Page:Victoria, with a description of its principal cities, Melbourne and Geelong.djvu/178

 in the same period. These wondrous progressions apply more or less to the whole of our Australian settlements, but Melbourne is the centre of the movement. Last year it exported gold to the value of £12,000,000, and, from the last returns, the exports during the present year are of much larger quotation. The advances of the Australian colonies cannot be fully appreciated, unless we compare them with wealthy and long established colonies. Thus, Victoria alone consumes more of our exports than all our colonies in North America. And these exports comprise not only the choicest works of our manufactures, and all that relates to the luxuries of life, but its refinements also. The whole of our exports of printed books, for example, in the year 1854, amounted to £445,000; of this Australia took more than a third, the United States took less than a third; that Melbourne takes a large share in the exports of this nature may be concluded from the fact that one bookseller in that city alone took 200 copies of the first historical essay of the day (Alison's). Such facts are among the most gratifying characteristics of the country, and show more clearly than anything else the standing of the emigrants as a class. It contains a large number of well-educated men, who, in leaving their country, have not left its literature behind them. Melbourne has its daily and weekly papers, and its Illustrated News, and its Punch; its opera-house and theatres; its musical saloons and promenades; delightful parks