Edward Gibbon Wakefield : the colonization of South Australia and New Zealand
Chapter III
Chapter III
Wakefield's Early Writings—'The Punishment of Death'—'Letter from Sydney'—The Wakefield System—'England and America'—Wakefield on the Agricultural Labourer
Edward Gibbon Wakefield's antecedents and hereditary connections have been treated with some minuteness, as, without acquaintance with them, it is impossible either to appreciate his character or to understand his surprising ascent from a prison cell to a position of influence in the national councils rarely indeed accorded to one unknown or disadvantageously known to the public and irrevocably excluded from Parliament. Like many other men, as has been already implied, Wakefield had two characters—one natural, the other superimposed. But whereas with most the engrafted character is the prop and ballast of the man, fortifying weak points and tempering congenital failings by the discipline of routine and public opinion, with Wakefield it was the reverse. He came, as we have seen, of Quaker stock, and all hereditary influences were of utilitarian, philanthropic and altruistic tendency. From this circle of ideas he had been projected into quite a different sphere, partly by his father's ambition and weakness for the countenance of the nobility, so deeply deplored by the Cato of Charing Cross, partly by the extraordinary revolution in his circumstances effected by the brilliant marriage which had introduced the youth of twenty to a fashionable and frivolous society. All this was now at an end. The crystal sphere lay in shivers on the floor, and Wakefield, Faust-like, must build it up again elsewhere; the phantoms of pleasure and gaiety fled, wailing, never to return; blue books and statistics were to be his companions henceforth. We hear no more of the best society in Europe and the step-daughter of the Bishop of Norwich. The unworthy aims and trivial pursuits of his engrafted character were for Wakefield absolutely annihilated, save for the considerable—and, indeed, for his future mission, indispensable—acquisitions of the ease and charm of manner obtained by association with the great world, and of the tact in dealing with men which he had gained in the pursuits of diplomacy. The original nature—the instinct to mend the world and work for public ends—recurred in full force, and with so much the more energy the more clearly Wakefield discerned that only by giving it full play could he retrieve himself from the unenviable position into which the reckless pursuit of adventure, rather than deliberate ill-intent, had precipitated him.
1 An article in the Colonial Gazette for 29th July 1840, evidently written or inspired by Wakefield, says that 'it has been stated' that the first idea of his system occurred to him while studying the land regulations promulgated for the Swan River settlement. These appeared in January 1829, but his study of them implies that his mind was already occupied with colonial subjects.
Wakefield's other literary production of this period, The Punishment of Death, does not concern his activity as a colonial statesman, but it is too remarkable for its riveting power, and too essential to the appreciation of the author's genius, at once so imaginative and so realistic, to be passed over without some notice. Though not actually written, it virtually took shape in his mind during his imprisonment, which lasted from May 1827 to May 1830. During that period he witnessed the scenes and held the conversations which so deeply impressed him, and it was easy to reproduce them upon his release. The book appeared in 1831, and a second edition was called for before the end of the year. It contributed largely to its immediate purpose of greatly restricting the denunciation of the death penalty, even when merely employed as a threat in terrorem; it laid the foundation of the agitation against transportation, to which much of the writer's best energy was subsequently given; and it served his own interests by displaying him in the light of one rising on the stepping-stone of a dead self to higher things, and pressing his own errors and chastisement into the service of the State. Melius sic poenituisse quam non errasse. In a literary point of view the book is most powerful; but like all Wakefield's more comprehensive books, it fails of being a complete whole, and rather resembles a series of essays akin in subject and spirit, but which might very well have stood apart.
