THE EVOLUTION OF COLONIES. 293 



earthquakes! But the tenure in the early days is unimportant. 

 With a virgin soil yielding at first seventy and then regularly forty 

 bushels to the acre, and high prices ruling, the farmer can stand 

 any tenure. Seen at market or cattle show, his equine or bovine 

 features and firm footing on mother earth suggest a sense of solidity 

 in the commonwealth to which he belongs. He gives it its character. 

 The legislature consists of his representatives. Laws are passed in 

 his interest. He controls the executive. His sons fill the civil 

 service. Judges sometimes come from his ranks, and lawyers easily 

 fall back into them. He supports the churches and fills them. 

 Small towns spring up in place of the pastoral villages to supply 

 his wants. As the period of the Golden Fleece was the colonial 

 age of gold, when Jason, the wool king, made a fortune, received a 

 baronetcy, and, returning to the mother country, founded a county 

 family and intermarried with the British aristocracy, so the agricul- 

 tural stage is the colonial age of silver, in money as in morals. It 

 lasted in England till well into the century, in Germany till the 

 other day, in France till now. It is, in the main, the stage 

 of contemporary colonies. What brings it to an end? The soil 

 gets exhausted, prices fall, and a succession of wet seasons in New 

 Zealand or of dry seasons in Australia or South Africa sends the 

 farmer into the money market. Nearly every province of almost 

 every colony gets mortgaged up to the hilt. The foot of the land 

 agent is on the neck of the farmer, who becomes his tenant or 

 serf — adscri'ptus glebce as much as the Old English villeins who were 

 the ancestors of the farmer, or the Virginia villeins who repeated in 

 the seventeenth century the Old English status. But tenancy does 

 not always arise out of bankrupt proprietorship. A capitalist may 

 drain an extensive marsh (like that along the valley of the Shoal- 

 haven River in New South Wales) and divide the rich alluvial soil 

 into hundreds of profitable dairy farms. More inland marshes, like 

 the Piako Swamp in New Zealand, have been so completely drained 

 as to make the soil too dry to carry wheat, and so have swamped both 

 capitalists and banker. Where the squatter owner keeps the land in 

 his own hands, he may lease an unbroken-up tract for three or five 

 years to a farmer who plows and" fences it, takes off crops, pays a 

 light rent of from five to fifteen bushels per acre, and leaves it in 

 grass. On one tenure or another the whole colony gradually comes 

 into cultivation. 



The predominance of the agricultural interest is long threatened 

 and at length shaken by the rise of the industrial stage. It is partly 

 evolved from the pastoral and agricultural stages and partly inde- 

 pendent. Nor do these stages at once and necessarily give rise to col- 

 lective industry. In all young colonies where the population is 



