residence from Sussex to Cumberland or Devonshire." And then, after devoting many pages to disparaging all other colonies and systems of colonization, 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 Alexandrina, 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 :—

"The price of land will take out the labourers free of cost to their employer, and will enable him to retain their services. It will be the first colony combining plenty of labour and plenty of land." "The large produce of industry, divided in the shape of high profits and high wages, will not only make living high, but will cause the interest of money to be high, and will thus enable persons owning money, without engaging in any work, to obtain much larger and more effective incomes than their property yields in England; and will furnish a demand for such persons as surveyors, architects, engineers, clerks, teachers, lawyers, and clergymen."

These were the inducements held out with eminent success to tempt men most unfit for the toil of early colonization to emigrate to a colony which was to be founded, not by slow degrees, but complete. The land was to be sold in England, at such a fixed price as would, by preventing labourers from becoming landowners "too soon,” preserve a "hired labour price," and secure high profits on good wages. The proceeds of the land sold were to be applied to supplying labourers with free passages, and thus a complete section of all the ranks and classes composing the parent state was to be transplanted, full grown, to the antipodes. An actual colonist having written to one of the members of the South Australian Association, "I believe your association aims at benefiting the miserable portion of the population, and I incline to think you have taken up a theory; nevertheless, I believe they are going to commit an act of insanity, and to prove a memorable scourge to those people who shall have the misfortune to emigrate

under their auspices; some knowledge of the probable nature of the undertaking can be had, but I find it has been despised- Quem Deus vult perdere prius dementat""-the suggestions accompanying this letter were treated as a piece of "the spirit of colonial rivalry arising from the fact that every owner of colonial land has a deep personal interest in preventing the formation of a rival establishment, which must divert the stream of Anglo-Australian emigration away from the degraded and corrupt penal colonies."

In the same spirit, at a great public meeting held at Exeter Hall, in July, 1834, to promote the projected colony, it was almost impossible for parties supposed to dissent from the opinions of the colonizers to obtain a hearing.

To add to the public excitement on a subject on which the public was profoundly ignorant, Colonel Torrens and other friends of the scheme traversed the country, lecturing, and proclaiming the merits of the new system and new province with all the enthusiasm of apostles; while the zeal of agents appointed in every populous district was stimulated by a handsome commission on every lot of colonial land sold. In due time these exertions produced an effect upon the public mind, which burst out in full force when the first favourable accounts were received from the colony.

In the commencement the commissioners found difficulty in selling the quantity of land and raising a sufficient amount of a loan of £200,000, at £10 per cent., authorized by the government. But eventually these difficulties were overcome by the active assistance of Mr. G. F. Angas, and Mr. John Wright, the once eminent afterwards notorious banker of Covent Garden.

Mr. Angas resigned his post as commissioner, and formed the South Australian Company, which commenced operations by purchasing a large quantity of land from the commissioners with certain special privileges. A sum of £30,000 completed the preliminary financial operations, and the first part of the colonizing career of South Australia commenced.

GOVERNOR HINDMARSH.

The South Australian Company, which had obtained special privileges in consideration of their large and early purchase, lost no time in sending out a pioneer expedition, with emigrants and officers, to make preparations for carrying on every kind of pursuit considered likely to be profitable in a colony-farming, sheep-feeding, banking, building, and whaling. We may mention here that after an experience

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of eleven years the company have found reason to subside into the humble, but more profitable, position of absentee landholders and land jobbers.

Colonel Light was despatched by the Commissioners in March, 1836, with a surveying staff and a few emigrants, and when he arrived at the appointed rendezvous in Nepean Bay, on the 19th August, he found three vessels of the South Australian Company, which had brought a body of emigrants who were settled on Kangaroo Island; and in November the Africaine arrived with the Colonial Secretary, a banking association, and a newspaper.

In July Captain Hindmarsh, the governor, sailed in the Buffalo, a vessel of war, with a number of emigrants.

All this was done before the commissioners had received any report as to the suitability of the district selected for supporting emigrants. Kangaroo Island, which had figured largely in prospectuses and speeches, was found to be unfit for colonization, after time and money had been wasted by emigrants and the company in building and clearing.

Colonel Light landed in the Gulf of St. Vincent, and after a survey fixed upon the site of the present city of Adelaide for the capital, and the present Port Adelaide for its harbour. It was then a narrow, rather shallow creek, about as wide as the Thames at Richmond, leading out of St. Vincent's Gulf, a moderately safe roadstead. The landing was in a mangrove swamp, seven miles from the intended capital. Wharves, deep dredging, a solid road, and other improvements have now given the province a good harbour, not inconveniently distant from the capital, to which it will be soon united by a railway. But at that period, when only vessels of some 300 tons could enter, and when passengers with their goods had to travel seven miles through a mangrove swamp, the inconvenience and exposure were serious in the extreme.

Governor Hindmarsh arrived on 28th of December, 1836, read his commission under a gum-tree, in the presence of about two hundred emigrants and officials, and then, looking round, felt extremely dissatisfied with the selection made by the resident commissioner and the surveyor-general.

