the city, where I found a vast crowd of holiday-makers assembled on the bare red earth that did duty for "turf," although there was a hot wind blowing, and the thermometer stood at 103° in the shade. For my conveyance to the race-course I trusted to one of the Australian Hansom cabs, made with fixed Venetian blinds on either side, so as to allow a free draught of air.

The ladies in the grand stand were scarcely to be distinguished from Englishwomen in dress or countenance, but the crowd presented several curious types. The fitness of the term "cornstalks" applied to the Australian-born boys was made evident by a glance at their height and slender build; they have plenty of activity and health, but are wanting in power and weight. The girls, too, are slight and thin; delicate, without being sickly. Grown men who have emigrated as lads and lived ten or fifteen years in New Zealand, eating much meat, spending. their days in the open air, constantly in the saddle, are burly, bearded, strapping fellows, physically the perfection of the English race, but wanting in refinement and grace of mind, and this apparently by constitution; not through the accident of occupation or position. In Australia there is promise of a more intellectual nation: the young Australians ride as well, shoot as well, swim as well, as the New Zealanders; are as little given to book-learning; but there is more shrewd intelligence, more wit and quickness, in the sons of the larger continent. The Australians boast that they possess the Grecian climate, and every young face in the Sydney crowd showed me that their sky is not more like that of Attica than they are like the old Athenians. The eager burning democracy that is springing up in the Australian great towns is as widely different from the republicanism of the older States of the American Union as it is from the good-natured conservatism of New Zealand, and their high capacity for personal enjoyment would of itself suffice to distinguish the Australians from both Americans and British. Large as must be the amount of convict blood in New South Wales, there was no trace of it in the features of those present upon the race-course. The inhabitants of colonies which have never received felon immigrants often cry out that Sydney is a convict city, but the prejudice is not borne out by the counte nances of the inhabitants, nor by the records of local crime.

U

The black stain has not yet wholly disappeared: the streets of Sydney are still a greater disgrace to civilization than are even those of London; but, putting the lighter immoralities aside, security for life and property is not more perfect in England than in New South Wales. The last of the bushrangers were taken while I was in Sydney.

The race-day was followed by a succession of hot winds, during which only the excellence of the fruit-market made Sydney endurable. Not only are all the English fruits to be found, but plantains, guavas, oranges, loquats, pomegranates, pine-apples from Brisbane, figs of every kind, and the delicious passion-fruit abound; and if the gum-tree forests yield no shady spots for picnics, they are not wanting among the rocks at Botany, or in the luxuriant orange-groves of Paramatta.

A Christmas week of heat such as Sydney has seldom known was brought to a close by one of the heaviest southerly storms on record. During the stifling morning, the telegraph had announced the approach of a gale from the far south, but in the early afternoon the heat was more terrible than before, when suddenly the sky was dark with whirling clouds, and a cold blast swept through the streets, carrying a fog of sand, breaking roofs and windows, and dashing to pieces many boats. When the gale ceased, some three hours later, the sand was so deep in houses that here and there men's feet left footprints on the stairs.

Storms of this kind, differing only one from another in violence, are common in the hot weather: they are known as "southerly bursters;" but the early settlers called them "brickfielders," in the belief that the dust they brought was whirled up from the kilns and brick-fields to the south of Sydney. The fact is that the sand is carried along for one or two hundred miles, from the plains in Dampier and Auckland counties; for the Australian "burster" is one with the Punjaub dust-storm, and the "dirt-storm" of Colorado.

CHAPTER II.

RIVAL COLONIES.

NEW SOUTH WALES, born in 1788, and Queensland in 1859, the oldest and youngest of our Australian colonies, stand side by side upon the map, and have a common frontier of 700 miles.

The New South. Welsh cast jealous glances towards the more recently founded States. Upon the brilliant prosperity of Victoria they look doubtingly, and, ascribing it merely to the gold-fields, talk of "shoddy;" but of Queensland—an agricultural country, with larger tracts of rich land than they themselves possess the Sydney folks are, not without reason,

envious.

A terrible depression is at present pervading trade and agriculture in New South Wales. Much land near Sydney has gone out of cultivation; hands are scarce, and the gold discoveries in the neighbouring colonies, by drawing off the surplus population, have made harvest labour unattainable. Many properties have fallen to one-third their former value, and the colony--a wheat-growing country-is now importing wheat and flour to the value of half-a-million sterling every year.

