One of the colonial superintendents, writing of a latelyreceived batch of Irish workhouse girls, has said that, if these are the "well-conducted girls, he should be curious to see a few of the evil-disposed." While in South Australia, I read the details of the landing of a similar party of women, from Limerick workhouse, one Sunday afternoon at Point Levi, the Lambeth of Quebec. Although supplied by the city authorities with meat and drink, and ordered to leave for Montreal at early morning, nothing could be more abominable than their conduct in the meanwhile. They sold baggage, bonnets, combs, cloaks, and scarves, keeping on nothing but their crinolines and senseless finery. With the pence they thus collected they bought corn-whisky, and in a few hours were yelling, fighting, swearing, wallowing in beastly drunkenness; and by the time the authorities came down to pack them off by train, they were as fiends, mad with rum and whisky. At five in the morning, they reached the Catholic Home at Montreal, where the pious nuns were shocked and horrified at their grossness of conduct and lewd speech; nothing should force them, they declared, ever again to take into their peaceable asylum the Irish workhouse girls. This was no exceptional case: the reports from South Australia, from Tasmania, can show as bad; and in Canada such conduct on the part of the freshly-landed girls is common. A Tasmanian magistrate has stated in evidence before a Parliamentary Committee that once when his wife was in ill health he went to one of the immigration offices, and applied for a decent woman to attend on a sick lady. The woman was sent down, and found next day in her room lying on the bed in a state best pictured in her own words: "Here I am with my yard of clay, blowing a cloud, you say.”

It is evident that a batch of thoroughly bad girls costs a colony from first to last, in the way of prisons, hospitals, and public morals, ten times as much as would the free passages across the seas of an equal number of worthy Irish women, free from the workhouse taint. Of one of these gangs which landed in Quebec not many years ago, it has been asserted by the immigration superintendents that the traces are visible to this day, for wherever the women went, "sin, and shame, and death were in their track." The Irish unions have no desire in

the matter beyond that of getting rid of their most abandoned girls; their interests and those of the colonies they supply are diametrically opposed. No inspection, no agreements, no supervision can be effective in the face of facts like these. The class that the unions can afford to send, Canada and Tasmania cannot afford to keep. Women are sent out with babies in their arms; no one will take them into service because the children are in the way, and in a few weeks they fall chargeable on one of the colonial benevolent societies, to be kept till the children grow up or the mothers die. Even when the girls are not so wholly vicious as to be useless in service, they are utterly ignorant of everything they ought to know. Of neither domestic nor farm-work have they a grain of knowledge. Of thirteen who were lately sent to an up-country town, but one knew how to cook, or wash, or milk, or iron, while three of them had agreed to refuse employment unless they were engaged to serve together. The agents are at their wits' ends; either the girls are so notoriously infamous in their ways of life that no one will hire them, or else they are so extravagant in their newfound "independence" that they on their side will not be hired. Meanwhile the Irish authorities lay every evil upon the long sea voyage. They say that they select the best of girls, but that a few days at sea suffice to demoralize them.

The colonies could not do better than combine for the establishment of a new and more efficient emigration agency in Ireland. To avoid the evil, by as far as possible refusing to meet it face to face, South Australia has put restrictions on her Irish immigration; for there, as in America, it is found that the Scotch and Germans are the best of immigrants. The Scotch are not more successful in Adelaide than everywhere in the known world. Half the most prominent among the statesmen of the Canadian Confederation, of Victoria, and of Queensland, are born Scots, and all the great merchants of India are of the same nation. Whether it be that the Scotch emigrants are for the most part men of better education than those of other nations, of whose citizens only the poorest and most ignorant are known to emigrate, or whether the Scotchman owes his uniform success in every climate to his perseverance or his shrewdness, the fact remains, that wherever abroad you come

across a Scotchman, you invariably find him prosperous and respected.

The Scotch emigrant is a man who leaves Scotland because he wishes to rise faster and higher than he can at home, whereas the emigrant Irishman quits Galway or County Cork only because there is no longer food or shelter for him there. The Scotchman crosses the seas in calculating contentment; the Irishman in sorrow and despair.

