in obtaining a highly respectable body of men, including some poor gentlemen, at 5s. a day.
The port on Colonel Gawler's arrival was a narrow swamp, through which, for seven miles, emigrants dragged their luggage and merchandise. Under his arrangements a road was constructed, and wharves and warehouses erected. He built a government-house of no extravagant pretensions, but which, nevertheless, cost, from the price of labour and materials, 20,000; and he also built custom-houses, police-stations, and other public buildings, which were indispensable for transacting public business. He expended a large sum in protecting and endeavouring to civilise the aborigines. He contributed to two expeditions which were unsuccessfully made by Mr. Eyre in search of tracts of fertile country. To every charitable claim his purse was open; while his hospitalities were on a liberal scale.
The result of his measures was to give an extraordinary impetus to the apparent prosperity of the colony. The brilliant reports of public and private buildings in progress, building land sold at 500 and even 1,000 an acre, of balls, fetes, pic-nics, horticultural shows, dexterously reproduced in England, tempted men of fortune to emigrate, capitalists to invest, and merchants and manufacturers to forward goods of all kinds on credit. Port Adelaide was crowded with shipping, which discharged living and dead cargoes, and departed in ballast. When 14,000 colonists had arrived, in the fourth year after the foundation, scarcely a vestige of an export had been produced. The land sales and the custom-house receipts rose to enormous amounts.
In the midst of a career of infatuation, by which some half dozen money lenders realised fortunes, and hundreds were entirely ruined, there were men of considerable fortune who endeavoured to realise the Utopia they had been taught to dream in England, and introduce the comforts and the scientific cultivation of an English country gentleman, as sketched in Mr. Wakefield's letter from Sydney. These gentlemen purchased what in English eyes appeared considerable tracts of land; loaded ships with furniture, with curious, useless agricultural implements, with live stock of choice breeds; brought domestic servants, labourers, and even tenants, and landed intent on making, according to the cant cry of the hour, the "desert blossom like the rose."
The example of one gentleman, whose name it would be cruel to mention, will exemplify the case of scores of his class, although less wealthy, who sank and died without notice in other colonies, or in England. Mr. B possessed an English estate which brought him in about 1,000 a year: fascinated by Mr. Gibbon Wakefield's writings,
