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 sh