POLITICAL AND SOCIAL 



A CENTURY OF PROGRESS. 



(EORGE THE THIRD was King when, one hundred years 

 ago, the Empire having just lost her colonial possessions on 

 the North American Continent, the enterprise of Cook and the 

 discipline of Phillip founded on the banks of the Tank Stream, 

 the nucleus of that group of flourishing states that now make 

 up the wealthy and important Australian system. The story of 

 colonization has already been told in the earlier pages of this 

 book. We have seen how the settlement progressed from what 

 it was originally, a mere place of detention for felons under 

 punishment, until it began to take the form and substance of 

 a colony to which the convict element was but an accidental 

 adjunct, to be thrown off as the time went on. It is always 

 to be remembered in speaking of the earlier stages of Australian colonization, that the 

 original purpose of settlement was not to found a colony at all, so much as to provide 

 a place to which the criminal and pauper population of England might be sent, that 

 the overburdened Home country might be relieved. It is true that we find mention in 

 the early state papers of some crude intention of allowing the convict element to reform 

 itself under novel conditions, and solidify in time into a new society. But the experi- 

 ment, such as it was, was entrusted to the hands best qualified to defeat it ; and the 

 early history of colonization in Australia has consequently been blackened by a record 

 of tyranny on the one hand and of criminality on the other, over which it is perhaps best 

 that we should draw a veil of discreet silence. Life in the early settlement presented a 

 good deal of the colour and outward appearance of English life at the beginning of the 

 last quarter of the eighteenth century. Both manners and dress have changed since then, 

 and a good deal of what was once regarded as good public policy and private morality 

 has disappeared as completely from the life of to-day as the knee-breeches and queues 

 of the gentlemen of the period, or the Georgian costumes of the ladies. Meanwhile, 

 however, the interests within the colony were forming themselves. The Macarthurs of 

 the settlement were beginning to gather about them the patriarchal flocks which later 

 on formed the staple of the wealth of the mother-colony ; and the officers of the corps 

 sent out to act as gaolers to the first convicts learnt to engage in those questionable 

 trading operations which they carried on with so little scruple and so much success. In 

 the time of Governor Brisbane the colony first attracted the attention of the general 

 public at Home, and the tide of free immigration began to set in, in a small degree at 

 first, but gradually increasing in volume as time went on. Free settlers were then 

 encouraged to come to Australia by the promise of lavish grants of land and the 

 assistance of convict labour. The expense and burden of maintaining these convicts had 



