ABSTRACT
Wales, to the brink of a dangerous agitation. Yet it is important that his motives should not be mistaken. Colonial management oflands, he judged from the reports of the New South Wales Legislative Council, meant sale at a low price, and what was worse, competition among the colonies for emigrants, which would tend to lower the price still further. I He genuinely believed that such a policy would be harmful to the best interests of the colonies. Colonial management of the land revenue, he feared, meant injustice to the remoter districts, which had a right to have their outlay returned to them in the shape of labour and public works. As there were in New South Wales no such provincial councils as in New Zealand-where he was willing, be it remarked, to transfer the control oflands to them-but only a central legislature dominated by the 'utterly unbalanced democracy' 2 of Sydney, he conceived it best that Imperial control should be for the present maintained: for it meant efficient administration on principles proved to be sound alike by theory and by experience. After all in the United States controloflands was in the hands of Congress. What Lord Grey did not see was that colonies of the British Empire were very different political entities from states in the American Union, where Senators and Congressmen from the Western States could go to Washington and have an effective voice in the control of federal land policy; and that control of the public lands was so vitally important a matter in a colonial society that without it self-government was felt to be a mockery. The colonists cared little for the purely constitutional points which so greatly interested Lord Grey, in comparison with a matter which so closely and obviously concerned their material well-being. The Australian Colonies Government Act could hardly by itself have engendered the heat of the Declaration and Remonstrance: but the feeling against the Land Sales Act had been steadily gaining strength, the struggle on the transportation question had added fuel to the discontent, and this much-heralded Act seemed to New South Wales almost irrelevant to the
