Page:The new British province of South Australia.djvu/97

 luxuries which long habit has taught him to consider as necessaries. He obtains coolness for the body, but wants every thing else that would be of service to him,—a comfortable house, the company of his wife and children, pleasant society, and entertainment for the mind. Yet what is there to prevent the formation, in one of the southern colonies, of a sort of pleasure town, like one of our watering-places, where, within five or six weeks' sail of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta, the children of Anglo-Indians might, under the eye of their mother, obtain as good an education as at Brighton, and whither the Indian invalid might resort with the certainty of finding all that he could desire? There is nothing to prevent it, but the state of all the southern colonies,—the poverty and wildness of South Africa and Western Australia, and the horrid convict system of Van Diemen's Land and New South Wales. The establishment of such a town at the Swan-river was recommended to some of the founders of that miserable settlement; and though the project appear ridiculous now, when after five years the settlers do not raise enough food for themselves, still it is a project well deserving the attention of the founders of South Australia, whose aim it is to establish something widely different from any modern colony. The project, considering the