The frequency of the punishment of death in Wakefield's time was undoubtedly a scandal; Wakefield shows that it was also a danger. Though evidently opposed to its infliction under any circumstances, he abstains from entering into the question, and contents himself with proving that its indiscriminate enactment, rather than execution—for in many instances it was known to be merely an empty threat—fostered corruption in prosecutors, weakness in witnesses, judges and juries, and reckless defiance or by no means unreasonable hopes among criminals, and thus injured society by striking at the root of the deterring influence of punishment, the conviction of its certainty. His remedies are by no means limited to the mitigation of the penal code, but include valuable suggestions not yet sufficiently carried out, the establishment of a public prosecutor, and the organisation of a preventive police. He is particularly earnest on the importance of rooting out the agencies by which youth was systematically decoyed into crime. His description of one of these recalls a study by a contemporary observer no less shrewd and graphic, George Borrow's delineation of the old apple woman on London Bridge. The repulsive subject is not unfrequently illuminated with humour, as in the description of the mock trials got up by criminals among themselves, with parodies of the peculiarities of learned judges and eminent counsel; and the character of thieves as practical philosophers, Epicuruses in their conviction of the omnipotence of chance, Babbages in their acute estimate of its probabilities. The manner in which a man's life might be muddled away is set forth in the story of a military officer named Montgomery, who, although the Bank of England, against which he had offended, was quite willing that the penalty should be mitigated, only escaped the halter by the phial. Wakefield had been kind to him, and the doomed man left a letter behind him which, being read at the inquest, appeared in the newspapers of the day. 'And so even you I dared not confide in—how dreadful have been my fears! how torturing my hopes! The bitterness of reflection, that even my inestimable, most devoted friends, who would have done anything to save my life, I dared not trust with my hopes of death! How little have I been known! But for your note, but for the pressure of your hand, last Saturday evening would have ended the dreadful tragedy. God bless you! May you find such a friend as your heart deserves!'
Another letter, addressed to an unnamed young lady, is not less affecting, and the sentiment they irresistibly excite illustrates the truth of Wakefield's own impressive words:—
'Everyone who comes in contact with a man whose death by the hangman is probable, treats him not as a criminal, but as an unfortunate. In the treatment of other prisoners, even before trial, when they are presumed to be innocent, I never observed anything like commiseration from persons in authority over them. At the best they are treated with neglect, except for their safe custody, and all convicts not capital are treated as criminals. The same men, once capitally convicted, are treated as brothers or children in distress. Why is the capital convict—he whose crime is most grave and is proven—so favourably distinguished? Because the punishment of death shocks every mind to which it is vividly presented, and overturns the most settled notions of right and wrong.'
The most remarkable pages in The Punishment of Death, however, are the chapters on the religious observances connected with it, too long and too remotely connected with the main subject of this volume to quote here, but one of the most powerful pieces of writing in the language. What a picture of the wretched quartette in the condemned pew—the bright, prepossessing youth, whose theft, unhappily for him, has been just over instead of just under five pounds; the savage, hardened burglar, a returned convict; the crazy sheepstealer, to be hung in spite of much intercession because many sheep have lately been stolen by others; 'the miserable old man in a tattered suit of black, a clergyman of the Church of England, convicted of forgery'! What traits, pure records from actual observation, but which the imagination of Dante could not have surpassed, as where the Ordinary, perceiving that the youth cannot find the place in his prayer-book, says quite simply, The Service for the Dead! 'The youth's hands tremble as they hold the book upside-down.' And so it goes on until, the service over, the condemned return to their cells; 'the forger carried by turnkeys; the youth sobbing aloud convulsively, as a passionate child; the burglar muttering curses and savage expressions of defiance; whilst the poor sheepstealer shakes hands with the turnkeys, whistles merrily, and points upward with madness in his look.' Such writing was more potent to effect the writer's object than his able arguments and unimpeachable statistics, and could have been produced by no one whose destiny had not led him to combine theory with experience. The Athenæum well said, 'Out of evil comes good, for to Mr Wakefield's three years' imprisonment in Newgate we are indebted for this judicious, sensible and serviceable publication. Mr Wakefield has laboured wisely and diligently to atone for the wrongs he committed, and every good man will be content to forget that he ever erred.'
