Page:Transportation and colonization.djvu/162

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148
TRANSPORTATION

ments during the last few years being uniformly much higher. In the future towns of Twofold Bay and Port Philip, £50 or £100 per acre would, I am confident, be a very moderate amount to be established as a minimum price; as even at Bathurst, a rising town beyond the Blue Mountains in the interior, £50 an acre has been obtained for town allotments. The present minimum price in Parramatta, the second town in the colony, is £20, but the allotment obtained from government for the Scots church in that town during the year 1835 has been since valued at £1000, although not more than half an acre; and in the town of Maitland at Hunter's River, where £7 an acre is the minimum price, a half-acre allotment has brought £56.

At all events, it may be calculated that the revenue arising from the sale of land in New South Wales will very shortly amount to £200,000 per annum; and if that revenue is exclusively appropriated to the introduction of useful emigrants of the working classes into the colony, it will enable the free colonists to import a sufficient number of virtuous and industrious labourers, artisans, and other operatives of all descriptions, not only to supply the existing and rapidly increasing demand for labour in the colony, but also to form a reputable free emigrant peasantry, to cultivate the