36 RESTRICTIONS ON THE ALIENATION OF LANDS. 



said that it has had a tendency to enforce thrift without causing any 

 general inconvenience. 



It was inevitable, considering that the present Act was in the 

 nature of an experiment, that some defects would come to light in 

 its working. That so very few defects have been discovered appears 

 to me to demonstrate the wisdom and foresight of those who were 

 responsible for framing the measure. The objects of the Bill which 

 I will presently ask leave to introduce are to effect one alteration 

 which may perhaps be regarded as radical, and to remove certain 

 defects in detail which have made themselves apparent. 



One very striking feature of the Act is that, while the non- 

 agricultural classes are excluded generally from the power of acqui- 

 ring land belonging to the agricultural class, this exclusion was 

 relaxed in the case of a small portion of the former. The relaxation 

 was undoubtedly due to the apprehension I have already alluded to. 

 The genesi of the statutory agriculturists may be said to have been 

 the result of the fear that undue economic inconvenience might result 

 from the exclusion uno ictu of the entire money-lending class. 



Except to the initiated the term agriculturist would certainly 

 convey an erroneous impression of what it was intended to cover. 

 The word had come to be used in connection with the revenue statis- 

 tics of the Province to denote a person whose hereditary occupation 

 was not agriculture, but who had acquired property in agricultural 

 laud. We had come to make a distinction for statistical purposes 

 between those who had recently become land-owners and those who 

 had been land-owners for some time. The latter were known as 

 old agriculturists , and it was this class in whose favour it was decided 

 to relax the exclusion from the power of acquisition. It was neces- 

 sary to draw some artificial line of distinction between the two classes 

 of non-agricultural land-owners which we were creating, i.e., those 

 on whom it was considered desirable to confer the power of acquisi- 

 tion because of the fact of their having held land for a long time, 

 and those who had acquired land more recently and were therefore 

 held not to be entitled to the privilege. This was effected by defining 

 in the Act an agriculturist to mean any person who in his own name 

 or in that of his ancestor in the male line was recorded as an owner 

 or as an occupancy tenant at the first Regular Settlement of h*'s ' 

 district. But the framers of the Act did not go so far as to extend 