The Punishment of Death was indeed a remarkable book, but neither in its literary merit nor the momentous and durable character of its effects could it be compared to the other product of Wakefield's imprisonment, the Letter from Sydney. Vigorous as the former was, it still related to matters within the writer's own cognisance; the literary gift displayed was that of a consummate reporter. In the Letter from Sydney, Wakefield undertook to describe things not seen, and only known from reading, or from oral information, and to draw lessons from them which had escaped the attention of intelligent observers on the spot. Success as a depicter of the unseen demanded creative imagination, or at least a gift of vivid realisation hardly less exceptional; conclusive reasoning from such premises required a most unusual share of shrewdness and penetration. The problem was the elucidation of the causes which had rendered Australia well nigh useless to the mother country, and these the inmate of Newgate undertook to point out from the other side of the world. The time, however, was in the writer's favour, however vexatiously he might be enthralled by too strict unity of place. The public mind had in a measure wakened up on the subject of the colonies. During the years of war, systematic emigration could not of course be thought of, but the lean kine which had followed in the train of Peace forced statesmen to consider seriously how to provide for a redundant and destitute population. America continued to take the mass of exiles, but men naturally felt indisposed to see our emigrants' blood and sinew entirely absorbed by a foreign country. Emigration to Canada increased; much was really done towards colonising the Cape with Scotch agriculturists; a new colony was actually founded in Western Australia, whose disasters afterwards supplied Wakefield with his most telling arguments. The idea of studying the principles of colonization as the outlet of his energies may well, as has been stated, have been suggested to him by the habit of brooding over maps or calling up pictures of foreign lands as a relief from the actual circumstances of his lot; even more probably, perhaps, by the natural contemplation of the colonies as the best asylum for what must have then seemed broken fortunes and an irretrievably damaged character. The quotations in the Letter from Sydney, which appeared in 1829, show that he must have occupied himself for some time with the study of literature relating to the colonies. 'I had occasion,' he says himself in The Punishment of Death, 'to read with care every book concerning New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land, as well as long series of newspapers published in those colonies.'
Had Wakefield, however, written under his own name, he could have promised himself no such success as was to attend The Punishment of Death. He had qualified as an authority upon prisons; on colonial subjects he could then produce no special credentials. His personality was accordingly suppressed, and the book was cast in an imaginative form. It appeared under the name of Robert Gouger, an actual ex-colonist and writer on colonial subjects (who, after a brief interlude of combat on the July barricades, became colonial secretary in South Australia), and purported to detail in the form of 'a letter from Sydney' the experiences of a settler with a magnificent grant of land, which, owing to the dearth of labour, was hardly of more use to him than a castle in the air. So thoroughly had Wakefield thought himself into the situation and realised the sufferings of his Australian Tantalus, so natural was his composition and so unaffected his style, that no one doubted the genuineness of the letter, which could hardly have been more graphic had it indeed been written upon the spot. Always racy, often eloquent, its argumentative cogency is continually irradiated by flashes of humour which indicate how exuberant under normal circumstances must have been the animal spirits which could thus struggle through the gloom of a prison. The main contention is that the admittedly undeveloped state of the colony is owing to a want of labour, and that this arises from indiscriminate land grants. Enormous tracts had been given away to wealthy colonists, or sometimes stay-at-home land- lords, whose means, it was supposed, would enable them to clear them and bring them under cultivation. But capital without labour was even more impotent than labour without capital. You could not hew down a tree with a bank note, or cleave the soil with a sovereign. The sturdy arms which bank notes and sovereigns ought to have set in motion were not to be had, being all too few, and engaged in cultivating the small plots which their owners had obtained on terms equally easy, and which supported families sinking into barbarism. The little cultivated properties and the great uncultivated properties alike remained stationary; want of labour enchained the one, and want of capital the other. There was indeed a resource in the employment of convict labour; but this was more suitable for the execution of public works under Government supervision than for the cultivation of the estates of private men, who had money to be stolen, and throats to be cut; it was, moreover, a mere temporary palliative. 'If,' the imaginary colonist remarks with sarcastic humour, 'for every acre that may be appropriated here, there should be a conviction for felony in England, our prosperity would rest on a solid basis; but, however earnestly we may desire it, we cannot expect that the increase of crime will keep pace with the spread of colonization.' Wakefield's answer to the problem he had stated consisted in the promulgation of the famous theory known as the 'Wakefield System.'
Before entering into any discussion of this much debated subject, it will be desirable to show clearly what the system was by the citation of its leading principles as embodied in the Outline of a System of Colonization, annexed to A Letter from Sydney, it being premised that some of them were slightly supplemented and modified in the author's more mature Art of Colonization (1849). 1
'It is suggested:—
- 'I. That a payment in money of—per acre be required for all future grants of land, without exception.
