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there is the best chance, though only a poor one. Of the 28,000 said to be in the interior of the northern island, only 3000 or fewer are in open hostility to the colonists; but the sympathy that binds them all together, and renders them now obnoxious to Englishmen, must hasten on their decay. Not till they have disappeared will New Zealand be able to enter without hindrance upon the bright future in store for it.

CHAPTER XXIX.

ENGLISH AUSTRALASIA.

THE RELATIVE ADVANTAGES OF OUR AUSTRALASIAN COLONIESWESTERN AUSTRALIA-QUEENSLAND-NEW SOUTH WALES

VICTORIA-SOUTH AUSTRALIA-TASMANIA-NEW ZEALAND.

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JARDLY more than eighty years have passed since, in May 1787, the first cargo of convicts, with their keepers and attendants, was sent out from England to begin the colonization of New South Wales. The only object of that enterprise, highly applauded by a few philanthropists and other enthusiasts, but ridiculed and blamed by nearly everybody else, was to get rid of some obnoxious members of society, and to see whether they could be made better use of in the far-off wastes of the antipodes than in crowded and pestilential prisons at home. Yet out of it has grown an empire five and twenty times as large as Great Britain and Ireland, and which, though still in the first stage of its growth-the whole vast area having less than half the population of London-already has a commercial value to the mother-country hardly less than that of India, and greater than that of all the other English dependencies put together. When the difficulties in the way of the first attempts at orderly settlement are considered-and in the presence of its convict population those difficulties were great indeed-its

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present prosperity is truly marvellous. What prosperity may be attained hereafter perhaps it is hardly possible for the most sanguine onlooker to anticipate.

In only one of the seven colonies already formed, and that one the nearest to England in actual distance, though the most remote from it in general characteristics, is the prospect uninviting. The immense territory of Western Australia has few attractions for British enterprise. Least favoured by nature, its comparatively scanty resources have never been duly made use of by the arts of man. The scene, at starting, of grievous blunders in colonization, it has profited little by the subsequent efforts to improve it through help of convict labour; and it can hardly be expected to attain much importance till the whole Australian continent has become so well peopled, and is so well provided with means of transit and intercommunication, that its deficiencies can easily be supplied from richer districts, and the wealth of those districts can give a new value to its more barren regions. Its northern provinces and coast districts, however, deserve more attention than they have yet received; and perhaps the day is not far distant when they will be parted off from it and associated with the contiguous parts of Queensland in a new and flourishing colony. To these districts, now appended to South Australia, the independent name of North Australia has already been given. Its harbours offer special facilities for trade with the neighbouring Indian Archipelago, and the rich pasture-lands in the interior wait only to be turned to profit by prudent adventurers.

Thriving Australia, however, still means little more than the coast-line of the eastern half of the island, and much of this has as yet been but slightly used. We are only now beginning to prove the value of Queensland as a great field for cotton cultivation, whence even greater profit may be derived than from the inland pasture-grounds which are already vieing with the highlands of New South Wales and Victoria in production of wool, the other great staple material for clothing. To supply the requirements of this younger trade, new ports will have to grow up along the north-eastern shore, and the enterprise developed in them will become the parent of fresh energy in the almost boundless plantation grounds and squatters' runs that adjoin them.

If cotton is to rival wool as a source of wealth to Queensland, coal is already beginning to rival wool in making the fortune of New South Wales. Gold has lately usurped too much of the energy that can find suitable employment in producing wool in Victoria; but here, in the end, the gold trade must help the wool trade, and both must contribute mightily to the further growth of the southern colony, which has already grown with a rapidity and vigour unsurpassed in the history of the world. Copper is joined with wool in promoting the prosperity of South Australia, which also has another great source of profit in its luxuriant farm-lands, making it the principal granary of the whole Australian island. Thus, if wool is a common source of wealth to all the Australian colonies, each has a second staple of its own, enabling it to assert its independence in the race of advancement in which all are alike engaged.

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The early Australasian voyagers were not far wrong in supposing that Van Dieman's Land was a part of Australia. The narrow straits that divide them, separate islands almost identical in character, or differing from one another only so far as an outlying peninsula must necessarily differ from the neighbouring mainland. From tropical Queensland there is an even gradation of climate down to temperate Tasmania; and here, as in the northern districts, wool is the main source of wealth. If the southern colony has made less progress than the other offshoots of New South Wales, it is due alone to the excess of the convict element in its social constitution—a source of weakness that time and the in-coming of fresh colonists will speedily remove.

From the other portions of Australasia New Zealand stands quite apart. If, as is likely, all the others soon unite, after the fashion of the North American colonies, in a grand Australian confederation, the south-eastern group of islands can have no place therein. New Zealand has, in its iron, its coal, and its agricultural capabilities, greater, though less showy, sources of wealth than its gold; but the gold will have done good service if it brings into the islands settlers ready to develop its other resources. The "Britain of the South" must justify its title by manufacturing industry of the sort that has made England great.