THE KNELL OF THE SQUATTER 337 



the seceding members no longer necessarily depart to a 

 distance, or break ofif connection with the relatives they 

 have left behind them, or on the ancestral estate, but 

 settle in the neighbourhood. In later days, indeed, as 

 we are now witnessing in Australia, squatters are break- 

 ing up their great pastoral estates and cutting them 

 up into small pastoral farms, where their sons, it may 

 be, are placed as the tenant-farmers of their fathers on 

 their fathers' estates. 



In Australia one great agency played a potent part 

 in engineering the transition from pasture to agriculture. 

 The statesman, Wentworth, looking on the spectacle of 

 the gold-discoveries, with all his visionary eye could see 

 nought in the future but " ruin and disaster " as the 

 after-births of such a portent. He might well dread its 

 advent. The whole class of squatters who saw their 

 runs deserted, their flocks and herds denuded of shep- 

 herds and stockmen, and the cost of all labour raised 

 to a prohibitive point, might loathe the discoveries and 

 condemn the encouragement given to them by the State. 

 They might as well have condemned the chemistry of 

 the earth which, by natural processes, engendered the 

 silver and gold that excited the cupidity of miUions. 

 " Before the gold " formed the great dividing line in 

 Australian history, the time-shed whence wealth was 

 to flow down on both sides, equally to the colonies that 

 possessed gold and to those that had none. The farther- 

 seeing Dr. Lang looked on it all with clearer eyes than 

 the great squatter, and saw in its immediate conse- 

 quences the downfall of the squatterocracy that had 

 ruled Australia for so many years. It virtually con- 

 verted a pastoral into a pastoral-agricultural country. 

 The men who immigrated to dig gold remained to farm, 

 as in Victoria and New Zealand, or went back to the 

 colonies they came from and there farmed, as in South 

 Australia. Or the gold won sent their colonies ahead ; 

 public works were undertaken on a large scale ; and the 

 road-makers employed on them at 15 shillings per diem 

 took up farms, as in Otago of Southland in New Zealand. 



22 



