Page:Transportation and colonization.djvu/158

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144
TRANSPORTATION

gest that the minimum price of all Crown land in the colony should henceforth be raised to seven shillings and sixpence, and, in particular districts, to ten shillings per acre. A large proportion of the land recently purchased by resident proprietors in New South Wales, in extension of their respective estates, would have been purchased at these rates as readily as at five shillings; for much of the land hitherto sold at the government minimum price has been purchased on speculation, to be afterwards resold at a greatly advanced price. Good land, whether for agriculture or for grazing purposes, especially in such vicinities as Twofold Bay and Port Philip, is well worth ten shillings an acre, and the colonial proprietors of sheep and cattle are well able to afford that price. Nay, Mr. Commissioner Bigge, in his Report to the House of Commons on the agriculture of the colony in the year 1821, recommended that good land in New South Wales should then be sold at not less than ten shillings per acre; and if the colonial settler could have afforded such a price at that period, much more will he be able to afford it now. Besides, it would be positively unjust for the British government to be selling waste land at Port Philip at a minimum price of five shillings per acre, when the minimum within the limits of the South Australian colony, almost in its imme-