very soil of the several townships, which I advised him to send in boxes to be analyzed in England. A goodly number of stanch άρχηγοι are collected round your committee table; all men of some substance, and, above all, of much piety. The bishop's letter is read pro formâ as a regulator and drag chain of the undue velocity of emigrant imaginations in haste to be rich or happy. The meeting begin to calculate—3l. an acre is a large sum to give for land, and one acre will only feed four sheep; their wool will weigh about 12 pounds; and we shall be lucky to get from 7d. to 9d. per pound from the merchants at Port Cooper, so that the clear profits cannot well be more than 6d. per pound, or 6s. for the acre; that is, just 10 per cent, on our purchase money. Well, so long as we can live and bring up our families, we have no wish to make fortunes. In fact, the school, the church, and clergyman, are the true interest for the outlay, and not the produce of the land or the increase of flocks and herds; for this profit has found its limits in the Australian colonies by an excess of all the necessaries of life, and by reducing nine-tenths of the settlers to be their own tallow-chandlers.
Who is for Oxford? Who is for Mandeville? Who is for Stratford? is the cry of the trusty άρχηγοι, or conductors, who are plying for passengers to their respective townships. 'A fine country, Sir.' Church spires as thick as in Lincolnshire; schools in every village.' 'No fear of the children breaking their necks in birdsnesting.' 'Fine country for a hardy man that can do without fire.' 'Town acres let by the season for quail-shooting.' 'Mutton so fat that the sailors of the Acheron could not eat it.' 'Did you never taste a Port Cooper cheese? The best cheese in the world next to Stilton.' Such will be some of the various 'protreptics' which the άρχηγοι, each according to his own fancy, will glean from our reports. But some grave old gentleman in the corner will call out—'My good friends, let me advise you not to go out expecting to find everything to your mind; but trusting that, by God's blessing upon the colonizing energies of the Anglo-Saxon race, you will find the means of solid comfort in the only form in which it can give you true pleasure—as the reward of honest industry, and in answer to prayer. You will see spires and school-houses springing up in all places, for money will do that: but money will not make faithful preachers or fruitful hearers. Money will not make children obey their parents, or keep the commandments of God. From the very first, you must have a social compact one with another; the Oxford leader with the Oxford clergyman; and the Mandeville leader with the Mandeville clergyman; and all the leaders, and all the clergymen, with all their bands of labouring men and settlers, that they all go out to found, so far as God may be with them, a Christian colony; that they must agree to support one another—'like people, like priest'—in every good and holy usage of their mother church; and as they will leave their native country amidst the prayers and blessings of all whose names are already written on the land of their adoption, so their course of devotion must be carried on on shipboard with their own loved and chosen chaplain, till they see their own bishop, or one who will be to them as their own, standing on the beach to welcome them on their arrival; that their first act may be prayer and thanksgiving, and that the first building into which they enter may be the house of God;
Commentary on the preceding by the Editor of 'The Times.'
(Leading Article, December 19th, 1849.)
It is now two or three years since a very grand design was very quietly announced under the name of the Canterbury Settlement, in New Zealand. It was to be purely a Church of England community, and the prominent part taken in the project by Mr. Godley, a man of great colonial information, gave some assurance that it was not a mere pious Utopia. Some remarks which we ventured to make on it were suggested rather by kind wishes than sanguine expectations, and, to say the truth, we hardly expected ever to hear of the scheme, except in a glowing prospectus and a pompous list of patrons. It is, then, with agreeable surprise that we find the Canterbury Settlement an actual topographical division
