Smaller farms than five thousand or six thousand acres can frequently be purchased, as well as spots for building near towns. Builders, carpenters, masons, &c. cannot possibly have a finer field.

The transfer or conveyance of landed property is easy, cheap, and secure. The amount of capital required for a large tillage farm, and on which cattle could be depastured, to form an additional source of profit, would be about £1500, paid, we will suppose, in cash, to be distributed as follows:

-

0 0

£ S. d. Purchase of farm of 6000 acres, including buildings 1000 Transfer dues to be paid to Government at 4 per

cent. on fees &c. on conveyance

50 0 0 112 10 0 5 0 0 25 0 0 102 10 0

50 cows at £2 5s. each

Implements, furniture, &c.

100 0 0

100 slaughter sheep and goats and 100 breeding do. for slaughter, at 6s. each

60 0

Seeds

20 0

£1475 0 0

It is not unusual for two or three persons to combine in a purchase.

A farm exclusively adapted for cattle will return 22 per cent. after paying all expenses.

The larger the capital of the sheep farmer, of course within reasonable limits, if employed prudently, the better; but £2000 may be considered adequate for a handsome beginning, while £3000 establishes him most enviably, and with the certainty of A reference to the article Wool, at pp. 170 to 186, will exhibit the prospects held out to the Cape sheep farmer. The following may be taken as an estimate of the capital required in this branch of the business :

success.

£ 8. d.

Purchase of a farm of 6000 acres, with buildings 1000 0 0 Transfer dues to Government at 4 per cent., and

costs of conveyance

1000 ewes at 10s.

10 rams at £5

5 do. of pure blood, at £10.

Carried forward

50 0

0 0

50

0

50

0

But in both these cases, it must be observed that the cost of the farm will not have to be paid at once, but most likely may be allowed to remain on interest for an unlimited period, as already observed. Two or three persons making up this sum are able to work such a farm to great advantage.

HINTS TO IMMIGRANT FARMERS.

In the first place, I should certainly recommend his selection of the Eastern Province of the colony for the sphere of his future labours and abode. It has the advantage of being more essentially an English settlement. Albany itself is almost entirely peopled by English-born people or their offspring. Utenhay, although not so exclusively English, has a large and rapidlygrowing population of the same kind. Somerset has also a considerable proportion, scattered at no distant intervals over her large surface. Graf Reinet is, in several parts, filling up with the most intelligent of our British population, and in Colesberg and Cradock they are also becoming numerous.

Englishmen are found in almost every farm of the frontier, however remote. The English mechanic may be traced in the buildings he has reared, in the English language, which he has taught the younger children, or in some pleasant recollection his visit has left behind him; for it is gratifying to be able to record that between the Dutch and the English the greatest cordiality of sentiment prevails. From these circumstances, particularly in the Eastern Province, the language is very generally diffused. English manners, English modes of thinking, and English independence, are making rapid progress through the whole length and breadth of the land. I would recommend the new settler,

also, on his arrival, to pause before he makes a purchase, or commences his establishment. Living is not expensive, and whatever the cost, it will be well spent if the new comer employs the time to look about him and consult the more experienced; he should visit the several farms (travelling not being expensive), and make the most profitable use of his own ears and eyes for a month or two, ere he take any step which may be imprudent. Several young men, who have immigrated lately, have very prudently employed themselves on the farms of the older sheep farmers, there to learn a pursuit which is so widely different in the details of its management from the same branch of farming at home.

I should recommend him not to purchase waste or unoccupied Government lands. Many estates may be bought, already built upon, and brought into some state of cultivation, sometimes for a sum less than the original cost of the erections, and which the Dutch proprietors have been willing to part with, in order to join their countrymen at Natal, or frequently because the owner has several belonging to him. But even should the immigrant have to pay, somewhat more than it would cost him to reclaim a fresh farm from the wilderness, he would still be the gainer, in having immediate possession of a property planted on a tried spot, and in being saved the trouble, discomfort, and endless vexation of creating a new home in a waste land. An Albany settler of 1820, who has had to undergo the annoyances here adverted to, may well presume to give advice on such a topic.