- 'II. That all land now granted, and to be granted, throughout the colony, be declared liable to a tax of— per cent. upon the actual rent.
- 'III. That the proceeds of the tax upon rent, and of sales, form an Emigration Fund, to be employed in the conveyance of British labourers to the Colony free of cost.
- 'IV. That those to whom the adminstration of the fund shall be entrusted be empowered to raise money on that security, as money is raised on the security of parish and county rates in England.
- 'V. That the supply of labourers be as nearly as possible proportioned to the demand for labour at each settlement; so that capitalists shall never suffer
1 Stuart Mill points out in his Political Economy that some of Wakefield's views had been in some measure anticipated in an article in the Westminster Review for January 1826, by William Ellis, which it is not likely that Wakefield ever saw.
- 'VI. That in the selection of emigrants an absolute preference be given to young persons; and that no excess of males be conveyed to the Colony free of cost.
- 'VII. That colonists providing a passage for emigrant labourers, being young persons and equal numbers of both sexes, be entitled to a payment in money from the Emigration Fund equal to the actual contract price of a passage for so many labouring persons.
- 'VIII. That grants be absolute in fee, without any condition whatsoever, and obtainable by deputy.
- 'IX. That any surplus of the proceeds of the tax upon rent and of sales, over what is required for emigration, be employed in relief of other taxes, and for the general purposes of colonial government.'
Such were the regulations as originally proposed. The following vigorous statement of the evils they were intended to combat, and the benefit they were expected to effect, is taken from Wakefield's remarkable letter to the South Australian Commissioners, June 1835, printed in the appendix to the South Australian Report of 1841:—
'When each member of a society employs no more capital than his own hands will use, the labour of the whole society is necessarily cut up into separate fractions as numerous as the families; each family, necessarily, in order to live, cultivates the ground, and does scarcely anything else. As each family is occupied in the same mode of production, there is no motive for exchange between the different families; and as, in such a society, there is no co-operation, so there can be no division of employments; capital and labour are so weak, so unproductive, that surplus produce, either for foreign exchange or for accumulation at home, cannot be raised. This is the primitive or barbarous state of things, under which famine is the necessary consequence of one bad season; it is a state of things which all nations have suffered, and which, during the earlier stages of the world's progress, was in every nation succeeded by a state of slavery. As the goodness of God and the progressive nature of man are unquestionable, and as God has permitted every nation to undergo the state of slavery, so we may be sure that slavery has not been an evil unmixed with good. Slavery appears to have been the step by which nations have emerged out of poverty and barbarism, and moved onwards towards wealth and civilisation. While in any country land was so abundant in proportion to people that everyone could and did obtain a piece for himself, free labour presented no way of escape from that primitive and barbarous condition under which poverty is the lot of all; but along with slavery came combination of labour, division of employments, surplus produce of different sorts, the power of exchanging, a great increase of capital, all the means, in short, to that better state of things in which slavery becomes an unmixed evil, and when, accordingly, it has been abolished. But what is the conclusion bearing on the present question that we are to draw from this review of one of the steps by which Providence has ordered that nations should advance from barbarism to civilisation? That conclusion is that the only means by which labour may be comibned and employments divided, so as to prevent a state of miserable poverty, are either slavery or the existence of labour for hire.
