In North America nominal quitrents were general; the system was long since introduced into South Africa, and it has lately been imported into New Zealand in spite of all previous experience to the effect that such rents can not be collected. Mr. Eggleston remarks that in the United States the tendency was to "a simple and direct ownership of the soil by the occupant." Since those days Henry George has come and (alas!) gone. A craze for the nationalization of the land buzzes in the bonnets of all who have no land. There is an equal reluctance on the part of colonial legislatures to grant waste lands as freeholds and on the part of purchasers to accept them on any other terms. Hence the constant effort to devise a tenure which shall reserve the rights of the colony and yet not oppress the tenant. One legislature has blasphemed into the "eternal lease," which would seem to be almost preferable to absolute ownership in a country subject to earthquakes! But the tenure in the early days is unimportant. With a virgin soil yielding at first seventy and then regularly forty bushels to the acre, and high prices ruling, the farmer can stand any tenure. Seen at market or cattle show, his equine or bovine features and firm footing on mother earth suggest a sense of solidity in the commonwealth to which he belongs. He gives it its character. The legislature consists of his representatives. Laws are passed in his interest. He controls the executive. His sons fill the civil service. Judges sometimes come from his ranks, and lawyers easily fall back into them. He supports the churches and fills them. Small towns spring up in place of the pastoral villages to supply his wants. As the period of the Golden Fleece was the colonial age of gold, when Jason, the wool king, made a fortune, received a baronetcy, and, returning to the mother country, founded a county family and intermarried with the British aristocracy, so the agricultural stage is the colonial age of silver, in money as in morals. It lasted in England till well into the century, in Germany till the other day, in France till now. It is, in the main, the stage of contemporary colonies. What brings _it_ to an end? The soil gets exhausted, prices fall, and a succession of wet seasons in New Zealand or of dry seasons in Australia or South Africa sends the farmer into the money market. Nearly every province of almost every colony gets mortgaged up to the hilt. The foot of the land agent is on the neck of the farmer, who becomes his tenant or serf--_adscriptus glebæ_ as much as the Old English villeins who were the ancestors of the farmer, or the Virginia villeins who repeated in the seventeenth century the Old English status. But tenancy does not always arise out of bankrupt proprietorship. A capitalist may drain an extensive marsh (like that along the valley of the Shoalhaven River in New South Wales) and divide the rich alluvial soil into hundreds of profitable dairy farms.