In Australia, as in Canada, we see the vital importance of good land
laws, and can measure the misery which resulted in Ireland from an
agrarian system incalculably more absurd and unjust than anything known
in any other part of the Empire. The stagnation of Western Australia was
originally due to the cession of huge unworkable estates to a handful of
men. South Australia was retarded for some little time from the same
cause, and Victoria and New South Wales were all hampered in the same
way. It was not a question, as in Ireland, and to a less degree in
Prince Edward Island, of the legal relations between the landlord and
tenant of lands originally confiscated, but of the grant and sale of
Crown lands. Yet the after-results, especially in the check to tillage
and the creation of vast pasture ranches, were often very similar.[33]

Duffy was not the only colonial statesman to apply Irish experience to
the problems of newly settled countries. An Englishman who became one of
the greatest of colonial statesmen and administrators, the Radical
Imperialist, Sir George Grey, began life as a Lieutenant on military
service in Ireland in the year 1829, and came away sick with the scenes
he had witnessed at the evictions and forced collections of tithes
where his troops were employed to strengthen the arm of the law.
"Ireland," his biographer, Professor Henderson, tells us,[34] "was to
him a tragedy of unrealized possibilities." The people had "good
capacities for self-government," but Englishmen "showed a vicious
tendency to confuse cause and effect," and attributed to inherent
lawlessness what was a revolt against bad economic conditions. "All that
they or their children could hope for was to obtain, after the keenest
competition, the temporary use of a spot of land on which to exercise
their industry"; "for the tenant's very improvements went to swell the
accumulations of the heirs of an absentee, not of his own." "Haunted by
the Irish problem," Grey made it his effort first in South Australia,
and afterwards in New Zealand, where he was both Governor and Premier at
various times, to secure the utmost possible measure of Home Rule for
the colonists, and, in pursuance of a policy already inaugurated by
Edward Gibbon Wakefield, to establish a land system based, not on
extravagant free grants, or on private tenure, but on sales by the State
to occupiers at fair prices. The aim was to counteract that excessive
accumulation of peop