regard to his idea that English society, under the presidency of some great English magistrate, should be taken out to the young colony “with all the good, but without the evil,”--he is I think Utopian. Of his own doings as a colonizer I shall have to speak again in reference to New Zealand. Mr. Wakefield’s plan was by no means adopted as a whole by the Act of 1834, in conformity with which the new colony was to be founded. In 1831 an attempt had been made to obtain a charter for forming a company, by which the new colony was to be planted in strict accordance with Mr. Wakefield’s principle. But this scheme broke down, and in 1834 the Act was passed. Under this Act it was provided that the land should be sold in small blocks,--no doubt at a “sufficient price,”--and that the money so realised should be applied to immigration. What the “sufficient price” should be Mr. Wakefield had never stated. Indeed it would then have been impossible, and is still equally impossible, that any price should be fixed as the value of a commodity, whose value varies in accordance with climate, position, and soil. The impossibility of fixing a price for land, and yet the apparent necessity of doing so, has been the greatest difficulty felt in arranging the various schemes of Australian colonization. At first sight it may seem easy enough. Let the land be put up to auction, and let the purchaser fix the price. But when the work was commenced it was necessary to get new settlers on to the land, who knew nothing of its relative value, who could not tell whether they could afford to give 5_s._ or £5 an acre for it and then live upon it. These new-comers required to be instructed in all things, and in nothing more than as to the proper outlay of their small capitals. And the system of auction, when it did come to prevail in the sale of crown lands, was found to produce the grossest abuses,--I think I may say the vilest fraud. Men constituted themselves as land agents with the express purpose of exacting black-mail from those who were really desirous of purchasing. “I will be your agent,” such a one would say to the would-be purchaser. “I will buy the land for you, at a commission of a shilling an acre. You can buy it for yourself, you say. Then I shall bid against you.” This system has prevailed to such an extent that the agency business has become an Australian profession, and men who did not want an acre of land have made fortunes by exacting tribute from those who were in earnest. As a rule, 20_s._ an acre has been the normal price fixed in these colonies generally,--though from that there have been various deviations. In South Australia proper,--that is in South Australia exclusive of the northern territory,--the Crown has never alienated an acre for less than 20_s._ an acre. Mr. Wakefield seems to have considered that 40_s._ an acre should have been demanded from the early settlers in the new colony,--but he would fix no sum, always adhering