annually, over and above the revenue, out of which they intended that all the ordinary expenditure should be defrayed. It is now calculated that after spending the whole local revenue, and providing otherwise for the charge of surveys, which has hitherto been defrayed by drafts upon the commissioners, and without making any allowance for public works, there will still remain to be provided for an annual deficit of about £40,000."
But the committee, as experience has since proved, were more correct in their statement of facts than fortunate and sagacious in proposing a remedy. Having unsuspectingly received all Mr. Gibbon Wakefield's assumptions and assertions as incontrovertible economical truths, they proceeded to recommend by resolutions, amongst other things, that all land be sold by auction at a minimum upset price, except special surveys of 20,000 acres; that "the minimum price of land in South Australia may safely be raised above the present amount of 1 an acre; and that in fixing such amount it is desirable to keep in view the principle of maintaining such an amount as may tend to remedy the evils arising out of a too great facility of obtaining landed property, and a consequently disproportionate supply of labour and exorbitant rate of wages."
At that time the committee were firmly convinced that they could regulate the rate of wages by the price of land; and Lord Howick, since Colonial Secretary as Earl Grey, then a pupil of Mr. Wakefield, moved as an amendment to the above-quoted resolution, "That one minimum price for land in all the Australian colonies ought to be established, and that this price ought not to be lower than 2 per acre, and that it ought to be progressively increased until it is found that the great scarcity of labour now complained of in these colonies no longer exists."
The fallacy of these assumptions has now been rendered as patent as another favourite assumption of the same period—that the price of corn in England regulated the rate of wages.
Ten years' experience have proved that the highest rate of wages may exist in the face of a price of land so high as to exclude all but a very small number of purchasers; and in that ten years the home government, in the face of a ruinous rate of wages, have been unable, although willing, to raise the price of land in Australia. The sale of land has ceased, except in the immediate neighbourhood of towns, in choice situations, and where mines were supposed to exist.
But in 1841 colonial opinions were treated with contempt. As in 1847 grave commercial men like Mr. Morrison, deceived by imaginary
