“WHAT is a Colonial Conservative?” is a question that used to be daily put to a Victorian friend of mine when he was in London. His answer, he told me, was always, “A statesman who has got four of the ‘points’ of the People‘s Charter, and wants to conserve them,” but as used in Victoria, the term “Conservative” expresses the feeling less of a political party than of the whole of the people who have anything whatever to lose. Those who have something object to giving a share in the government to those who have nothing; those who have much, object to political equality with those who have less; and, not content with having won a tremendous victory in basing the Upper House upon a £5000 qualification and £100 freehold or £300 leasehold franchise, the plutocracy are meditating attacks upon the Legislative Assembly.
The democracy hold out undauntedly, refusing all monetary tests, though an intelligence basis for the franchise is by no means out of favor, except with the few who cannot read or write. One day, when I was driving from Melbourne to Sandridge, in company with a colonial merchant, he asked our car-driver: “Now, tell me fairly: do you think these rogues of fellows that hang about the shore here ought to have votes?” “No, I don‘t.” “Ah, you‘d like to see a 5s. fee on registration, wouldn‘t you?” The answer was sharp enough in its tone. “Five shillings would be nothing to you; it would be something to me, and it would be more than my brother could pay. What I‘d have done would be to say that those who couldn‘t read shouldn‘t vote, that‘s all. That would keep out the loafers.”
The plutocratic party is losing, not gaining, ground in Victoria; it is far more likely that the present generation will see the Upper House abolished than that it will witness the introduction of restrictions upon the manhood suffrage which exists for the Lower; but there is one branch of the plutocracy which actively carries on the fight in all the colonies, and which claims to control society, the pastoral tenants of crown lands, or Squatter Aristocracy.
The word “squatter” has undergone a remarkable change of meaning since the time when it denoted those who stole government land, and built their dwellings on it. As late as 1837, squatters were defined by the chief justice of New South Wales as people occupying lands without legal title, and who were subject to a fine on discovery. They were described as living by bartering rum with convicts for stolen goods, and as being themselves invariably convicts or “expirees.”
Escaping suddenly from these low associations, the word came to be applied to graziers who drove their flocks into the unsettled interior, and thence to those of them who received leases from the crown of pastoral lands.
The squatter is the nabob of Melbourne and Sydney, the inexhaustible mine of wealth. He patronizes balls, promenade concerts, flower-shows; he is the mainstay of the great clubs, the joy of the shopkeepers, the good angel of the hotels; without him the opera could not be kept up, and the jockey-clubs would die a natural death.
Neither squatters nor townsfolk will admit that this view of the former‘s position is exactly correct. The Victorian squatters tell you that they have been ruined by confiscation, but that their neighbors in New South Wales, who have leases, are more prosperous; in New South Wales they tell you of the destruction of the squatters by “free selection,” of which there is none in Queensland, “the squatter‘s paradise;” but in Queensland the squatters protest that they have never made wages for their personal work, far less interest upon their capital. “Not one of us in ten is solvent,” they say.
As sweeping assertions are made by the townsfolk upon the other side. The squatters, they sometimes say, may well set up to be a great landed aristocracy, for they have every fault of a dominant caste except its generous vices. They are accused of piling up vast hoards of wealth while living a most penurious life, and contributing less than would so many mechanics to the revenue of the country, in order that they may return in later life to England, there to spend what they have wrung from the soil of Victoria or New South Wales.
The occupation of the whole of the crown lands by squatters has prevented the making of railways to be paid for in land on the American system; but the chief of all the evils connected with squatting is the tendency to the accumulation in a few hands of all the land and all the pastoral wealth of the country, an extreme danger in the face of democratic institutions, such as those of Victoria and New South Wales. Remembering that manufactures are few, the swelling of the cities shows how the people have been kept from the land; considerably more than half of the population of Victoria lives within the corporate towns.
A few years back, a thousand men held between them, on nominal rents, forty million acres out of the forty-three and a half million—mountain and swamp excluded—of which Victoria consists. It is true that the amount so held has now decreased to thirty million, but on the other hand the squatters have bought vast tracts which were formerly within their “runs,” with the capital acquired in squatting, and, knowing the country better than others could possibly know it, have naturally selected all the most valuable land.