of salt meat, and flour, or biscuit, with other
comforts. To secure to the emigrant his due
allowance, a system of checks, or tickets,
corresponding to each week's allowance, has been
introduced.

The whole ship is at the disposal of the
emigrants; all are on an equality; there is
no sacred quarter-deck. All the berths are
enclosed within doors with fixed Venetian
blinds; each family, in fact, having its little
closet to sleep in. In Government ships,
husbands, wives, and children sleep publicly
in open berths. Improvements in ventilation
and the supply of water are important
features of the arrangements; in fact, each
ship is an improvement on the last, because
experience leads slowly to the production
of a model system of ship-filling and victualling.

The career of the originator of this plan,
as a coloniser, may be briefly told. In 1839-40,
she arrived in Sydney from India with her
husband, a captain in the Madras Native
Infantry, on sick leave, and with her children.

At that time the discontinuance of
transportation, and the manumission by lapse of
time of assigned prisoners, had rendered it
necessary for the pastoral proprietors, or
"squatters," to replace the unpaid prisoners
by paid emigrants or freed-men. It was an
epoch of rapid transition from slave labour
to free labour. Employers who had been
accustomed to exercise almost uncontrolled
authority over servants to whom they paid
no wages, or a mere voluntary trifle, and
whose eventual liberty depended on their
masters' reports, were feverishly impatient
when obliged to deal with free servants, who
claimed to make contracts for food and wages,
and to enforce them; servants who could
leave a master with whom they were not
content, and whom no magistrate could order
to be flogged. Even before the abolition of
assignment, the rapid increase of flocks and
herds had caused a cry for labour. This
change, and the land speculations mentioned in
"Three Epochs of Colonisation," raised wages
to famine price. Under the excitement of
these high wages, the large sums obtained
from the sale of land were devoted to the
importation of emigrants on what was called
the Bounty System. The Crimping System
would have been a better term. Parties in
England, Ireland, and Scotland, by employing
agents, and publishing hand-bills after the
model of Mr. Recruiting Sergeant Kite,
collected ship-loads of emigrants. These on
landing in Sydney had to pass the examination
of a board, and for each that passed, the
shippers were to receive a bounty of some
twenty pounds. The result was organised
fraud, perjury, cruelty, and bribery. Great
numbers of unsuitable persons were introduced,
and the female emigrants included the
refuse of our seaport towns. The treatment
of the emigrants on board ship was often
shameful, and in the highest degree immoral.
The whole system, from beginning to the end,
festered with abuses.

The emigrants began to arrive in fleets
just at a time when the wealthy classes were
suffering from their imprudent land speculations.
The Governor desired to worry the
squatters into buying land—the squatters
wished to worry the Governor, and drive
down wages to an European level. The slave-
owner feeling was still strong in all.

Sydney was filled with emigrants unhired,
especially young women, many of them stout
girls, unfitted for town life, though invaluable
in the country, and very suitable to be the
wives of shepherds and stockmen. There
were also a number of young women of education,
who, without some care and training,
were fit for neither town service nor country
work. A great number of mechanics were
employed on Government wages in executing
Government work—of course, a fictitious
labour test. Large families were lodged in
tents drawing Government rations, and extremely
well contented to do nothing.

Mrs. Chisholm, from the time of her arrival,
had been busy in teaching the most willing
and ignorant of the unemployed emigrants
how to help themselves. Thus she acquired
a large amount of confidence among the
working classes. She determined to save the
young women who were endangered by want
of protection and employment. So resolved,
she offered to manage, gratuitously, a
"Home," in which single women should be
lodged, and provided with situations through
a " Register," if Government would give a
building for the purpose. After a long and
obstinate struggle, in which the jealousies of
many parties, and the decided opposition of
the Red Tapery of the Emigration department,
had to be overcome, the Governor gave up a
store-room, infested with rats, for the lady's
bedroom, and a sort of barrack for the women,
on receipt of a guarantee that the Government
should incur no expense. The Home
was filled, the Register opened, hundreds of
friendless girls found protection, and went
from the Home to situations.

But one depot for a colony extending into
the pastures, or Bush, many hundred miles,
was insufficient. A correspondence was opened
with the interior; the want of servants was
ascertained; and, when there was a difficulty
about the means of sending the girls forward,
the lady took them herself, at her own risk,
for the cost of the steam-boat. Six depôts
were thus established in the interior, under
the charge of clergymen, and respectable residents.

While a provision was thus attempted for
the women, the distress of the men concentrated
in the towns continued great. A committee
of the Legislative Council sat to consider
this distress, took evidence, and obtained
a list of many thousands out of employment.
This list is still in existence.

A public meeting called upon the Colonial