regardless how they may affect injuriously others, is, if not very just, very comfortable.

The New Zealanders complained thus:-" Your horses damage our potatoes." The settlers replied, briefly, “Fence your potatoes in." Said the New Zealanders, more justly, "Our potatoes do not come to your horses to do them injury: fence in your horses."

So it was in Australia Felix. The new settlers found the country very much to their liking. There was abundance of not entirely unoccupied, but of the smoothest, park-like country, thinly sprinkled over with the most beautiful trees; water, often good and abundant, and often otherwise. The country, moreover, was thinly occupied by dusky natives, and plentifully stocked with wild animals, their food. Here the new settlers made themselves quite at home. All that they wanted was the land entirely to themselves-room; and that they found, for cattle and sheep to range over almost illimitably; to see their flocks and herds grazing in quiet; to be themselves, with their sheep and cattle, at ease; in the midst of plenty; satisfied with the present, and looking on cheerfully to the future.

But there were the natives; and they, also, wanted something principally to range the country in the old hereditary manner; to find game where they had always found it; to kill it where and when it suited them; in short, like the new race of people, to have the country wholly to themselves.

The settlers were not always unjust, or inhuman; but they were attended by servants, as stockmen, shepherds, hutkeepers, &c. ; men frequently of the most reckless, debased, and desperate character; and these became the pioneers of-not civilisationbut of strife, jealousy-conflict, and depopulation. Most of these men were convicts, assigned servants; others were ticket-ofleave men; and the rest emancipated convicts: wretches who had been expelled from their own country for the worst of crimes. And these were our representatives of European civilisation-on whom it devolved to impress upon the Australian aboriginal people our character, manners, customs, and religion. It is easy to imagine the fatal results of convict and native intercourse; lust, and reckless cruelty on the one hand, and recrimination and deadly revenge on the other. Avarice amongst the worst of the settlers would also have its effect.

That these fatal conflicts took place very frequently without the settlers' knowledge, much less participation, is a fact; known in their results only, when the fatality was not only amongst the natives, and in the destruction or dispersion of

flocks and herds. Also knowledge of the murder of the aborigines has been revealed by remorse-stricken convicts in the most horrible death-bed confessions.

Of the great value of cattle and sheep; of the capital invested in them; of their value to the settlers individually; or of their momentous importance to mankind generally; the aborigines could not be expected to know anything-not even, in most instances, that they were property at all. They well know the nature of hunger, and how to appease it. Other idea of property in animals, except by capture, they had none. Formerly game was everywhere abundant, open to all, and had been killed by all indiscriminately.

This circumstance was sure to lead to great errors in the new order of things—much conflict and mutual suffering-before there could be any amount of knowledge imparted to the natives on these mighty interests of all civilised nations-Meum and Tuum-and have often been written for their instruction in blood.

It must always be a subject of the most painful regret to the better portion of our kind, that where we, as a people, in participation of what there was good in this, as in other lands, have gathered to ourselves its benefits, its blessings, that we, in so doing, have not only not been any blessing to the people of it, by imparting any of our advantages to them, but have rained upon them the contagion; have diffused amongst them the pestilence of our vices; have demoralised them by our contact; and have rewarded them-a Christian and magnanimous returnwith disease and death.

That this has been the result of convict contact with the New Hollanders, preventing almost entirely all possibility of future good; closing the field almost universally against the Christian missionary; no one well acquainted with Australia and its aboriginal tribes can deny.

EMIGRATION.

"It is lamentable to think what blunders have been committed from time to time in the management of our Colonies."

Author of "SAM SLICK."

There is scarcely any human act so important in its consequences as that of exchanging one country for another; especially in parents, who must be the authors of good or evil, not only as it regards their own success or failure, but extensively to others who have not yet acquired the habit and responsibility of think

ing and acting for themselves. For difficult, indeed, is it for such, if disappointed, to retrace the step they have taken.

Seriously responsible then must be the vocation of the visitor and describer of foreign and distant countries, who must be the cause, the living and moving impulse, the light and guide unto emigration. It will become the most imperative duty of such writer to make himself intimately conversant not only with the soil and climate of the scene of his operations; not alone with its pastoral, agricultural, and other capabilities; or the salubrity of its atmosphere, things in themselves vitally important; not only how far its rivers and springs and the quality of its water fit it for being thickly inhabited; but to employ his faculties sedulously in the discovery of whatever affects, or has affected materially the general healthfulness and prosperity of such emigration field; and promptly and boldly to lay bare the sources of evil, careless of any mortal consequence to himself that may result from the performance of a great public duty.

Not only has the writer to do justice to his countrymen, to himself, and the God of the whole earth; he is accountable, it is his duty, to give a just report of the unseen land.

