Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/123

called. That land was purchased at Port Phillip with the object I have mentioned, I know to be a fact; and as to great part of the £400,000 worth of land bought there, I can speak with confidence. Men attempted to play the same game with regard to land which (if they be not belied) has been more than once tried by merchants at Sydney with respect to tea and sugar, namely, to purchase the whole supply in the market) and then to retail it out at immense profit to the consumer. At Melbourne at the time their conduct was considered oppressive, as taking an unfair advantage of their command of capital, and they were commonly called there land sharks. One Sydney house alone purchased £44,000 worth of land at Port Phillip in one year—they are now insolvent. Another very wealthy firm at Sydney were also purchasers to a very large amount, but what I do not exactly know. In my mind the real subject of complaint against the government is this, that by putting up comparatively small quantities of land at a time, and by holding the sales at distant intervals, they did, under the specious terms of limiting the supply to the demand, (I do not say knowingly, but in effect) play into the hands of the monopolists. Many of the newly-arrived settlers at that time were forced to buy land at any price. Several had wooden houses, and all of them had hundreds of useless things. Store rent and house rent were dreadfully high, and the expense of living in Melbourne ruinous. To persons so circumstanced land became, in a financial point of view, as much an article of prime necessity as air or water in a natural one; and it is this