Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/22

 wild beasts threaten or affright the timid. The aborigines are few, and quick to learn submission.

The hard work of colonisation has been done; the road has been smoothed, and made ready; yet is there ample verge and room enough for millions to follow in the track of the thousands who have conquered and subdued the earth, and planted and reared, not only corn and cattle, but an English race, imbued with English traditions, taught by English literature, enjoying English institutions, and practising English love of order and obedience to law while cherishing the firmest attachment to liberty.

With these elements of social and political prosperity, only needing for full development a tide of population which this country can well spare, it cannot be doubted that a very few years will transform what our fathers considered the meanest, into the greatest of Britain's dependencies; and that, at a period when Continental Europe seems retrograding into deeper than medieval darkness and despotism; side by side in friendly rivalry with the great American republic, we shall realise the threat of the baffled statesman (when the rising liberties of Spain were crushed under the armies of the soon-to-be-exiled Bourbon), and "call a new world into existence to redress the balance of the old" —a new field for the employment of able-bodied industry, which, overflowing from the crowded competition of Europe, may there help on the march of unrestricted commerce by digging capital out of the soil, or, at less exercise of strength, produce choice raw material for the triumphs of machinery.

For some fifteen years armies of emigrants have annually proceeded in greater or less numbers to the Australian colonies, yet it is but recently, that the general public have cared to inquire more than how bread was to be earned or how capital invested. Late discoveries have invested these dependencies with new importance in the eyes of all who follow with interest the progress of the Anglo-Saxon race. The time seems propitious for attempting not only to describe the features, the resources, and the prospects of these colonies, but to trace the series of political, social, and commercial events by which an insignificant penal settlement in the most distant quarter of the globe, supported at great cost by the parent state, has given birth to a cluster of prosperous self-supporting colonies, largely contributing, directly find indirectly, to the imperial revenues, by the production of wool and gold, by the consumption of British manufactures, and by the employment of any amount of labour that can be landed on their shores.