PREFACE.
The chief object of this volume is to call the attention of the public to the advantages held out in the neglected colony of Western Australia to emigrants, to capitalists, and also to the younger branches of the higher classes, and to the middle orders, who, under existing circumstances, are unable to find employment adequate to their numbers, education, and habits. Incidentally the subject has called on the writer to shew that, up to this time, the colonial department of the English government has had neither system nor principles in the settlement of new colonies; the want of which has retarded, and is retarding, the formation of new communities in different parts of the world, and which, politically considered, have become necessary to the support of the manufacturing and mechanical era into which England has advanced beyond the possibility of return, or even of regulated and systematised progression.
Every work of this kind must, in great measure, be a compilation. The writer has carefully collated the mass of documents to which he has had access, and held conversations with many whose local knowledge and experience entitled them to respectful attention; and has endeavoured to give the results as correctly as he could. The Lists of the Proprietors, and other Returns, are faithful transcripts of the official documents, for the use of which he is indebted to Captain Sir James Stirling,
