of granite which was at the time largely used as ballast for tea ships. He shrank from reviving the opium monopoly, but stimulated the revenue from the opium retail licences which had been substituted (since August 1, 1847) for the farming system. He left the police tax assessment untouched at the low rate of 5 per cent. but reduced the expensive European contingent of the Police Force to the lowest possible minimum. Finally he restricted public works (with the exception of the erection of a new Government House) to the bare maintenance of existing roads and buildings. By these and other minor forms of retrenchment, he produced at the close of the year 1849 an immediate reduction of £23,672 on the expenditure of the preceding year. He thenceforth maintained this low rate of expenditure (£38,986 in 1849) which averaged £34,398 per annum during the next three years and rose in 1853 to no more than £36,418. He was unable, indeed, to bring about any great improvement of the local revenue, which, though it rose temporarily, by the rigorous exaction of arrears of land rent in 1849, to £35,580, fell again to £28,520 in 1850, and produced during the next three years (1851 to 1853) an annual average of £23,254. However, at the close of his administration he was justified in saying (April 7, 1854) that he had brought the Parliamentary Grant from £25,000 in 1849 down to £8,500 (correctly £9,200) in 1858, and that he had reduced the expenditure of the Colony, within six years, from £62,658 to £36,418.
During h period of such financial difficulties, the vexed question of land tenure could not possibly be solved in the way in which the mercantile community desired it to be settled. The merchants were not satisfied with perpetuity of leases. They desired an entire revision of the terms on which they had originally bought their land. Instead of fixing an annual rental and putting up to auction only the rate of bonus to be paid once for all, Elliot had (in the absence of a reliable standard of land values) initiated the system of putting up to auction the rate of the crown rent to be paid from year to year. In the early times of keen competition, of booms and speculations, land
