Page:The State and Position of Western Australia.djvu/122

 principles propounded in an article which forms No. III. of the Appendix to Archbishop Whately’s “Thoughts on Secondary Punishments,” and which consists of “Suggestions for the Improvement of our System of Colonization,” written by a friend of that Prelate. After noticing the instruction to be derived from the ancients, with respect to the settlement and growth of colonies, and contrasting their success with that of modern European States, the writer thus continues:—

“The main cause of this difference may be stated in a few words. We send out colonies of the limbs, without the belly and head;—of needy persons, many of them mere paupers, or even criminals; colonies made up of a single class of persons in the community, and that the most helpless, and the most unfit to perpetuate our national character, and to become the fathers of a race whose habits of thinking and feeling shall correspond to those which, in the mean time, we are cherishing at home. The ancients, on the contrary, sent out a representation of the parent state—colonists from all ranks. We stock the farm with creeping and climbing plants, without any trees of firmer growth for them to entwine round. A hop-ground left without poles, the plants matted confusedly together, and scrambling on the ground in tangled heaps, with here and there some clinging to rank thistles and hemlocks, would be an apt emblem of a modern colony. They began by nominating to the honourable office of captain or leader of the colony one of the chief men, if not the chief man of the state,—like the queen bee leading the workers. Monarchies provided a prince of the blood royal; an aristocracy its choicest nobleman; a democracy its most influential citizen. These naturally carried along with them some of their own station in life—their companions and