When I first decided on emigration to Port Phillip, and made known my intention, the numerous requests which flowed in upon me, from persons with whom I had previously no acquaintance, that I would give them information of one kind or other with regard to the place of my destination, when I should have it in my power to do so, caused me to consider seriously, how extremely onerous such situation must be; whilst the determination many expressed of being guided by my report, made it certainly more so. On this account I was careful from the first not to say anything that could give a false gloss, or poetical colouring, to any of my accounts of the objects that might present themselves to my notice, or of the country generally; yet, thus cautiously guarded, such of my letters as were from time to time made public in England, caused me to be considered in the colony as the author of misrepresentation; and, on the other hand, I was accused by a few emigrants of having misled them by a rate of colonial wages, through the publication of a letter never intended to be made public.

So great and rapid had been the reduction in the price of labour, and so fearful the disappointment of bounty emigrants, that the considerate path I had marked out for myself, and the fact of my never having recommended emigration, afforded me great satisfaction.

I shall never forget the description given me by one of those

persons, of the warmth of expectancy with which the passengers on board the Westminster, and the all-eyed anxiety which absorbed them on approaching the coast of Australia, to behold from the highest possible elevation of their vessel, as from Mount Pisgah, the Promised Land, the region of Hope and Happiness. When it dawned upon them, great was the sensation, and loud and simultaneous the acclamations of delight. The long line of elevated coast westward; Mount Macedon, Arthur's Seat, Station Peak and the Barraboul hills inland; the smooth outline of almost naked foreground around the Port Phillip Bay and about the Heads; the beautiful expanse of inland water; the ample and pleasant ranges of pastoral country, by turns occupied their attention, and were the subjects of endless rapturous commentary. The rich cope of variegated sky, the exhilarating purity of the atmosphere, the pleasant breeziness, and the bright sunshine, fresh reaches of the country growing upon them momentarily-all combined to form a picture and a feeling as they entered the Heads and glided smoothly up the bay, to whose felicity there seemed no termination.

A boat neared them: in it an important personage-the pilot. Opportunity was watched for anxiously, and obtained by some one of the passengers; inquiry was made as to the condition of the colony and the rate of wages. How blank the face of the inquirer! He has first felt the power of an extinguisher! intelligence that has

"Soberised the vast and wild delight."

Thence went low careful whisperings upon deck, circulated eagerly, followed by a great quietness. By and by some of them sauntered about listlessly; others hung thoughtfully over the bulwarks, all with lengthened and haggard visages, none caring to look out upon the new country; England, a place forgotten in their happiness, coming back by degrees into their memories and into their hearts.

Many of the emigrants would naturally take the Home-Circular from their pockets and read such poetry as this: "This fine colony.". This delightful and prosperous colony.""That fine quarter of the colony."-" Labourers are scarcer than ever; if one thousand couples of labourers and mechanics arrived here every month, they would all be absorbed without lowering wages!!!"

"The demand for female servants is enormous, they get 201. to 251., and such as can cook 301.; all living of course as their employers."

If one thousand single women (eighteen to thirty years of

age) were to arrive in 1840, I would undertake that they would find husbands in a short time."

This was strong poetical seasoning! What are the facts? The bounty emigrants had to be employed by the Government until they could procure work elsewhere; wages did come down enormously; and a vast quantity of the marrying young women are yet out at service unmarried.

As it regards the emigration from England to Australia Felix, of British capitalists, the most momentous inquiry of these must be, "What is the condition of the province? in what can capital be safely invested? and what certainty is there of any adequate return? The distance is great, and the advantages ought to be as great and palpable !"

To the first query we regret to say, that it is the only AngloAustralian colony that has no domestic Government. Its Land Fund has been a robbery upon it of one hundred and eighty-nine thousand pounds, for which it has received not a farthing of return. Twenty thousand per annum surplus revenue is also drained out of it. This data sufficiently accounts for its wretched political position, and its almost nothing of a circulating medium.

Good soil and good water there are; and, however scanty these may be, considering the extent of the country, they will be sufficient for all demands for a century at least, whatever may be the tide of emigration. In England many a sterileseeming district has been rendered by cultivation productive and delightful; and so it will be in Australia. Water, where there now seems none, will be found in abundance by digging wells. What the country may eventually become it is impossible to predict; so we must satisfy ourselves for the present with Campbell's augury

"As in a cradled Hercules we trace

The lines of empire in thy infant face."

Of the climate we have said enough elsewhere. Of its healthfulness as an emigration-field; of what it is, and what it is not, something remains to be said.

Our first consideration must be, what it is not. This reflection sends us back through the old and money-accumulating times of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land. We think of the pleasant progresses made by the Governors of those times, when they moved about the land royally, visiting their people in hall and cottage, freely distributing their favours, reprehending the idle, but most assiduously rewarding the industrious. The mind loves to escape from the present universal pinch-fit