'The process by which a colony goes to utter ruin, or is reduced to misery, and then gradually recovers, has been witnessed over and over again. The colonists, proceeding from a civilised country, possessing capital, divided into classes, skilful, accustomed to law and order, bent on exertion, and full of high hopes; such a body of people reach their destination, and then what happens? The society which at the moment of its landing consists of two ranks, bearing towards each other the relation of master to servant, becomes instantly a dead level, without ranks, without either servants or masters. Everyone obtains land of his own. From that moment no one can employ more capital than his own hands will use. The greater part, therefore, of the capital which has been taken out necessarily wastes away. In a few months nothing in the shape of capital remains beyond such small stocks as one isolated person can manage. But those of the society who have not been used to labour cannot, with their own hands, manage even that small stock so as to increase or even preserve it; while those who have been accustomed to nothing but labour, and to labour in combination with others, finding themselves each one alone in a vast wilderness, are unable to use with advantage such small stocks as they begin with; and thus both classes (or rather the whole body, for there are now no classes) soon fall into a state of want. In these cases when the colony was preserved by some sort or assistance from without, a state of want has continued until some sort of slavery was established. Such unfortunate results were the necessary results of placing civilised men in a situation where they could not but sink into that state of weakness and poverty which is but one step above the condition of the naked savage. An extensive and uninhabited country is a field where, unless something be done to counteract the influence of too much land, a small body of civilised people must inevitably fall back into what is called a primitive state. Hitherto, in young colonies, the influence of too much land has been counteracted no otherwise than by means of slavery. In this case [of South Australia] slave labour of every sort, whether that of slaves, bondsmen, re- demptioners or convicts, is wholly out of the question. What we have to consider, therefore, is the other means by which to preserve civilisation. The history of modern colonization exhibits a great number of expedients, not one of which, I venture to say, ever effected its object. Hence the project of an undertaking of which the object is to try whether, in countries where land is superabundant, free or hired labour may be secured by rendering land dear enough for that purpose. The projectors of the undertaking have concluded that, by putting a certain price upon public land, labourers may be induced to work for wages during a certain term. The South Australian Act excludes all other than this one means of securing hired labour; it is based upon the assumption that no other expedient for that object is likely to succeed, or ought, after so many failures, to be tried again; and that a price may be put upon all public land, which will have constantly the same effect as if land were never superabundant.
'Such are the grounds on which it has been decided to employ, for an object never yet accomplished, means never used before.'
1 'Les Portugais des Açores y prospèrent [at Hawaii] admirablement, et sont devenu en grande partie petits propriétaires après avoir travaillé aux plantations des Américains. Leroy-Beaulieu ( Les nouvelles sociétés Anglo-Saxonnes, ch. 1). Why should an English labourer fare worse than a Portuguese?
The soundness or unsoundness of the Wakefield theory will be best discussed after the history of South Australia and New Zealand has afforded us the means of viewing it in actual operation; and also after considering the form finally given to it in its author's Art of Colonization. But one quality it had which alone went far to render it a boon to the Empire, it was a scientific theory. 'The subject,' Wakefield forcibly remarks, 'presented before 1830 one very remarkable feature, namely, an immense amount of practice without any theory. There were long experience without a system; immense results without a plan; vast doings, but no principles.' Colonial questions, involving serious problems in statesmanship and political economy, had hitherto been treated in the roughest fashion. For most people the Colonial question was the Convict question, or at most a contribution to the more urgent problem how to rid the mother country of idle and useless incumbrances. In Disraeli's Popanilla, a speck upon the sea, originally mistaken for a porpoise, proves to be a rock, and is immediately provided with a governor, a deputy - governor and storekeepers, 'more plentiful than stores,' not to mention clergy, lawyers, engineers, and an agent for the indemnity claims of the aborigines. 'Upon what system,' asks Popanilla, 'does your Government surround a small rock in the middle of the sea with fortifications, and cram it full of clerks, soldiers, lawyers and priests?' 'Well, your Excellency, I believe we call it the colonial system!'
Wakefield's pamphlet was the first great literary blow to this hap-hazard and this pampered officialism, and its exposition of the great opportunities which awaited the colonist with capital, provided only that this capital was placed in a position to command labour, gradually enlisted the sympathies of the most valuable section of the community, those not ill off nor yet so well off as to be indifferent to the prospect of bettering themselves. It came, too, at a most auspicious moment, just on the eve of that development of the means of communication which was to afford such an impulse to emigration and commerce. Ere this had quite arrived, the public mind was fully awake on the subject of colonization, and the man who had chiefly aroused it was Edward Gibbon Wakefield. 'Never,' says Herman Merivale ( Lectures on Colonization, vol. ii., p. 56), 'was there a more remarkable instance of the success of a principle against all manner of misapprehension, against the fear of innovation, against corrupt interests, against the inert resistance which all novelty is sure to encounter.' Yet it has been recently asserted that 'the proposal took London by storm.' 'Pictures,' it is added, 'of fruitful land, lovely scenery, mineral wealth, and all that could excite the cupidity of small capitalists, were deftly drawn in this publication, and fortunes that were to be made in creative land values were dangled before the eyes of the public in the most seductive literary style.' There is nothing of the sort in the Letter from Sydney, beyond the incontestable observation that in Australia 'Nature fully performs her part in bestowing upon man the necessaries, comforts and luxuries of life.'
