pleasure in going well on to the run of some great squatter, pegging out some 40, 80, or 160 acres, and saying, “By your leave, sir, I mean to have this.” We can understand that there is pleasure in doing it, and great pain in enduring it. My sympathies have been chiefly with the free-selecter, not believing that he is always a sheep-stealer, and feeling that the land should be open to him. Pastoral autocrats with acres by the hundreds of thousands,--acres which are not their own,--cannot fill up a country. They are the precursors of population, and, as the population comes, should make way for it. But might it not be arranged that the free-selecters should be invited to come and take up their lands in some manner less objectionable than that which has hitherto prevailed? When I was in Western Australia new land regulations were issued and proclaimed, having just received the sanction of the Colonial Office at home; and these regulations go a long way towards effecting a remedy for those evils attaching to free-selection which I have attempted to describe,--and they will remedy another evil which, in Western Australia especially, is very detrimental to the selecting farmer. They will bring the agricultural occupiers of the land together. Men are invited to occupy lands chosen for “special occupation.” By this arrangement the skill and experience of the land officers of the colony will be used on behalf of the selecter, who will not only be enabled to place himself on soil capable of bearing corn, but will find himself surrounded by others, occupied as he is in producing corn. In this way rural communities may be formed which shall not be sheep-stealing communities. The locality having been chosen in the first place, not by the new-comer, but by the government, sheep-stealing will not at any rate have been the object when the choice was made,--nor the idea that a squatter if harassed sufficiently may at last be induced to buy his neighbour out. Communities will be formed, and communities will make markets. I have sometimes thought that free-selecters like to take their land up far away in the bush, at long distances each from another. There is a wild independence in the doing so which charms. But no decision can be more detrimental to the man’s material interest. When so located he is driven to consume all that he grows, and then,--unless he steal sheep,--he can consume nothing else. That which is most to be desired by him is that gradually a township should be formed round his homestead.