THE KNELL OF THE SQUATTER 339 



them facilitating the process. As a result, the lease- 

 holders or runholders retired to the distant North, driven 

 ever further away by the advance of the freeholders. 

 By 1891 the pastoral estates in Southern Queensland 

 were chiefly freehold. In Northern Queensland and the 

 watersheds of the Gulf of Carpentaria they were chiefly 

 leasehold.* 



The passage from pasture to agriculture is a necessary 

 transition. Whenever it becomes more lucrative to grow 

 grain than to grow grass, the transition will necessarily 

 be made. Writers of the old individuahst school will 

 ask : why not wait ? To all appearance these eager 

 and pushing communities cannot afford to wait. Their 

 blood is on fire with the passion for wealth. All around 

 them are peoples striving to pass one another in the 

 mad race. The guerdon is not opulence alone. It is 

 the acquisition of all the comforts and luxuries, all the 

 potencies or capacities, that modern civilisation can 

 supply or satisfy. The smallest and youngest of these 

 colonies want railways and steamers, telegraphs and 

 telephones, schools cind churches, concert-rooms and 

 theatres, and these they cannot have unless they have 

 a growing population, which will not come without the 

 existence of industries and lands to occupy. On the 

 other hand, the great landowners are reluctant to break 

 up their princely domains. Their pride, their self- 

 consequence, their social importance, and their ambition 

 to rank with the magnates of Old England forbid them 

 to part with the broad acres that are the bases of their 

 state. " I pay property-tax to the tune of £10,000 a 

 year," complained one of the very lordly squatters of 

 New Zealand, in the days when the property-tax had 

 not yet been supplanted by the land-tax. " Happy 

 man ! " said a retired army-oflBcer. Good and upright 

 man though he was, our squatter yet did not feel quite 

 " happy." The previous year the Government of the 

 Colony had endeavoured to take from him by Act of 

 Parliament a huge cantle of his far-stretching estates, 

 ♦ Satge, Journal, etc., pp. 357-8. 



