Page:Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen's Land.djvu/31

 of his presentation, his Excellency, Sir George Gipps, proceeded to the Council Chamber, for the purpose of opening the session, and declaring the purposes for which he had summoned the members. At an early hour the house presented an animated and brilliant appearance; most of the seats in the body of the chamber being filled with elegantly-dressed ladies, amongst whom we noticed Lady Gipps, Lady O'Connell, Mrs. Deas Thomson, Mrs. George M'Leay, Mrs. C. M. O'Connell, and the female part of most of the families of the members of council and their friends. A guard of honour was drawn up in fashion of those in London; but nowhere did its lamps and the numerous lights in its windows, which reflected upon the crowd, betray any of those signs of a corrupt state of society common to the streets of other capitals. Since then how many nights like the first did I not witness, in which the silence, the feeling of perfect security, and the delicious freshness of the air, mingled with nothing that could break the charm of a solitary walk! At ten o'clock all the streets are deserted: to the bustling industry of the day succeeds a happy repose; and to that again a day of fresh struggles, successes, or failures! Extraordinary race! the only people who—to speak the language of one's own craft—seem subjected to atomic laws, immutable and independent of the varieties of climate; aggregating by a kind of molecular attraction, constantly in the same order; and expanding, however dispersed, into a similar social structure, thus everywhere preserving those properties and tendencies which nature assigns to their primitive form. Other races, like true children of the soil, identify themselves with it, draw from it their sustenance, their power, and their nationality; call it country; love and cherish it as such, and cling to its bosom, though at the cost of freedom, of comfort, of property, and even of life. Banished from it, they become but lost wanderers, and soon degenerate; like the alpine rose, which when transplanted even to more genial regions loses its blossoms, and sends forth only thorns. The hardy nature of the Anglo-Saxon race is proof against the effects of transplantation: for it does not depend on the soil either for its character or its nationality: the Anglo-Saxon reproduces his country wherever he hoists his country's flag. The United Kingdom is far from furnishing a just idea of this race. The traveller there is like one buried in the entrails of a colossus. It is in the United States, in the West Indies, in the factories of South America and China, in the East Indies, and in this town of Sydney, that the prodigious expansion of the Anglo-Saxon life, the gigantic dimensions of its stature and the energy of its functions, are fully perceived and appreciated.—MS. Journal of the Author. B 2