which in 1851 had not yet been navigated by anything beyond a whale boat, and which a range of lofty mountains divides from Adelaide! An influential agent in the South Australian interest not only produced a magnificently-coloured plan of the new city, divided into streets and squares, but, by a further stroke of imagination, anchored a 400 ton ship in the Torrens, opposite Government House the River Torrens being a chain of pools in which the most desperate suicide would ordinarily have difficulty in drowning himself, and across which a child may generally step dryshod!
Thus land was sold, and emigrants were shipped off before the commissioners had time to receive further accounts from their new and trusted governor and commissioner.
Colonel Gawler being an amiable, enthusiastic, simple-minded, yet ambitious man, was dazzled with the idea of becoming the founder of a great, civilised, self-supporting community. He accepted the theories of Mr. Wakefield as solemn, immutable truths, and the calculations of the commissioners as the emanations of the highest financial ability. Confiding in the private assurances of the commissioners, he was most bitterly and cruelly deceived.
Under the original plan of the colony the commissioners had calculated that an annual sum of 10,000, over and above any revenue to be derived from customs or local taxation, would be sufficient to defray all the govermental expenses of South Australia. This calculation was founded on what they hoped to be able to raise, and not on the necessities of the case. In order to make it fit they fixed on an arbitrary number of officials at arbitrary salaries.
The statements made in a despatch written by Colonel Gawler, immediately after his arrival, show that if he had been less zealous to carry out the views of the commissioners and more cautious about his own personal interests, he would have at once brought the progress of colonisation to a stand- still, strictly followed his written instructions, and retired with his private fortune uninjured, to his own profession.
He found the treasury empty the accounts in confusion. Twelve thousand pounds, being two thousand pounds more than the whole amount authorised to be drawn for in England in the year, had been drawn in the first six months; a large expense was required for the support of emigrants sick of fever and dysentery; provisions, wages, and house rent were enormously high; custom-houses, police-stations, a gaol, and offices for transaction of public business were urgently required; a police establishment, at colonial wages, in the absence of a military force, was indispensable; the commissioners in their calcula-
