state of the French Canadian was felt much more as a reproach to the wisdom, than a credit to the enterprise of France. France, glittering, profligate, and vain, was no more proud of her offspring than a mother would be of a child whom she had flung into the highway. The pinched and starvėling features of the colony scarcely allowed her haughty and frivolous Court to recognise it as her own. The American wilderness was an excellent substitute for the foundling hospital, and she was too glad to leave her young illegitimate there, without ever desiring to hear of it again. These Canadians are now boastful of their French blood, but this is only since they have had England for a nurse. The little Ishmael, perishing in the wilderness, has now been suffered to grow up into the disturber," his hand against every man, and every man's hand against his." But all this is the result of English pampering. Left to the old nutriment of France, his frame would have been as maigre as his soup. And this ill success, too, accounts for the singular facility with which France allowed Canada to be wrested from her. The matchless gallantry of Wolfe and his troops must have conquered; but the question was, to have kept. In the general ignorance of England relative to the resources of the banks of the St Lawrence, fifty years ago, her negotiators would, probably, have made no very stern stand against any serious determination of the French Government to retain Canada. But it was abandoned by France and kept by England, with, probably, equal indifference; and now the British colony is but a spot in the midst of a new British empire.

It is true that in its settlement at the peace, our Government committed one capital error, an error against all good policy, and which should be regarded as wholly beyond the line of pardonable blunders, they allowed the colony to retain its French laws and language. The conquest by force of arms had put the question on both fully in their power. But a weak and most unwise desire to conciliate the caprices of the conquered sufficed them to retain both, thus hazarding their future connexion with England, retaining them in perpetual alliance with France, and drawing an import

ant and irritating line of separation between them and their fellow-subjects in Canada. The policy of the Roman empire ought to be the policy of every conquering country. The laws of England ought to be made the laws of all her subjects, whether old or new, as soon as it can be done. The adoption of her language in all public transactions ought to be a principle. Using no force with the people, and letting them speak their jargon if they will, she must make the whole language of official and public life English, distinguish it as the language of high life, of politics, of the professions, and in a few years a new generation will be seen springing up, with new loyalty, forgetting the language of the conquered, speaking the language of the conquerors, and, instead of looking back with regrets, alike frivolous and perfidious, to the nation that abandoned them, rejoicing in the confirmed connexion with the liberties, literature, and power of the British empire.

But how memorable a contrast to all those abortive attempts exists in the colonies of England! Let them be thrown on what shore they will, they make for themselves a home, establish a power, mould a government, and commence an empire. They may land as pilgrims or fugitives, but they march forward as conquerors. What a contrast in the United States to the little settlements, even of the indus. trious German and the trafficking Dutchman, on the banks of the Demerary, settlements bounded by the same swamp for these fifty years; to the little French settlements in Guiana; to the half savage languor of the Spanish and Portuguese settlements on that immense, various, and lovely, region stretching from the Equator to the La Plata ! What a contrast in the vigour, the activity, the multitude, of the Anglo-American! What a still stronger contrast in the freedom, the public force, the national feeling, the rising literature, the political energy! Hostile as we are to American presumption, and conscious as all must be of the spots that dim their character; yet we proudly feel the superiority of the great colonies founded by our country, to all the dying dependencies of all other nations.

But we have not been content with planting the standard of civilisation in the South; we have waved it over the

North. The regions which seemed made only for the rude habitudes and strong instincts of the wild beast, where the climate made the efforts of the cultivator precarious at the best, and often defied all his industry; where winter lasted half the year, and lasted with a severity unknown in Europe; where life went out beside the pole," there, too, a colony has been founded, which is itself the foundation of a mighty kingdom; already displaying the arts, knowledge, and ambition of European life; increasing by hundred thousands-sure and soon to increase by millions, and contribute, in that mighty increase, the products of an almost unlimited province to the necessities and luxuries of Europe.

But of all the colonies of England, the most singular and the most successful is the colony established in New South Wales. Formed by none of the impulses which had hitherto urged men to take the chances of the wilderness; formed at the greatest distance from home ever attempted by colonisation-in fact, the greatest possible distance, the Antipodes; formed of the most intractable materials, the colony of Australia, within half the life of man, has risen to a pitch of commerce, agricultural opulence, and population never before equalled in the most fortunate or costly settlements of national fortune and enterprise. Why is this? May we not naturally ask, why has the new Continent, given exclusively into the hands of England, exhibited the extraordinary spectacle of a new shape of dominion?

