hiring servants in the country were the applications for wives. Shepherds left their sheep and would come for miles for this purpose, with their certificates of good character, and of money deposited in the savings banks, and list of their stock, and even bank notes. I had more than forty applications of this kind in two years. One man, according to a note in my register-book, who came down to Sydney for a wife, was very anxious to know 'when we should have a new governor who would attend to matters of consequence like that."
The governor took a different view of the subject, for when, in the early days of the "Home Protection," it was suggested to him that many of the forlorn girls if sent into the interior would marry well, "His excellency drew himself up to his full height, and exclaimed indignantly, 'What, Mrs. Chisholm! is it my business to find wives for bush servants?'" He might have done worse.
In 1845 Mrs. Chisholm was examined before a committee of the Legislative Council, on the best means of promoting emigration, the whole distress having been absorbed, and the demand for labour being urgent. She then produced a few of the "Voluntary Statements."
In the same year she published a "Prospectus of a Work to be entitled 'Voluntary Information from the People of New South Wales, respecting the Social Condition of the Middle and Working Classes in the Colony/ with the view of furnishing the labourer, the mechanic, and the capitalist with trustworthy information, and pointing out obstructions to immigration that ought to be eradicated." She writes:—
"Few persons, if any, are more intimately acquainted with the actual condition of the working classes than I am. Silence, therefore, would be culpable. The servant in Sydney, the shepherd, and the small settler in the bush are known to me; I have visited their homes and witnessed their trials and deprivations; I have the satisfaction of laying before the public proofs of their importance as a body and their merits as individuals: their virtues far exceed their failings their language may be rude, but their hearts are kind and true. To improve the condition of these people is my object; to break up the bachelor stations my design; happy homes my reward. To supply flockmastera with shepherds is a good work: to supply those shepherds with wives a better. To give the shepherd a good wife is to make a gloomy, miserable hut a cheerful, contended home; to introduce married families into the interior is to make squatters' stations fit abodes for Christian men.
"If I meet with the co-operation I expect, it is my intention to submit to her Majesty's commissioners of emigration a plan for female
