 gone. A craze for the nationalization of the land buzzes in the 

 bonnets of all who have no land. There is an equal reluctance on 

 the part of colonial legislatures to grant waste lands as freeholds 

 and on the part of purchasers to accept them on any other terms. 

 Hence the constant effort to devise a tenure which shall reserve the 

 rights of the colony and yet not oppress the tenant. One legislature 

 has blasphemed into the " eternal lease," which would seem to be 

 almost preferable to absolute ownership in a country subject to 



