Page:Narrativeavoyag01wilsgoog.djvu/256

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224
EXTENSIVE GRANTS.

to be the worst. "It is true (said he) an action may be brought against an overseer, for having given a false character; but, then, who would go home with all the necessary witnesses to England, to prove the fact?" He further good-humouredly observed, that "nothing else could be expected, than that overseers should endeavour to get their parishes cleared from such trash and scum."

It is a very injudicious plan to send people, accustomed to eat the bread of idleness, to an infant colony, unless it is understood, that coercive measures may be used to enforce a fair day's work, if the laziness of the individual required such stimulus.

All the land, on the immediate banks of the Swan, is allotted away. One individual, I was informed, has got 15,000 acres of excellent land, and is now residing at Freemantle, selling those articles, from which he claimed and received such an extensive grant; and it was the opinion of not a few, that the Governor had acted very improvidently, in giving such an extent of river frontage to one individual.

It would, perhaps, have been better, to have made a square mile the maximum of any grant on a river; this would have accommodated many emigrants, who could by degrees, and at their convenience, go into the interior, to search for the remainder.

Much disappointment has already been felt by many, who, from the favourable report they had heard in Eng-