Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/88

 lxx%m ^.V INTRODUCTORY The perverse tenacity with which Euglishmen generally have held on to their nnpleasant impressions with respect to this country, is one of the most conspicuous features in its social history. It would not be too much perhaps to say that it has hardly yet overcome the inveterate prejudice which, originating in the gloomy accounts of its earliest explorers, led one of the most speculative of Frenchmen in the last century to pronounce it unfit for colonisation, and subsequently condemned it to the dismal fate of a penal settlement, to be populated by British criminals for over half a century. Banks could find only two men in his time to whom he could appeal for confirmation of his own opinion in its favour; and the proportion of those who believed in it to those who did not, increased at a very slow rate for many years afterwards. Undoubtedly the publication of Phillip's despatches did a great deal to justify all that Banks had said ; and the oflScial volume in which they were given to the world was probably published for the purpose of justifying the Government in the eyes of the public, and pacifying the unfriendly critics of their action. But there were other pens besides Phillip's at work ; and the accounts written by them for the benefit of friends in England met with equal publicity and were read perhaps with much more confidence. They related the bitter experience of men whose sufEerings, brought about by the mismanagement of the Government, were invariably debited to the unfortunate colony, for which in most cases they had nothing better to say than the Israelites of old had to say for Egypt. It was not unnatural that men trembling for their very existence should feel nothing but despair in their hearts when they sat down to describe the scene of their misery ; and that they should rail at the deceptive visions on which their Digitized by Google