Page:The Present State and Prospects of the Port Phillip District of New South Wales.djvu/98

 cheerful, contented persons, of cultivated minds, but unsophisticated feelings, are worth whole shiploads of discontented people, who underrate every thing colonial because it is not English, and in whose minds the recollections of the exciting dissipations of a highly artificial state of society destroy all relish for those simple duties which a more natural one imposes, and for those purer enjoyments which nature so bountifully spreads out for such as are capable of appreciating them.

How many men possessed of capital sufficient to give them the means of profitable employment in the colonies, spend a wretched life in some English country town, or watering place, in that most miserable of hypocrisies—the attempt to keep up appearances, struggling perhaps to bring up an interesting family to all the wretchedness of genteel beggary. How many young men, too, with the same means waste the best years of their life, and fritter away their energies in frivolous pursuits, for want of some way of employing them with a fair prospect of remuneration. The life of such men is scarcely worthy of being called living, but rather a prolonged contrivance for the killing of time—"Verum enimvero is demum mihi vivere, atque animâ frui videtur, qui aliquo negotio, intentus, præclari facinoris, aut artis bonæ famam quærit." The colonies do not indeed afford a field for the performance of illustrious deeds; but they do open a path for useful and honourable employment; and it is well worth the while of such men as I have alluded to, seriously to take into consideration the prudence of at once taking a bold step, and their means of doing so.