Raised out of the refuse and rejected material of the mother country whatever may have been the purpose, the result is clear, that a great experiment in the faculty of renovation in the human character has found its field in the solitudes of this vast continent; that the experiment has succeeded to a most unexampled and unexpected degree; and that the question is now finally decided between severity and discipline. If this were the intent of Providence in making over to England the inheritance of New South Wales, it would be only one of the crowd of instances which display the unwearied watchfulness of Heaven for the welfare of man. When the time shall arrive in which the philosopher shall be able to regard the results,

free from the detail which now diminishes their real grandeur; when half a century more shall show him the noble proportions of a new empire ruling the Southern Ocean, filled with the free spirit and strong energies of Britain-covering the waters so long lifeless with her commerce-acting like a new minister of life, along those boundless and most fertile shores which spread from India to Japan-shooting the moral electricity in shocks that only reanimate, and sparks that only enlighten, through the whole stagnant and fettered, yet most lovely zone of the East,-then first shall he be able to comprehend either the nobleness of the task achieved, or the beneficence of that Power which, controlling all things, gave to our remote island the duty, the means, and the honour of this great triumph of good over evil. We admit that all has not yet been completed, that there are many things in the execution to excite the displeasure of the fastidious, and not a few to puzzle the sagacity of the sapient. We expect that those who pride themselves on the exclusive possession of philosophy will be indignant. We admit, also, that the manners of convicts and their attendant turnkeys can have but little of the picturesque and less of the sentimental. But the main fact is unquestionable, that out of those convicts has been formed a powerful, active, and opulent community. What could have been done at home with the multitude who have been, in succession, transported to Australia, if they had remained in England? Possibly, not one in fifty would have ever thought of any thing but picking pockets or robbing on the highway; one half of them would have perished in prison, or of famine and disease, in their own hovels; one quarter at least would have been hanged. by the fortunate, we might almost say the miraculous, expedient of providing them with a country, where they might begin the world anew, where they might live without the stigma of their former life, and recommence their character-where, being saved from the desperate difficulties of providing themselves with food, they might feel some human enjoyment in the beauties of nature; being protected from disgrace for the past, they might exert themselves to provide a character for the future; and, being placed in the hope

But,

of possessing property and providing for their offspring, they might become alike industrious and domestic, decent and happy, or in some rarer instances, opulent and honourable, the greatest example of rapid colonial prosperity in human records has been exhibited to the eyes of mankind.

The interior of New South Wales is still unknown. The remarkable want of bays or large rivers indenting the coast, and the strange conjecture that all the rivers converged to the centre of the Continent, perplexed public curiosity from an early period. The problem at length seemed to lie between those who imagined the centre of the region to be filled with an Australian Mediterranean, a vast space of blue waves surrounded with picturesque shores, the seat of future Antipodean kingdoms; or to make their drowsy way into the centre of mighty sands, a new Zaara, and there sink into a vast pestilential swamp. On the whole, we wish well to the Mediterranean theory, looking on the Mediterranean itself as the most brilliant invention in topography, and knowing it to have been the source of the most glittering enterprises of mankind, from the day of the Argonauts to the battle of the Nile; the mirror in which Phoenicia, Carthage, Athens, and Italy dressed their locks and attired themselves in their laurels ; and once more the heaving field in which Greek and Turk, Europe and Asia, will renew the old combat of Greek and Persianwith the Russian, the heir of the ancient Scythian and his happiest representative standing by, longing to devour both combatants, and by no means unlikely to have his wish ful

filled.

Yet the whole course of the Australian discoveries hitherto has failed to substantiate either conjecture. The sea and the swamp are still equally under a cloud; and, if we may venture any new guess on a subject so resolutely obscure, we should decide for the probability of some central waste of sand, as waterless, as herbless, and perhaps, reserved for the express purpose of keeping up the temperature of an immense continent, left by nature otherwise to shiver in the damps and mists of the greatest sweep of ocean on the globe, a world of waters.