In the consideration of the Wakefield theory, it must not be forgotten that colonization was at the time much more an affair of the home Government than is now the case. There were no ocean going steamers to bear emigrants swiftly and cheaply across the water, and no free communities on the other side to whose enactments and regulations they could be subjected upon their arrival. There was no possibility of despatching them in any considerable numbers except by the agency of the Government or of a private company, and no authority to prescribe the conditions of settlement except the former of these, or an association to which its authority should have been delegated. No such wholesome principle as that of the numerical equality of the sexes, a valuable feature in the Wakefield plan, could have been realised without such control. It was therefore of the last importance that sound principles of colonization should be impressed upon a Government whose main object in colonizing was the relief of the mother country by the exportation of convicts, a system against which Wakefield always set his face, and which, as will be seen, he did more than any other man to destroy. At the present day emigrants can in general remove themselves to their new country, and the colonies themselves are in a position to stimulate the stream of emigration if necessary. In Wakefield's time the movement had to be guided and fostered, nay, to some extent artificially originated. The almost untrodden regions of Australasia teemed indeed with unsuspected riches, which would in time be a sufficient impulse to emigration, but the first steps needed support, only to be obtained from Government or from the powerful co-operation which it required a Wakefield theory to call into being. Whatever the abstract merits or demerits of his system, it was invaluable as providing a standard and a rallying point for colonial reformers.
One article of the Wakefield faith to which, taught by miscarriages in South Australia, he afterwards attached the highest importance, is not much insisted upon in the Letter from Sydney—the necessity of an accurate preliminary survey. 'The survey! the survey! the survey!' he reiterates when writing to Godley at Canterbury, and Godley repeats to the colonists, 'Nothing that Mr Wakefield has said upon this point is too strong.'
The Letter from Sydney, indeed, was too brief and occasional a production to constitute a systematic exposition of Wakefield's views; this must be sought in England and America, and in The Art of Colonization, more recent by twenty years. The main idea, however, was there: 'I constantly ask myself whether it be possible to devise any means by which to establish in a new country such a proportion between labour and land as would render labour plentiful and not extravagantly dear.' The whole may be described as a variation on this text. One digressive passage, a little idyll worthy of Goethe, may be cited as establishing once for all the rank which Wakefield might have attained in pure literature if his mind had not been so completely engrossed by the practical side of life:—
'You remember that Genoese girl before whom you trembled, and I became faint, though she only handed us some grapes? Do you remember that, having recovered ourselves, we measured her eyelashes? Do you remember how long they were, and how she laughed? Do you remember that bright laugh, and how I patted her cheek, and told her that it was softer than her country's velvets? And how she blushed—do you remember that?—to the tips of her fingers and the roots of her hair? And then how—do you remember how?—peasant as she was, and but just fifteen, she tossed her head and stamped her little foot with the air of a queen? And then how, on a sudden, her large eyes were filled with tears; and the grace with which she folded her arms across that charming bosom; and the tone—I hear it now—the deep, grave, penetrating tone in which, half angry, half afraid, she at once threatened us with her "Berto," and implored our respect? We did not care much for Mr Berto, certainly, but did we not swear, both together, that not a hair of her head should be hurt? And when, flattered by our involuntary devotion, she departed with a healthy, lively step, showing her small, smooth ankles, and now and then turning her profile to us and laughing as before, did we not, dashing blades as we thought ourselves, snuffle and blow our noses and shake hands without the least motive, like two fools? And afterwards, notwithstanding that gratuitous fit of friendship, did we not feel jealous of each other for three days, though neither of us could hope to see the little angel again? Yes, you remember it all. Well, just such another girl as that brings fruit to my door every morning.'