That he should have been dissatisfied with a selection which placed the capital in a picturesque but hot valley far from a port, and without the use of a navigable river, and that he should as a sailor have been forcibly impressed with the fearful cost of landing and conveying cargoes to the interior from such a harbour, is not extraordinary; nevertheless, experience has proved that the site was as good as any that could have been chosen, and art has corrected the defects of nature.

Governor Hindmarsh attempted to change the site of Adelaide. Differences of a serious character arose between him and the resident commissioner: the colony became divided into two parties, one of which supported the governor and the other the resident commissioner. Both parties were greatly to blame. Lord Glenelg settled the question by acceding to the request of the commissioners and recalling Captain Hindmarsh. In the sequel the site of the capital to which Captain Hindmarsh had objected was retained, and almost all the officials, from whom he had experienced most vexatious and insolent opposition, were found either incompetent or corrupt, and dismissed by his successor.

*

To replace Captain Hindmarsh the commissioners recommended and secured the appointment of Lieut.-Colonel George Gawler.

At the same time that Colonel Gawler was appointed governor he was also made resident commissioner, vice Mr. Fisher, dismissed, and thus united in his own person all the administrative powers of the colony.

THE SOUTH AUSTRALIAN COMMISSIONERS' MANAGEMENT, FROM 1838 TO 1841.

In order to obtain money to commence operations, before the colony had been surveyed or even settled, the commissioners issued "preliminary orders" as a bonus to the first purchasers and colonists, at £72 12s. each, which entitled the purchaser to select, in a rotation settled by lottery, 120 acres of country land, and one acre in the intended capital of the intended colony. This capital city, before discovery or survey, was settled by the commissioners to consist of twelve hundred acres, or nearly nine square miles, a space sufficient to accommodate the population of Westminster, or even of Paris. As soon as the capital, Adelaide, had been selected and mapped, the holders of preliminary orders, forming the first body of colonists, selected their sections, and the whole surplus was put up for auction

*The most serious evils that befel the South Australian colonists arose from the precipitancy with which emigrants were sent out, before the surveyor-general had reported whether the country was fit for settlement, and before any preparation had been made, by roads, wharves, barracks, conveyances, surveys, and importation of live stock, for employing feeding emigrants. But it seems part of the system to care rather for producing a sensation of doing business in England than for the welfare of the emigrants. The same error was committed at Wellington, in New Zealand, where, with a shipload of colonists going they knew not where, Colonel Wakefield was obliged to fix on Wellington, where a fine harbour is shut out by inaccessible mountains from the adjoining country, and even expensive military roads have not yet opened out land enough to feed the town population; and two secondary settlements at Wanganui, distant 100 miles, and New Plymouth were formed in order to complete the original sales of land. On a second occasion Nelson was chosen without proper survey, where, in order to find land enough, two thousand colonists are obliged to spread over 150 miles of coast. Even in founding Canterbury, Mr. Wakefield had influence enough to persuade the directors to send out, at an enormous useless extra expense, a fleet of four large ships half filled, to the great inconvenience of the first colonists, in order to make a sensation in the English newspapers. The expedient failed.

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to the colonists "as a reward for their enterprise," and sold at an average rate of £2 per acre. Thus, more than ten times the space that ever has been, or in this generation is ever likely to be, required was turned into and perpetually dedicated to building land. From that moment the great object of the first colonists became to puff, magnify, and sell to future colonists their building land in Adelaide. No crop was so profitable as land left in a state of nature, but called

and sold for a street.

The first operation having been performed, by which the future site of what was intended to be a great city had been transferred into the hands of a few persons, chiefly consisting of the friends of the commissioners and the officials of the South Australian Company, the next was to sell as much land as possible in England, by giving English purchasers a decided advantage over those who intending to emigrate declined to buy a pig in a poke.

Accordingly land orders were issued at £80 each, which entitled the holder to select eighty acres of country land in the order dictated by the date of payment. Thus, when any particularly desirable plot of land was brought into the market, a speculation arose to discover and purchase the oldest "order" in the colony. A class of Adelaide brokers arose who dealt in and professed to put a value on these "scrip," according to their respective dates. Sometimes an emigrant who had been months in the colony would be superseded by the holder of the land order of an absentee sent at the latest moment by ship letter. It was a foreshadowing of the railway stagging of 1846, and a revival of the famous days of the South-sea Bubble. On one occasion the supposed discovery of a lead-mine, under an eighty-acre section, sent up the earliest-dated order to a premium of £500. After all there was no lead-mine. But the lucky purchaser, being in command of the market, made use of a later order, and reserved his £500 prize for future use.

After five days of the week had been consumed by those who purchased "land orders" in England in selecting the best sections, on the sixth the colonizing emigrant who had preferred seeing before investing, or the frugal labourer who had saved enough to work for himself on his own land, was allowed to take his pick of the refuse. Such parties were required to send in a sealed tender. A person tendering for several adjoining sections had the preference over a person tendering for a single section. Thus, in every way, the cultivating colonist was discouraged, and land-jobbing speculation invited.

That no element of confusion might be wanting in the land arrangements of the model colony, the commissioners devised, and

M