At the Burra Burra and Kapunda copper-mines there is not much to see, so my last days in South Australia were given to the political life of the colony, which presents one singular feature. For the elections to the Council or Upper House, for which the franchise is a freehold worth £50, or a leasehold of £20 a year, the whole country forms but a single district, and the majority elect their men. In a country where party feeling runs high, such a system would evidently unite almost all the evils conceivable in a plan of representation, but in a peaceful colony it undoubtedly works well. Having absolute power in their hands, the majority here, as in the selection of a governor for an American State, use their position with great prudence, and make choice of the best men that the country can produce. The franchise for the Lower House, for the elections to which the country is "districted," is the simple one of six months' residence, which with the ballot gives excellent results.

The day that I left Adelaide was also that upon which Captain Cadell, the opener of the Murray to trade, sailed with his naval expedition to fix upon a capital for the Northern territory; that coast of tropical Australia which faces the Moluccas. As Governor Gilpin had pressed me to stay, he pressed me to go with him, making as an inducement a promise to name after me either "a city" or a headland. He said he should advise me to select the headland, because that would remain, whereas the city probably would not. When I pleaded that he had no authority to carry passengers, he offered to take me as his surgeon. Hitherto the expeditions have discovered nothing but natives, mangroves, alligators, and sea-slugs; and the whole of the money received from capitalists at home, for 300,000 acres of land to be surveyed and handed over to them in North Australia, being now exhausted, the Government are

seriously thinking of reimbursing the investors and giving up the search for land. It would be as cheap to colonize equatorial Africa from Adelaide, as tropical Australia. If the Northern territory is ever to be rendered habitable, it must be by Queensland that the work is done.

It is not certain that North Australia may not be found to yield gold in plenty. In a little-known manuscript of the seventeenth century, the north-west of Australia is called "The land of gold," and we are told that the fishermen of Solor, driven on to this land of gold by stress of weather, picked up in a few hours their boat full of gold nuggets, and returned in safety. They never dared repeat their voyage, on account of their dread of the unknown seas; but Manoel Godinho de Eredia was commissioned by the Portuguese Lord Admiral of India to explore this gold land, and enrich the Crown of Portugal by the capture of the treasures it contained. It would be strange enough if gold came to be discovered on the north-west coast, in the spot from which the Portuguese reported their discovery.

By dawn, after one of the most stifling of Australian nights, I left Port Adelaide for King George's Sound. A long narrow belt of a clear red-yellow light lay glowing along the horizon to the east, portending heat and drought; elsewhere the skies were of a deep blue-black. As we steamed past Kangaroo Island, and through Investigator Straits, the sun shot up from the tawny plains, and the hot wind from the northern desert, rising on a sudden after the stillness of the night, whirled clouds of sand over the surface of the bay.

CHAPTER XIII.

TRANSPORTATION.

AFTER five days' steady steaming across the great Australian bight, north of which lies the true "Terra Australis incognita," I reached King George's Sound-"Le Port du Roi Georges en Australie," as I saw it written on a letter in the gaol. At the shore end of a land-locked harbour, the little houses of bright white stone that make up the town of Albany peep out from among geranium-covered rocks. The climate, unlike that of the greater portion of Australia, is damp and tropical, and the dense scrub is a mass of flowering bushes, with bright blue and scarlet blooms and curiously-cut leaves.

The contrast between the scenery and the people of West Australia is great indeed. The aboriginal inhabitants of Albany were represented by a tribe of filthy natives-tall, half-starved, their heads bedaubed with red ochre, and their faces smeared with yellow clay; the "colonists" by a gang of fiend-faced convicts working in chains upon the esplanade, and a group of scowling expirees hunting a monkey with bull-dogs on the pier ; while the native women, half clothed in tattered kangaroo-skins, came slouching past with an aspect of defiant wretchedness. Work is never done in West Australia unless under the compulsion of the lash, for a similar degradation of labour is produced by the use of convicts as by that of slaves.

Settled at an earlier date than was South Australia, West Australia, then called Swan River, although one of the oldest of the colonies, was so soon ruined by the free gift to the first settlers of vast territories useless without labour, that in 1849 she petitioned to be made a penal settlement, and though at the instance of Victoria transportation to the Australias has