Prospectus of the Scots New Zealand Land CompanyMatthew, Patrick
History
Prospectus of the Scots New Zealand Land Company
Matthew, Patrick
New Zealand -- Emigration and immigration; Scots New Zealand Land Company
only the larger capitalists have been able to hold out? Has not the
high price of land, L.1 per acre, instead of condensing been the means
of dispersion,--throwing the stock owners with their flocks out to
wander over the undivided territory for which they pay no price, which
in fact is worth no price--perhaps no great loss in that arid country
where change of place is necessary in the season of drought to obtain
herbage and water--a country only fit for this Tartar or Arab system
of husbandry? Has the miserable Adelaide and the steril sands around
it, a place scarcely capable of affording support, even under the best
culture for which it is fitted, for a few hundreds, become any thing
but the grave of the hopes of the many thousands who have been thrown
upon this desert coast by means of the money extracted from capitalist
emigrants by this “sufficient price,” or by money borrowed at 10 per
cent. per annum upon the faith of the “sufficient price?” Adelaide will
never reach higher than a miserable village, unless like Sydney it
get an extraneous Government expenditure of several hundred thousand
pounds per annum (Sydney without this would have remained a miserable
village). As soon as the money spent by emigrants (not unfrequently all
they possess) waiting upon the lagging surveys, or upon some plausible
means of employing their little capital to advantage, shall have ceased
to flow, Adelaide will appear in its natural poverty.
Is the sufficient price calculated for New Zealand? Why import so many
servants when it is so politic to employ native labour, and to leave
the labour market open for this supply? The natives say they have a
double motive for selling land to the British--the price they receive
for it, and the employment they procure in cultivating it. Why take
means to prevent dispersion when prudence will direct a pretty close
arrangement? Why take means to procure a consolidated population as
a market for agricultural produce, when a market so very favourable
already exists in the agricultural produce-demand of Australia and of
the South Sea Whalers, together with the British and Indian demand
for flax and spars? For what then is a “sufficient price” desirable?
Only for the private emolument of managing secretaries and other
officials, to whom the “sufficient price” will pay a pretty good tax
_in transitu_, and to be a plausible pretext for the Land Company
resident in London to obtain the warrantry of the Legislature for
monopolizing whole provinces of New Zealand, and for selling the land
at a high price to the buyer;--no doubt thinking the buyer will be a
more industrious colonist after his pockets have been emptied into this
land-jobbing Company’s coffers. From some hints which have been thrown
out in Parliament lately, it would seem to be in contemplation to have
something like “a sufficient price” in the British colonies in the West
Indies (perhaps practicable there by a sufficient demonstration of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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