AUGUST 26, 1848.

New Zealander, Volume 4, Issue 234, 26 August 1848, Page 2

AUGUST 2 6, 18 48.

" It is not difficult to discover the causes of the unexampled prosperity and rapid growth of our North American colonies, and generally of all colonies placed under similar chcumslances. The North American colonists carried with them a knowledge of the arts and sciences practised hy a civilised and polished people. They had been tiained fiom their infancy to habits of industry and subordination. They weie practically acquainted with the hest and wisest form of civil polity that had been established in Europe ; and they were placed in a situation that enabled them, without difficulty, to remedy its defects, and to try every institution hy the test of utility. But the thinnkss of the aboriginal population, and the consequent facility of obtaining ineyiuustilsle supplies of fertile and unoccupied lano, must certainly be placed at the head of all the causes which have promoted the rapid increase of wealth and population in the United States, and in all the other colonies iiotii ok North and South America. On the first foundation of a colony, and for long after, each colonist gets an ample supply of land of the best quality; and having 110 rent, and scarcely any taxes, to pay, his industry neCESSMULY BECOMES EXCEEDINGLY PRODUCTIVE, and he has every means and every motive to amass capital. In consequence, he is eager to collect labourers from all quarters, and is hoth willing and able to reward them with high wages. But these high wages afford the means of accumulation, and, joined to the plenty and cheapness of the land, speedily change the more industrious labourers into proprietors, and enahle them, in their turn, to hecome the employers of fresh labourers ; so that every class participates in the general improvement, and capital and population advance with a rapidity hardly conceivable in old settled and fully peopled coutnes." So writes M'Cullocii. The extract is a long one ; but, as it furnishes a standard text for the practical colonial commentator, we could not, in justice to the subject into which we are about to enter, curtail it. It is a history, in little, of the true springs of all colonial prosperity. An incontiovertible exposition of their infallible sources of wealth and greatness. Misapply the one, or dam up the other, and the stream, whose generous current must fructify J and enrich, will become a stagnant pool of desolation — a slough of despond and disgust. In New Zealand, through mischievous interference, and improvident retention of the soil, that stream is most effectually dammed up. The field is barred alike against the man of capital, and', the man whose " industry necessarily becomes exceedingly productive." The emigrant — by the wildest inversion of a system which the great political economist of the age has pionounced to be the, true source of the prosperity of the United Slates — can not obtain land, unless at such a famine price as must preclude, except in a few and favored spots, all hope of wealth, and, in consequence, eveiy prospect of an increase of population. It is to improve their moral, social, and physical position that men of capital and industry emigrate — n ot to become the princes of wastes and deserts, nor yet to transfer the scene of their daily, if umemunerative, toil. And to what beneficial lesult does the retention of the countless millions of fertile acres tend 1 Do local or imperial governments derive a greater revenue by hugging their Lairen acres, than they would command w r ere those acres teeming with a contented and flourishing population, prosperous themselves, and living incentives to industrious prosperity in others ? Is the rude hut of the Australian squatter an object of greater admiration, or a type of more substantial wealth, than the yeoman's cottage, with its smiling accessories of barn and poultry -yard, flower and kitchen garden? It would almost seem so. At all events a system has obtained to foster the one and swamp the other. England arrogates to herself the claim to be considered the most intelligent, and the most practical of colonising nations. We deny the justice of that claim. We repudiate it toto ecelo. And we contend that we have only to point to that Juggernaut of coiruption, ignorance, and oppression — her Colonial-office — as irrefragable proof of the truth of our negation. Sift its acts— investigate their motives and their