Wakefield's next book of importance, England and America (1833), is an undesigned proof that the advice of the Athenceum had been largely taken by the British public, and that the author knew it. It betrays the satisfaction of a man who feels that he has liquidated his accounts with society, and that past errors will not deprive him of the privilege of speaking his mind with the freedom of Figaro, and with a more extensive choice of topics. Like the Letter from Sydney, it is anonymous, but the writer's identity can have been no great mystery. It was published by Bentley, whom Wakefield accuses in a subsequent work of having taken advantage of his absence on the Continent to disfigure it with 'a puffing title.' This title certainly misleads; the book does not offer that close and accurate parallel between the two countries which the reader is naturally led to expect; but in truth the entire work somewhat disappoints from its desultoriness; it has not the unity and directness of purpose of its predecessors, but rather offers the miscellaneous reflections of an acute and powerful mind. The first chapter presents a brilliant description of the wealth of England, explained as the result of the combination of labour and capital, and of the minute subdivision of the former. The second chapter is devoted to an equally powerful, and unhappily equally accurate, description of the misery of the lower, and the harassed anxiety of the middle classes, followed by a retrospect of recent political occurrences, and an inquiry into the most likely means of averting the menaced revolution. These are, free trade in corn, the extension of trade with the East, and scientific colonization. The writer argues with great power for the total and immediate, rather than gradual, abolition of the corn laws. This view was held by so many of the scientific political economists of the day that it is very remarkable that their reasoning should have virtually produced no impression until taken up by a body of men little enamoured of abstract truth—the Lancashire manufacturers. The demonstration that the admission of foreign corn must produce a greatly extended demand for British manufactures had been perfect, but remained merely academical until the pocket gave it access to the head. The other side of the question—the danger of exclusive dependence upon foreign countries for the necessaries of life—is no more considered by Wakefield than by the Manchester School. He predicts, indeed, that America would grow grain cheaper than any other country, but the fabulous cheapness of transport by the power of steam could not then be anticipated, nor the consequent injury to British agriculture foreseen. The remarks on the China trade may be read with interest now that the question of opening up China has become of such importance. It is strange that nothing should be said about India; and none could then foresee that the Eastern countries, with their fabulous cheapness of labour, and the material at their doors, would manufacture on their own account, or on the account of foreign capitalists, with an energy and success which may yet convert Manchester to protection.
The most important part of the book, however, is Wakefield's re-statement of his theory of colonization, which he had been unable to exhibit scientifically in the Letter from Sydney on account of the lively and dramatic form in which that book is cast. As concerned the interests of the colonies, he had little to do but to set forth the case of the mischief caused by enormous land-holdings and the consequent scarcity and inefficiency of labour from its dispersal over too wide an area; but having now a foot at home as well as abroad, he is able to enter more fully into the case of the mother country, whose requisites in this point of view he sums up under three heads—extension of markets, relief from excessive numbers, enlargement of the field for employing capital—all of them objects which the system or no-system of colonization practised up to his time tended in but the slightest degree to promote. Whether his own theory was sound or unsound, he compelled men to think, and an era dates from him. This luminous chapter, being entitled 'The Art of Colonization,' has been frequently mistaken for the elaborate work on the subject published under the same title sixteen years afterwards, which is dated in many bibliographies 1833.
The style of England and America is less finished than that of most of Wakefield's writings, and the chapters wear less the appearance of literary essays than of imperfect reports or of memoranda for speeches. Effective as they are, they would have been more powerful still as oral deliverances. But this could never be. Ample as had been his atonement for the offence he had committed against society, he could not be safely brought forward for any open borough, and the nomination boroughs which might have procured him admission to Parliament disappeared contemporaneously with his entrance upon public life. He did, indeed, offer himself to the electors of Birmingham in 1836, but the appeal met with no response; the party managers were little likely to entrust their cause to one so obviously vulnerable. Could he have entered the Commons, he must sooner or later have fought his way to the Cabinet, and it may have been the bitterest part of his penalty to contemplate the success of inferior men in the career from which he had irrevocably excluded himself. Yet it was best as it was. But for his disaster it is extremely doubtful whether he would have been specially attracted to the colonial department of affairs. As a Member of Parliament he would have been obliged to apply his mind to a variety of subjects, and his energies might have been frittered away among them. Circumstances compelled the concentration of the discursive activities of his mind upon a single subject, and gave him the mission without which he might have gone down to posterity as a useful M.P. and a successful administrator, but not as a builder of Greater Britain. The cause of the colonies was at this time better served by wirepulling than by oratory. Our colonial heroes were no longer great voyagers and discoverers, nor even great administrators of distant dependencies, but the thinkers who worked out principles of colonization at home, and the organisers who impressed them upon public opinion. Both these characters were united in Wakefield in a surprising degree. What he was as a thinker we have seen, but his insight into the abstract science of colonization was no greater than his gift of controlling and managing men. No man knew better how to play upon the various human passions, from the loftiest philanthropy down to the most sordid self-seeking, capable of being enlisted in the support of a colonizing venture. None could make himself so readily all things to all men, none could so dexterously guide the inquiries of a Parliamentary committee to the desired point, or attract a patron, or inspire a newspaper. But the greater part of these subterranean activities never came to light, and cannot now be retrieved. Their really gigantic sum can only be inferred from comparatively scanty vestiges—enough, however, to show that the labours of colony-making would have excluded all possibility of attending to other subjects, or even of sharing in the ordinary committee work of the House of Commons.