The depressed condition of affairs is the result, partly of commercial panics following a period of inflation, partly of bad seasons, now bringing floods, now drought and rust, and partly of discouragement of immigration by the colonial democrats-a policy which, however beneficial to Australia it may in the long run prove, is for the moment ruinous to the sheep-farmers and to the merchants in the towns. On the other hand, the labourers for their part assert that the arrivals of strangers— at all events, of skilled artisans-are still excessive, and that

all the ills of the colony are due to over-immigration and free trade.

To a stranger, the rush of population and outpour of capital from Sydney, first towards Victoria, but now to Queensland and New Zealand, appear to be the chief among the causes of the momentary decline of New South Wales. Of immigrants there is at once an insufficient and an over-great supply. Respectable servant-girls, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, plasterers, and the like, do well in the colonies, and are always wanted; of clerks, governesses, iron-workers, and skilled hands of manufacturers, there is almost always an over-supply. By a perverse fate, these latter are the immigrants of whom thousands seek the colonies every year, in spite of the daily publication in England of dissuading letters.

As the rivalry of the neighbour-colonies lessens in the lapse of time, the jealousy that exists between them will doubtless die away, but it seems as though it will be replaced by a political divergence, and consequent aversion, which will form a fruitful source of danger to the Australian confederation.

In Queensland the great tenants of Crown lands-" squatters" as they are called-sheep-farmers holding vast tracts of inland country, are in possession of the government, and administer the laws to their own advantage. In New South Wales, power is divided between the pastoral tenants on the one hand, and the democracy of the towns upon the other. In Victoria, the democrats have beaten down the squatters, and in the interests of the people put an end to their reign; but the sheep-farmers of Queensland and of the interior districts of New South Wales, ignoring wells, assert that the "up-country desert" or "unwatered tracts" can never be made available for agriculture, while the democracy of the coast point to the fact that the same statements were made only a few years back, of lands now bearing a prosperous population of agricultural settlers.

The struggle between the great Crown tenants and the agricultural democracy, in Victoria already almost over, in New South Wales can be decided only in one way, but in Queensland the character of the country is not entirely the same: the coast and river tracts are tropical bush-lands, in which sheepfarming is impossible, and in which sugar, cotton, and spices

alone can be made to pay. To the copper, gold, hides, tallow, wool, which have hitherto formed the stereotyped list of Australian exports, the Northern colony has already added ginger, arrowroot, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton, cinnamon, and quinine. The Queenslanders have not yet solved the problem of the settlement of a tropical country by Englishmen, and of its cultivation by English hands. The future, not of Queensland merely, but of Mexico, of Ceylon, of every tropical country, of our race, of free government itself, are all at stake; but the success of the experiment that has been tried between Brisbane and Rockampton has not been great. The colony, indeed, has prospered much, quadrupling its population and trebling its exports and revenue in six years; but it is the Darling Downs, and other table-land sheep-countries, or, on the other hand, the Northern gold-fields, which are the main cause of the prosperity; and in the sugar and cotton culture of the coast, coloured labour is now almost exclusively employed, with the usual effect of degrading field-work in the eyes of European settlers, and of forcing upon the country a form of society of the aristocratic type.

If,

It is possible that just as New England has of late forbidden to Louisiana the importation of Chinamen to work her sugarfields, just as the Kansas radicals have declared that they will not recognise the Bombay Hammal as a brother, just as the Victorians have refused to allow the further reception of convicts by West Australia, separated from their territories by 1000 miles of desert, so the New South Welsh and Victorians combined may at least protest against the introduction of a mixed multitude of Bengalees, Chinamen, South Sea Islanders, and Malays to cultivate the Queensland coast plantations. however, the other colonies permit their Northern sister to continue in her course of importing dark-skinned labourers, to form a peon population, a few years will see her a wealthy cotton and sugar-growing country, with all the vices of a slaveholding government, though without the name of slavery. The planters of the coast, united with the squatters of the tablelands or "Downs," will govern Queensland, and render union with the free colonies impossible, unless great gold discoveries take place and save the country to Australia.