him.  Just as his fresh face and bluff British manner concealed the subtle mind ever spinning webs and weaving plans, so, behind and above all his plots and dodging, was the high dream and ideal to which he was faithful, and which redeemed his life.  He saw, and made the commonplace people about him see, that colonization was a national work worthy of system, attention, and the best energies of England.  The empty territories of the Empire were no longer to be treated only as gaols for convicts, fields for negro slavery, or even as asylums for the persecuted or refuges for the bankrupt and the social failures of the Mother Country.  To Wakefield the word “colony” conveyed something more than a back yard into which slovenly Britain could throw human rubbish, careless of its fate so long as it might be out of sight.

His advocacy revived “Ships, Colonies, Commerce!” as England’s motto.  But for colonies to be worthy, they must be, not fortuitous congregations of outcasts, but orderly bands of representative British citizens, going forth into the wilderness with some consciousness of a high mission.  From the outset his colonies were to be civilized communities where men of culture and intellect need not find themselves companionless exiles.  Capital and labour, education and religion, were all to work together as in the Mother Country, but amid easier, happier surroundings.  For Wakefield conceived of his settlements not as soulless commercial outposts, but as free, self-governing communities.

How was all this to be brought about?  Whence was the money to come?  Whence the organizing power?  At that point came in Wakefield’s conception of the sale of waste lands at a “sufficient price.”  He saw the immense latent value of the fertile deserts of the Empire.  He grasped the full meaning of the truth that the arrival of a population with money and industry instantly gives good land a value.  His discernment showed him the absurdity of giving colonial lands away in indefinite areas to the first chance grabbers, and the mistake of supposing that wage labour would not be required in young countries.  His theory, therefore, was that colonizing associations should be formed in England—­not primarily to make money; that these bodies should hold tracts of land in the colonies as capital; that the sale of these lands at a “sufficient price” to intending colonists, selected for character and fitness, should provide the funds for transporting the colony across the earth, for establishing it in working order on its land, and for recruiting it with free labour.

The numerous ex post facto assailants of Wakefield’s theory usually assume that he wished to keep labour divorced from the soil and in a state of permanent political and industrial inferiority.  That is sheer nonsense.  There are few more odd examples of the irony of fate in colonial history than that the man who warred against the convict system, fought the battle of colonial self-government, was ever the