CHAPTER XllI 



KING GEORGE'S SOUND 



The year (1889) following my voyage in the Swan^ I paid 

 a visit to King George's Sound, and subsequently to other 

 West Australian ports, my business being to prospect the 

 country with a view to starting a cattle farm in the 

 colony, for even at this date most of the best land in 

 all the eastern colonies was occupied. What the future 

 of the country will be I have sometimes thought over with 

 anxiety. Unless the land is to enrich a favoured few, and 

 a favoured few only, the land-grabbing mania will have to 

 be counteracted, or peremptorily stopped. 



I was surprised, on my first arrival in England, to find 

 many persons, whose education and intelligence I should 

 have thought would be a guarantee of better information, 

 believing that there were few, or no, abjectly poor persons 

 in " prosperous Australia." This is a common and serious 

 mistake in England. There is, proportionally, as much 

 sordid misery and vice in our big cities as there is in 

 Liverpool and London, and those who expect to land 

 penniless in any one of our colonies, and yet pick up a 

 fortune in a few years, are as simple as the old-fashioned 

 bumpkins one reads about in old books who were 

 persuaded that the "streets of Lunnon be paved with 

 gold." 



Capital is wanted in Australia to ensure the prosperity 

 of the individual as surely as it is wanted in the mother- 

 land, and the big capitalist has the best of it in the new 

 land as in the old — far too much the best of it ; and men 

 with sixty or a hundred thousand acres, without reckoning 

 a back-run of perhaps three or four times that extent, are 



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