pasture*. Even these, in 1840-41, were almost
unsaleable, until an ingenious man discovered
that a fat sheep, when worth nothing to feed
or to kill, was worth from two shillings and
sixpence to three shillings and sixpence, to
boil down to tallow. That put a minimum
on the price of sheep and bullocks, and made
a new export.

In the end, which came in 1841, there was
a general repudiation of debt among
Australians, and they started again, like the
Advocât Paletin, by returning to their muttons.
The Insolvent Court stopped agricultural
improvements, emptied fine houses, and crushed
grand speculations, but had no effect on sheep.
The ewes yeaned, and the flocks were ready
to be shorn, in due season. Wages fell from
thirty, twenty-five, and twenty, to sixteen,
and even twelve pounds a-year, with a hut
and food, for shepherds.

In Sydney there were crowds of emigrants,
doing a sham labour test, and receiving
Government rations, until Mrs. Chisholm,
whose labours play a great part in Australian
colonisation, began by teaching the Government
how easy it was to provide for any number,
at good wages, by distributing them
through the interior; by taking an army of
men, women, and children, and leaving them
where they were needed, as bush servants or
wives.

The nine years between 1841 and 1850
present only one remarkable incident in the
progress of the " Three Colonies." That
incident was, the discovery, in 1845, in South
Australia, of the richest copper mine in the
world—"The Burra." The colony was in
the lowest state of depression: vegetating,
with no exports except a little wool—neither
capital nor credit. With great difficulty the
colonists raised twenty thousand pounds, in
five pound shares, to purchase the land under
which the mine was supposed to lie. The
results were enormous; the five pound shares,
ever since the first year, have been worth
one hundred and twenty pounds. Copper
ore has afforded the staple which wool
and tallow supplied in the other colonies.
Agricultural produce at once found a market;
and, as the pastures of South Australia were
limited, prosperity smiled once more.

The distress which fell upon this country,
after the railway mania, drove large numbers
of persons to accept the passages offered by
the Commissioners of Australian crown lands.
With the cessation of distress, the inclination
to accept free passages ceased to a great
extent; and, to use the Colonial Minister's
words, the ships were chiefly filled with
"the refuse of work-houses." Impatient
Members of the Legislative Council of New
South Wales called for a tax on the re-
emigration of English emigrants, and were
fortunately defeated. In May, 1851, a rumour
reached Sydney that a Californian gold-digger
had discovered a gold field within one hundred
and fifty miles of the capital. Singularly
enough, the seat of this discovery was the
15at hurst district; the original exploration of
which saved the colony in Governor
Macquarrie's time. One of the richest "placers"
turns out to be on the estate of Wentworth,
the explorer of 1810.

From that period until the present time,
each month's news is more extraordinary than
the last; a relative of Mr. Salter (who belongs
to one of the oldest free colonial families,
the introducer of the orange,) found a hundred-
weight of gold in that so long unappreciated
lump to which we have already adverted. By
the last intelligence, it seems that a place
has been hit upon in Port Philip district,
near the second port, Geeloug, where gold
is to be scraped up in trowels-full at a time.
The discoveries, so far, have proved the
stronghold which lawful order has on a
British population. How fortunate that the
free institutions, the abolition of transportation,
the diffusion of gospel truths, have had
time to do their work! Suppose a purely
penal colony had found this gold? The
results would have been something to shudder at.

The gold-diggers are prosperous and
fortunate beyond their wildest dreams; the hard-
handed, and strong-backed, are reaping such
wages as never were paid, before, for digging
and hoeing; but the flock-owners are ruined,
and their ruin will fall hardly and bitterly
upon thousands. They are reaping, now, the
fruits of fifty years of selfishness. In the
convict time, the flock-owner wanted a slave;
husbands and fathers were nothing to him; he did
not care to be troubled with children on his
station. The small farmer—"the Dungarree
farmer," as he was contemptuously termed, from
an Indian coarse cloth, worn before English
imports had commenced—was despised, and
even hated, by the great flock-master, as much
as a poaching cottage-freeholder is hated near
a manor in England. Bachelor shepherds were
the favourites among the hundred-thousand-
sheep men. It is the theory of the pound-an-
acre land-selling system, that the purchase
money goes to import labour to cultivate the
laud purchased. In actual fact, for several
years, the greater portion of the laud fund has
been derived from the poll-tax on stock, and
rent of pastures on wild waste land in the
interior, which alone produce more than sixty
thousand pounds a-year. On this theory the
stock-owning classes have always claimed to
have such emigrants sent as suited their
standard; that standard being morally very
low. The same feeling directed the efforts of
the Colonisation Society, which numbered a
long list of distinguished names, and totally
failed. One who thoroughly imderstands the
subject has observed, "The best of the
emigrating classes will not consent to be drafted
out like cattle; they expect to be allowed to
go in families; they will not support a system
which says, ' Stop. Your father is too old;
the eldest, John, a ploughman, may go;
second son, Charles, a sailor, not wanted; and