experience, was greeted with the utmost degree of scorn and contempt. They were hissed down, unheard, as the most stupid or jealously envious of mortals. The friends of Mr. Wakefield's theory had, from the first taken it for granted that nothing but the basest motives could induce any one to hesitate in accepting their panacea for colonial ills, and they had the same advantage in attacking the Colonial Office that a quack like Morison or Holloway has in ridiculing a venerable, high-charging, pill-and-potion, bleed-and-blister practitioner of the old bag-wig school.
A small book, published in 1834, entitled "The New British Province of South Australia, with an account of the Principles, Objects, Plan, and Prospects of the colony," one of scores of the same tendency which appeared about the same time, is a favourable and temperate specimen and the ingenious literary agitation which Mr. Wakefield perfected, if he did not invent. This work, adorned with maps, a picture of a bay, with palm trees and an emu, commences with an extract from one of Archbishop Whately's speeches, which now sounds excessively absurd, but which was then received with enthusiasm:—
"A colony so founded would fairly represent English society: every new comer would have his own class to fall into, and to whatever class he belonged he would find its relation to the others, and the support derived from the others much the same as in the parent country. There would be little more revolting to the feelings of an emigrant than if he had merely shifted his residence from Sussex to Cumberland or Devonshire."
And then, after devoting many pages to disparaging all other colonies and systems of colonisation, and promising a supply of labour and a state of refinement equal to that of an old colony, a considerable space is devoted to a description of the proposed country, particularly "Kangaroo Island," and its resources, with a list of probable exports. Seldom have more errors been propagated in so few pages, in so formal, so positive, and so pompous a manner. Out of five pages of tabulated exports only one, "wool," has been obtained, and that, not as promised, in greater, but in less quantities than in the older colonies. The means of communication promised by the seacoast, the Lake Alexandria, and the River Murray, remain unused to this hour, and Kangaroo Island is still a solitary waste.
A day in Adelaide at any time, from the founding of the city down to the time when the last ship left the port, would show how absurdly the following premises have been falsified:—
