NOVEMBER 397 



money properly invested are sure to return good interest?' 

 Many will be inclined to echo the question. Why not, indeed ? 



But I hold no brief for Queensland, of which I know little. 

 Doubtless it has its drawbacks, like other places. Within the 

 giant circle of the British Empire are several such favoured lands, 

 whose fertility and wholesomeness literally cry aloud to man to take 

 his profit from them. 



What I do hold a brief for, what I do venture to preach to 

 almost every class, and especially the gentle-bred, is emigration. 

 Why should people continue to be cooped up in this narrow 

 country, living generally upon insufficient means, when yonder 

 their feet might be set in so large a room ? Why do they not 

 journey to where families can be brought into the world without 

 the terror that if this happens they will starve or drag their parents 

 down to the dirt ; to where the individual may assert himself and 

 find room to develop his own character, instead of being crushed in 

 the mould of custom till, outwardly at any rate, he is as like his 

 fellows as one brick is like to the others in a wall ? 



Here, too, unless he be endowed by nature with great ability, 

 abnormal powers of work, and an iron constitution, or, failing these, 

 with pre-eminent advantages of birth or wealth, the human item has 

 about as much chance of rising as the brick at the bottom has of 

 climbing to the top of the wall, for the weight of the thousands 

 above keep him down, and the conventions of a crowded and ancient 

 country tie his hands and fetter his thought. But in those new 

 homes across the seas it is different, for there he can draw nearer 

 to nature, and, though the advantages of civilisation remain un- 

 forfeited, to the happier conditions of the simple uncomplicated 

 man. There, if he be of gentle birth, his sons may go to work 

 among the cattle without losing caste, instead of being called 

 upon to begin where their father left off, or pay the price in social 

 damage; there his daughters will marry and help to build up 

 some great empire of the future, instead of dying single in a land 

 where women are too many and marriage is becoming more and 

 more a luxury for the rich. Decidedly emigration, not to our over- 



