THE GOVERN MEN T AS A PASTOEALIST 31 



pampered it. For the first thirty years of the existence 

 of the Colony, the Government gave Httle encourage- 

 ment to the individuals who were ambitious of continu- 

 ing the work the Government had begun. Both the 

 Secretary of State and the Governor of New South 

 Wales persistently refused to grant the large estates 

 without which the industry could not have been solidly 

 founded. Even after the Minister had authorised 

 extensive land-grants to enterprising individuals, the 

 local Government refused or delayed to give effect to 

 the instructions they had received. To judge from 

 the hesitations of Governor King, and the language 

 addressed to him by Governor Bligh, one would have 

 said the Captain John McArthur was a would-be 

 pubhc pilferer, instead of being the greatest benefactor 

 the Colony ever had. When he endeavoured to float a 

 joint-stock company for the growing of wool, he had 

 again to encounter coldness and denial, though he was 

 this time supported by the authority of Commissioner 

 Bigge, expressly sent out by the Home Government 

 to report on the state of the Colony. 



The two contending parties were controlled by two 

 incompatible ideals. The Government, Home and local, 

 desired to reform successive generations of Enghsh 

 convicts by creating out of them a community of 

 peasant-proprietors or peasant-tenants. The nascent 

 pastoralists aimed to build up a pastoral society of 

 freemen, with the breeding of stock for its chief end and 

 the employment of the convicts as its chief instrument. 

 The Governmental ideal was gradually rehnquished, 

 but it controlled the policy of the Government for more 

 than thirty years and affected it for a quarter of a 

 century after it had ceased to control it. The pastoral 

 history of New South Wales, as of all Australia, is, indeed, 

 closely interwoven with its pohtical history. At every 

 point the main actors in it come into collision with the 

 actors on the political stage. Nay, these are themselves 

 among the chief actors. They pass from the one arena 

 to the other ; they energize from the one sphere into 



