378 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



for only the amount of their claim. Others were sacrificed by the 

 wharfingers and lightermen for their charges, and vast quantities 

 remained to be gradually pilfered or destroyed by exposure to the 

 weather. Naturally the result of this reckless congestion was to 

 materially lower the profits of the regular trader, who found himself 

 undersold in every article he dealt in. The only hope of checking 

 the disastrous inflow lay in a tedious waiting until the account 

 sales of some of these speculative ventures reached England ; so 

 during the whole year the process continued, until more than ample 

 provision had been made for the wants of the colony for the next 

 four or five years. By the beginning of 1854 the outlook for the 

 merchant and retailer alike was very gloomy. The wild expendi- 

 ture of the previous eighteen months had received a decided check. 

 The success of the diggers in acquiring sudden fortune was less 

 pronounced ; the gains were distributed in more moderate form, 

 over a larger area, and the business of mining began to take on the 

 semblance of an ordinary industry, with average fair results, and 

 many blanks. The migratory disposition which characterised the 

 digger was very prejudicial to the success of the storekeepers. 

 Some fields with a dozen stores, supplying 5,000 or 6,000 miners, 

 would be practically deserted in a few weeks on receipt of unsettling 

 rumours of great finds somewhere else. And the loss of the trader, 

 already large in the outlay for buildings and cartage of stock, was 

 frequently aggravated by the disappearance of debtors with un- 

 settled accounts. When the country storekeepers went down, the 

 Melbourne merchants suffered, and as the dtbdcle continued, it was 

 not long before many houses of hitherto fair repute were in difficulties. 

 The wine and spirit merchants were among the first and largest 

 sufferers, for the unnatural preponderance of public-houses could 

 not live on a sobered community, and many of them had been 

 carried on by their suppliers in the hope of starving others out. 

 The losses in this mercantile "boom" were not purely local, as 

 was the case in the previous one. Quite an equal share of them 

 fell on the greedy exporters at the other end, and on the institu- 

 tions which financed their operations. 



In the colony there was another factor working concurrently 

 which aggravated the position of the trader, and left him less pre- 