New South Wales abounds in ex

travagant accounts of the interior. Few runaway convicts are ever brought back without having a story to tell; and, as the great object of the Government is to ascertain the nature of the unexplored country, the public ear is seldom left ungratified with accounts of scenes, mountains, rivers, and pastures, as little accessible to man as mountains in the moon. As an instance of the impression which those stories sometimes make, the Surveyor-General's first excursion to the north was the fruit of a convict's fancy (a convict named George Clark, with an alias of "the Barber"), who had escaped into the wilderness, and mixed with the natives, painted himself black, and helped them to add European knavery to Australian savagery, but was at last caught and brought back to Sydney. What is the use of our European refinements, which we call necessaries of life? This fellow, accustomed all his life long to be clothed from top to toe, threw off his last remnant, braved the climate, which in winter is often as damp and cold as that of England, and in utter nakedness contrived to live alike through winters and summers, travel hundreds of miles, and, with his aboriginal wives, prepared to lay the foundation of a cattle-stealing dynasty. As he lost the fear of detection, he reapproached the frontier of the colony, and there, collecting some of the natives, and joined by some of the runaway convicts, he began the plunder of the cattle pastures, on a large scale; a scale, fortunately, too large for impunity, for it compelled the notice of the police, who at length traced him to his haunts, and took him.

The "Barber," now, with the intention of tempting the lenity of Government, told his tale of the discovery of a vast river, the "Kindur," running through the heart of the country, and, by a north-west course, entering the sea.

It certainly argues a remarkable degree of dexterity in this fellow, to find him able to mystify all the science of all the savans of New South Wales. Declaring that, by pursuing the stream of the Kindur, he had made his way to the opposite shores of the continent, he propped his narrative so happily with what he knew, and what he did not, that an expedition was construct

ed to ascertain the facts, and the expedition was given into the hands of the chief official man of science, the Surveyor-General.

It is impossible to read any part of the subsequent narrative without being convinced that its writer is a man of intelligence, information, and soberness of mind. Yet, it inevitably steals out, that Major Mitchell is to this moment a little ashamed of the general acceptance of the convict's story. He fortifies himself with so much care in rumours, probabilities, and possibilities, “of a great river beyond Liverpool plains, flowing north-west," that we are satisfied the Major will never take a convict for his Columbus again.

On setting out for the exploration, he makes a remark which may be useful to future investigators of strange lands.

"After I had surveyed extensive tracts of territory, I never could separate the question respecting the course of any river from that of the situation of the higher land necessary to furnish its courses, and supply its basin. I could not entertain the idea of a river distinct from those conditions, so necessary to the existence of one." On this result of experience he acts, and it accordingly "appeared to him that if a large river flowed to the north-west of any point north of Liverpool plains, its sources must be sought for in the coast range in the opposite direction, viz., to the eastward of those plains." He then determines on his plan. From the knowledge that various rivers did exist on that side of the coast range, all falling to the north-westward, he proposed, therefore, to proceed to the northward as far as the nature of the country permitted, so that he might arrive on the most northern of those rivers, and then, keeping in view whatever high land might be visible near its northern banks, trace the river's course downwards, and thus arrive at the large river, or common channel of all those waters.

But he now arrives at a more important conclusion. "The second condition necessary to the existence of a river, namely, the higher land enclosing its basin, might, in this case, have been either Arbuthnot's range or that between the Darling and the Lachlan. And this seemed to me to involve a question of at least equal importance

to that of the river itself. For, had the fall of all the rivers above mentioned been all to the north-west, it was obvious that such a range must have been the dividing ridge or spine, connecting the eastern and western parts of Australia; and which, when once discovered, was likely to be the key to the discovery of all the rivers on each side, and to the other subordinate features of this great island."

Thus, too, the whole expedition amounts to the attempt to solve a most curious problem, highly exciting human interest of every kind, and urging on the explorers day by day with the delight of discovery, perhaps one of the most delightful, ardent, and intellectual of all delights, whether in art, science, or travel, that can be offered to the mind of man. The time, too, will come when these volumes will be as curious to the Australian, as their investigations are now curious to ourselves; when great cities shall stand on those mountains which are now designated merely as points for the theodolite; when myriads of busy agriculturists shall be familiar with every spot of those vast plains, over which the investigator now casts a bewildered glance, appalled by their solitude; when commerce shall be pouring her wealth and animation through the land, on the bosom of rivers whose existence now hangs between conjecture and science, whose paths are through deserts where none but the foot of the savage ever trode, and whose glimmer on the remote horizon is lost in the vapours of her plains, or shines but to tantalize the eye of the traveller.

All our military men are beginning to write well, but Major Mitchell writes like a man at once of knowledge and feeling. On the 24th of November, 1831, he commenced his journey, having still to traverse 300 miles from Sydney before he reached the limits of the colonial lands, and entered upon the undiscovered soil. Some natural and graceful thoughts are expressed in the contemplation of his new adventure.

"I felt the ardour of my early youth when I first sought distinction in the camp and field review, as I gave loose at length to my reflections, and considered the nature of the enterprise. But, in comparing the views which I now experienced with those which ex