In making the purchase of his estate, he need not place so great a stress upon the immediate vicinity of a market as he would in Britain. If the roads are not irremediably bad, he may put up with the difficulties of distance, the evils of which are not so great in the colony as elsewhere, and more particularly if his produce be wool, or some such article, which is of considerable value, and easily conveyed in the country waggons. In visiting the market-town, he travels in his own waggon, a vehicle usually fitted up with all the conveniences of a house; he has to pay no toll-keeper on his route, but brings the produce of his industry up to the market scales without a single impost. If he has not the enjoyment of inns on the road, he has no long-drawn tavern bills to pay and no inducements to irregularities or extravagance;

but under skies the most balmy, often amid the most beautiful snatches of scenery, he enjoys his hearty meal, cooked by his driver, at the waggon side, to which health, contentment, and appetite, give the highest seasoning. No crusty landholder threatens to send him to the cage for cutting a stake to boil his tea-kettle, or to send his hungry cattle to the village pound for intruding upon or nibbling the green sod; fuel, water, and pasturage, although protected from wanton outrage, being in general considered common to travellers. No officious gamekeeper calls upon him to surrender his gun when he has shot a partridge or hare; every wild animal, by custom, is considered the property of all, from the naked savage up to the itinerant judge on circuit, or his Excellency the Governor when making his "progress" through her Majesty's colony. The luxury of this free mode of life, its exemption from restraint, from the insolence of office, the impertinencies of wealth, and the palpable manifestations of power, render a South African waggon trip enviable by the free-born Englishman.

SECTION II.

ADVANTAGES OF THE COLONY TO LABOURERS AND THE LABOUR QUESTION.

FAVOURABLE as are the capabilities of this colony for the profitable employment of a very large additional influx of capital, its chief and most urgent requirement at the present moment is, like that of our other settlements, labour, a steady and continuous supply of which would equally benefit the colony, the mother country, and the immigrant himself. Nor has this demand only grown up in these later days; the settlers of Albany, in 1825, five years after their arrival, finding the roots of the young colony had taken firm hold, and that the brightest prospects were gradually disclosing themselves, invited the home government, by a public memorial, to send out a fresh supply of emigrants to share with them the success they were achieving, and help them to develope still further the immense natural resources of this fine country. That appeal however, like many others subsequently made, fell upon deaf or unwilling ears, and

being confined to an official channel (for at that time the settlers were not entrusted with the use of a press), the said memorial seems never to have reached the ears of their countrymen, who were taught to believe, even by respectable publications, that the settlement at Algoa Bay as it was denominated, had totally failed; a part of the unfortunate people had perished from the effects of the climate, another portion were destroyed by their savage neighbours, some few by wild beasts, and the remainder dispersed to the four winds of heaven. Despite these absurd fictions, some friends and relatives of the early settlers ventured from time to time to link their fate with their connexions in the colony, without however assisting to supply the labour market, but embarrassing it still more, as they rose rapidly from servitude to be masters and landed proprietors, and then required and implored additional aid for themselves.

Previous to the year 1828 the amount of the servile population of the colony could not be rated at less than 70,000 souls, including women and children, 34,000 of whom were Hottentots, and the remainder slaves; but even this large population were inadequate to the wants of the colonists, who were in numbers about equal to the other two. By the laws then existing, the Hottentots were subjected to several very unjust restraints upon their personal liberty, among which was one obliging them, failing to shew they had any settled place of abode or ostensible means of subsistence, immediately to enter before a magistrate into a contract of service, the effect of which, with their improvident and wandering habits, was to force almost the whole race into servitude. In this year an ordinance purporting to be "for improving the condition of Hottentots and other free people of colour," was promulgated, and took the full force of law in the beginning of 1829; but this benevolent measure intended to emancipate the Hottentots from some real, but much more seeming, oppression, had an immediate evil effect upon the labour market, as well as upon the objects of its intended protection. Injudicious friends succeeded in alienating the mutual good will between the employers and employed, by representing the former as monsters of cruelty, and by stimulating the latter to the indulgence of vindictive feelings, a false estimate of their newly-acquired freedom was instilled into the minds of the Hottentots, and the