People are always travelling in Victoria, seldom staying at home for even a single day’s holiday, while they think no more of going to Sydney for the inside of a week than the average Londoner would of going to Brighton; and it is amusing to remark that the number of passengers carried over the lines in the year 1908 represented sixty journeys a year for each man, woman, and child in the State—though, of course, there are many people who will take three or four different journeys to separate suburbs in one day, to balance the lonely dwellers in the back blocks who have never been in a train in their lives. Still, the average of 150,000 passengers coming and going at Flinders Street Station alone, in one single day, seems to me a very large one. For the purpose of administering the Land Act, Victoria—and it must be remembered here that I am speaking of State, and not of Federal, affairs—is divided into seventeen districts, in each of which is a land office and officer. These districts include 3,316,727 acres of pastoral Crown land, exclusive of 6,412,500 acres of Mallee land—the entire Mallee covering 11,000,999 acres. This spare land is graded into first, second, and third class land, auriferous and pastoral land; the greater part of the first-class land, with sheltered valleys, suitable for vineyards and orchards, being in the Buln-Buln area, the soil of which is mostly volcanic, and of a warm chocolate brown. A great many of the large estates in Victoria are being subdivided into farms, the squatters being under compulsion to sell a certain proportion of their property. The Land Branch has now acquired forty-nine properties, which it has subdivided into 1,203 farms, and 589 allotments for workmen’s houses—the question as to who the workmen are to work for apparently not having been very seriously considered—while shortly the Werribee Park Estate of 23,214 acres will also be available. One knows, of course, that Victoria must be more thickly populated. But one cannot wonder that squatters whose fathers have acquired vast areas of land, who have built dwelling-houses, fenced and planted, invested money in stock, and, in fact, devoted the whole of their life to the care and the improvement of their properties, should feel aggrieved at seeing them taken away from them, chopped up into small holdings, and allotted to men who have never done anything towards the furtherance of the export and import trade, or the gain and credit of their country. Still far above this, it must be most galling of all to have shipload after shipload of emigrants brought out to occupy land which the squatters feel belongs to them—morally, as well as actually, if land ever did belong to anybody, wrested from the wilds as it has so often been by incredible labour and risk of life.