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Subject Area: Political Theory
Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

271.: NEW AUSTRALIAN COLONY MORNING CHRONICLE, 23 OCT., 1834, P. 3 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II [1831]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

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271.

NEW AUSTRALIAN COLONY

MORNING CHRONICLE, 23 OCT., 1834, P. 3

Mill’s last newspaper contribution in 1834 is his first letter to the editor of an English journal since 30 Oct., 1828 (No. 42). Taking up the central issue of Nos. 259, 261, and 263, it is headed as title and described in his bibliography as “A letter in the Morning Chronicle of 23d Oct. 1834, signed A.B. and headed ‘New Australian Colony’ ”

(MacMinn, p. 42).

sir,—The letter which you inserted on Tuesday, respecting the new colony in Southern Australia, evidently proceeds from a writer thoroughly acquainted with the subject;1 and if I were certain that it would attract the attention of the newly-appointed Commissioners for the government of the colony,2 I should not have troubled you with any remarks on a subject which has been treated in so masterly a manner by your correspondent. But the question on which he chiefly insists is of such vital importance to all the objects of the colony, that so long as it is undecided, you will not, perhaps, grudge to devote a portion of your columns to its further discussion.

It would be far better, that the colony had never been thought of, it would be far better it should be thought of no more, than that the price for which land may be purchased in the colony should be so low as 12s. per acre, or even 1l. or 2l.

This must be clear to all who consider the principle on which the peculiarity of the proposed colony is founded. Other colonies have advanced slowly, because every family settles on its own piece of land, attempts to produce for itself all that it requires, and there is no combination of labour, no home market, no division of employments, because there are no hired labourers. Accordingly, the plan of the present colony is so framed as to secure a constant supply of hired labourers. It is not intended, far from it, that the labourer should continue a labourer all his life: it is desired that every labourer should in time become a landholder, but not until another labourer has arrived from Europe to take his place.

Now, your correspondent has clearly shown that if land can be obtained at 12s. an acre, every labourer will be able to become a landholder in less than a year. If so, there will be the same scarcity of labour as in the old colonies; the labourer, when established as a landholder, will depend solely upon the labour of his own family; there will be the same absence of combination, the same absence of a market for anything except food, the same want of motive to produce anything but the commonest necessaries of life, the same absence of society, of comforts, of civilization, as in the wilds of Canada. If so, it were far better that the colony should never be formed. There are enough, and more than enough, of colonies on the old absurd system.

The Commissioners, being men who understand the subject, are, doubtless, well aware of the necessity of a high minimum price; and, if they fix it too low, it will not be for want of knowing better, but for fear lest the object should be misunderstood, and emigrants induced, by the high price of land, to prefer some of the old colonies. But this is a chance which must be undergone. Let the reasons for fixing a high price be explained as fully and as clearly as possible, to all who are disposed to emigrate; but do not, to conciliate emigrants, sacrifice the only object for which the colony is established at all.

Perhaps the Commissioners may think of compromising the matter, by fixing the minimum price at 12s. or 1l., and selling all the land by auction, with that for the upset price; by which means they would obtain a higher than the minimum price for all the lots which are most eligibly situated. Now, the chief object of my writing the present letter is, to point out that this will not remedy the evil. So long as land of good quality can be had for cultivation at 12s. an acre, it is of no consequence that an acre of ground in a town may perhaps produce ten pounds. It is not the average price, but the lowest price, which determines the degree of concentration of the people. With the present artificial feelings of our labourers about property in land, they will spread themselves out on the outer verge of the colony, where land may be had at no more than the upset price; the labourers who first go out will become landholders in the first year, and there will be but few labourers to succeed them; every colonist will be a producer of food; there will be no purchasers for any surplus of food, and no producers for anything to give in exchange for food. Each family will have food in abundance, and nothing else.

The only advantage of selling the land by auction is, that a larger emigration-fund would be afforded than could be obtained at the same minimum price if the minimum were also the maximum. But this is a very trifling advantage. Considering the distance of the colony, and the expense of transport, a slight increase of the emigration-fund would by no means occasion labour to flow into the colony in sufficient abundance to supply the places of the first labourers so rapidly as those places would be vacated, if the minimum price were too low. It would be far better to fix the minimum sufficiently high from the beginning, and never to take more than the minimum for any land whatever. Those who might otherwise be deterred by the high minimum price from settling in the colony at all, would be no longer so, if, by paying that price, they purchased the chance of obtaining lots which could be resold at once for treble the value.

The one thing needful is a high minimum price; and this would probably be more easily obtained by renouncing the disposal of lands by auction altogether.

I am, Sir, yours respectfully,

A.B.

[1 ]“Kangaroo” (Edward Gibbon Wakefield), Letter to the editor (20 Oct., 1834), Morning Chronicle, 21 Oct., p. 1. (Republished in App. II of Torrens’s Colonization of South Australia [London: Longman, et al., 1835], pp. xiv-xix.) Wakefield was arguing for a land price low enough to enable labourers to set up on their own in a few years, and high enough to ensure that those few years would be needed.

[2 ]For the Commissioners, see “Second Report of the Select Committee on South Australia, Appendix of Documents,” PP, 1841, IV, 487-90.