began to think that the crisis was over, that the district was clearing the breakers so long threatening to swamp it; and that at last there was a good time coming. The year's returns shewed only a very small increase of population and births, a decrease in marriages and deaths, and an addition to departures. Land sales had diminished by more than half; live stock had increased, though not so much as it ought. Imports had decreased, whilst exports shewed an increase.
Such is a cursory view of the condition of the colony at the most peculiar stage of its early history. It suffered, so to speak, from a surfeit of excesses, and the regimen which adversity had for a time prescribed, was working off the noxious humours and pointing to convalescence. In fact, the vigorous young patient was "suffering a recovery," and, warned by the tribulation of the past, was righting itself and preparing for that future in which the colonists always implicitly believed. Little did they dream of the revolution which the coming decade would work in the land of their adoption—by which the earth would give up its golden treasures, and cause such a social and material disruption as would render 1843, when compared with 1853, as a mole-hill is to a mountain; and much less could the most sanguine imagine that many of them would live to see the "unnamed village," in less than four decades more, undergo such a magical transmutation as to make it the metropolis of the Southern Hemisphere, inviting all nations to several displays of the industrial resources of the world in an International Exhibition Temple, the erection of which cost a quarter of a million of Victorian money.
