weary children into her covered tandem-cart; now mounting on horseback and galloping over a short cut through the hills to meet her weary caravan, with supper foraged from the hospitable settlers; it was in the midst of marshes in which she managed the discipline, the route, the commissariat, the hospital, and the billetting, all herself, with such aides-de-camp as each army happened to furnish, that she commenced another great work subsidiary to colonisation, the "Voluntary Statements of the People of New South Wales," for the use of the home country. These were statements in answer to the series of printed questions, taken down in the words of the informant, of which we shall give some examples at the end of this chapter.
They were written down in all manner of dwellings, but chiefly among the humbler; in cottages and bark huts; on the roadside; on the top of a hat; in the field, on a plough; in the forest, on the first log of a frugal bush servant's first freehold.
There were nearly eight hundred of these statements from natives of almost every county of the United Kingdom, from emigrants, from "old hands," and from ticket-of-leave men.
These records proved incontestably that Australia was a country in which any industrious man could thrive; that there was ample verge and room enough for millions; that land which squatters then and now assert to be only fit for sheep pasture would support yeomanry in comfort and independence. They laid bare much injustice, exhibited in a striking manner the demand and necessity for an increased female population, and presented a more perfect, truthful, and valuable picture of bush life, painted by servants and settlers, than had ever been drawn in travellers' tales or parliamentary blue books.
It was in consequence of the habit of collecting these statements that Mrs. Chisholm was able to tell the committee of the House of Lords in 1847:—"I never returned from a journey to the interior without gaining information which would enable me to provide for a second number; and it was frequently unnecessary to go into a district more than once; then I knew the character of the people and the sort of servants that would suit them, and it enabled me to advise people when they called at my residence to say, 'You go to such a place and I can guarantee you employment.' My first object was always to get one female emigrant placed: having succeeded in getting one female servant in a neighbourhood, I would leave the feeling to spread among this class. These girls eventually married best, for the parents were thankful if their son married her.
"One of the most serious impediments to transacting business of
