with all the aid that can be derived from the capital, the credit, the colonisation, and "cheap defence" of the parent state, Australia seems starting on the race of empire with greater advantages than have ever fallen to the offshoot of a great nation in ancient or modern times. Free institutions, unrestricted commerce, ample revenues, without debt, and without the taxes which a defensive force, naval or military, would require—nothing can retard the progress of our Australian fellow-countrymen, if they prepare in good time to counteract the money-worshipping, utilitarian spirit, and low tone of commercial morality which are the bane of new communities.
An antidote is to be found in the teaching of zealous Christian ministers, and in the study of those treasures of the literature, art, and science of the old world, which no modern material El Dorado can excel.
The regulation of the future colonisation of the Australians will rest with the colonists themselves. If they are wise, they will give no encouragement to that system of pauper emigration which the Government Commissioners have long patronised. No population can be more difficult to govern than a mob of uneducated peasantry, suddenly transferred from indigence to the wages of a gold country. It is the interest alike of the colonies and of this country, that the influence of rude men who crowd to the gold diggings should be counterbalanced by a stream of industrious, educated, intelligent families, the yeomen and frugal mechanics, with large families, who swell the ranks of "Family Colonisation," men who would be prepared to carry on colonisation by cultivation, and reproduce on the fertile lands of Australia the farms and villages of England. We commend to the attention of the Colonial Legislatures, the fathers of this many-childrened class, who are led to emigration, not by discontent, not by vain Utopian longings, but by
"The pride to rear an independent shed,
And give the lips they love unborrow'd bread,
To skirt their home with harvests widely sown,
And call the blooming landscape all their own,
Their children's heritage in prospect long."