Before becoming entirely engrossed with colonial subjects, Wakefield produced some pamphlets on social questions at home, only one of which is worthy of especial attention. The title, Swing Unmasked, happily conveys no idea to the present generation, who have not seen the systematic burnings of farm produce attributed in the slang of the perpetrators to Captain Swing,' and for which bad poor laws, bad corn laws, and the absence of all educational legislation were mainly responsible. It did not need Wakefield's sagacity to discover causes so near the surface, but few could have equalled the vividness of his picture of the prowling serf hugging the tinder-box that makes him terrible, and the ensuing reflections are as just as they are striking:—
'A Swing fire has taken place; what a commotion ensues in the parish! Is it credible that the pauper should not view with satisfaction the flurried steps and pale face of the rector, the assumed air of indifference, not half concealing the uneasiness of my lord who owns the soil on which the stacks were burnt, and the violent rage of a neighbouring squire, mixed with nervous indications? The powerful of his neighbourhood, before whom he used to tremble, now shake in their turn. He is anxiously noticed by well-dressed passers-by, who before treated him as a beast of the field, but now make anxious inquiries after his wants, and take pains to become acquainted with his peasant's nature. What is yet more to the purpose, a new scale of wages becomes the topic of his parish, and is probably adopted, after an understanding between the landlords, clergymen and tenants that rent and tithes shall be reduced in proportion as wages are raised. When his family ask for bread, they receive it, and at noon there is an unusual smell of bacon about the cottage. He has now firing enough to dry his clothes, which, before the stack was burnt, he used to put on of a morning as wet as when he had taken them off at night. Moreover, his rustic vanity is gratified by reading in the county paper a minute account of the deed that he has done. Lastly, when he returns home, thinking of what he has also read in that paper, as coming from the lips of a Parliament man, about "the urgent necessity of some permanent improvement in the condition of the poor," he becomes fonder than usual of his wife, and kinder to his children; and when they ask him why, he is prevented from speaking by what he would call a lump in the throat, but he answers, aside, with one great rude tear of joy. He has burnt a stack, and his heart (it has just been discovered that paupers have hearts), lately so poor and pinched, is now swelling with the strange pleasure of hope.'
Such observations, probably made at his brother-in-law's Suffolk parsonage, were calculated to nourish Wakefield's enthusiasm for colonization. He might well deem it a good deed to place the degraded serf where he might become a man; and if he did not think him fit to become a landed proprietor until he had done something to discharge his obligation to the benefactors who had planted him in a new soil with new hopes and new opportunities, such a view appears in no respect inconsistent with equity, humanity or common sense.
Wakefield was released in May 1830. He had throughout had to congratulate himself upon the loyal support of his family, who continued to recognise him as their natural chief notwithstanding the discredit he had brought upon them. His principal comforter during his captivity, however, appears to have been his cousin, John Head, who upon his liberation took him to his house at Ipswich, where his aged grandmother was verging towards the close of her long and useful life. Her admonitions and benediction, we may be sure, were not wanting to Wakefield, who after no long interval returned to London, to gather around him the more thoughtful of the readers of A Letter from Sydney, and to commence his career as a founder by founding the Colonization Society—the little leaven destined to leaven the whole lump.