oak; but, “O the difference to me!" not so venerable a tree, not "the grave senator of mighty woods." A most stately, a most superb tree, august in the rich depth of its leafiness, is that adorner and defender of Britain. I sometimes see a very oldlooking young rich man, a native of New South Wales, who lives in an elegant house, and has a valuable estate about it; and I ask myself what kind of boyhood must that man's have been? He never saw the blue gleam of hedge-sparrow eggs in the fresh budding garden-hedge. What kind of flowers were his daisies and buttercups? Only to think that he never saw a cowslip or primrose; never wandered in a sweet English meadow; nor ever saw a bank of violets. All our summer sights and sounds are lost to him as completely as if he had been brought up in a vast city nay into cities the shouting of the vernal cuckoos will often penetrate; and into them, garden-haunting nightingales will carry the soul of woods and copses. What idea can he have of a green rural English lane; or of a country village, with its old grey gothic church, and the grand harmony of bells? of rustic cottages, substantially capacious farm-houses, halls antiquely venerable or of vast hoary stern castles? How utterly are lost to him the green freshness of small homesteads, with their shrubby line of flowery hedge-rows, and the deep rich shadowing of umbrageous trees. His native trees are scarcely worthy of the term. He doubtless had and has great advantages; is satisfied with the world, and with himself. Yet seeing what he was and is, and knowing well from what elements his youth has become manhood, what a nakedness of soul must he have! How far more rich in the best wealth is the poorest English peasant? whose education has been the song of birds; the breath of vernal blossoms; the daily aspect of ever-varying nature; the old traditionary legends; and the homely poetry of common speech. Alas for the manhood which has been built up in a dry-as-dust, post-and-rail country! whose education has been completed by a tour with the stockman to the Hume-river, the Goulbourn and the Murray; and whose conversation smacks of the parrot and the stock-whip. Howsoever rich such a man may be, I would rather, regarding real wealth and happiness, be Spencer Hall, in Padley Wood, or Hatherge Moor; most certainly I should be the gainer.

It is true there are rich Peter Bells in England, both in town and country, into whose souls nature could never find entrance; men who have decently the form of men-the outer temple without the inner capaciousness and adornments-bare walls, where there is neither altar nor incense.

What are the agreeable objects in an Australian landscape? Certainly there is little variety. With the endless range of a wooded country the eye is soon satisfied. Better it is to meet, as you do occasionally, with here and there ample openings of gracefully smooth country, with a shiac-tree only at intervals, or a clump of them; knoll and slope and glen sweetly varied with sunshine and shadow; and with the silvery gleam of blue waters, the green sward whitely dotted, far as you can see, with flocks of sheep; such scenery as you meet with amongst the beautiful chain of the Moonee ponds, in the neighbourhood of the higher flow of the Salt-water river, and beyond Mount Macedon. Then there are gay groups of magpies, with their rich lively voices, the most abundant of Australian birds. Perhaps a bronze-winged pigeon may get up before you and alight in some tree near at hand-a beautiful creature. The gorgeous colours of a flock of parrots may suddenly flash before your eyes, with rainbow hues, and then as fleetly with their shrill sharp cries vanish far off in the woods. White and black cockatoos are not disagreeable objects, but most harsh and discordant screamers. Very stately and pleasant is the lofty and deliberate flight of the larger kinds of falcons; and very grand is the coming from the immense forests and untrodden mountains, the soarings aloft, and stoopings from the higher heavens, of the large Australian eagle. Also very noble in its flight, and seen solitarily in bays and lakes, is the pelican of the wilderness. Splendid through dusky heavens is the caravan-motion of trumpet-toned swans. Very lively and animating, the dancing mass of plumage of the fleet racing emu: and not ungraceful, the plunging-gump-gump-gump of the kangaroos; filling you with sudden trepidation, as it bounces and flusters through the scrub.

WHAT RIGHT HAVE WE TO AUSTRALIA?

As it regards the Dutch or the aborigines? certainly both. First of the Dutch. If the Welsh allow us the honour, and the Irish, of picking up waif and stray countries, the Dutch will not dispute it. These below-water-mark people had once a portion of North America, and the English laid their hands upon it. New Amsterdam became New York, but that John Bull did not keep. The Cape of Good Hope, the East Indies, Van Diemen's Land, and New Holland, these were worth having, and we have them. We had hold, too, of Meinheer's Spice Islands; but had we a little bit of conscience, or did we pity the beaver-nation, that we let go our hold? Perhaps we

had grasped enough. No nation can boast such an honest ancestry as we our colonising is of the blood. The Romans were in Britain, and the Danes; they came uninvited if the Saxons did not. Milton considered those same Romans to be only a great nation of splendid thieves. Then the Danes, when they were paid to leave the country, never came back again—until the next spring. The Saxons saw the country was beautiful; they had been invited over, were hospitably desired to make themselves quite at home in it, and did so. Besides, they didn't like crossing the Channel, for ship-building was not then in great perfection. Then the Normans, but we have said quite enough. We have the right blood in our veins; Roman, Danish, Saxon, and Norman ; and nobody will dispute our title to one half of the globe. Our dominions, whatever quantity of night and darkness there may be in the world, are known to bask in perpetual sunshine. The Dutch will say nothing to us about New Holland; and, for the aborigines, they have reversed God's command to "increase and multiply." They are decreasing naturally, and have thus no right to the land. Nobody will dispute our title in this particular; we are not decreasing.

Well, all the crimes of our ancestors were sincerely repented of; and we are inclined to act, nationally and individually, in a becoming and Christian manner.

"Thank God," says the white man, as he draws near to a newly-discovered country, " that I was born in a Christian land! for these poor savages that we are about to visit know nothing, so great is their simplicity and ignorance about meum and tuum; and we shall be able for a few glass beads, or some trifling gift of knives or scissors, hatchets or blankets, to persuade them, like Esau his birthright, to sell the very land which they have inherited from their forefathers. It is very likely that they may not so much as know one syllable of our language; nor, indeed, understand the nature of the bargain which they make; still, the trinkets will be theirs and the land ours, for we have both the will and the power to take possession of it. Besides, we have other authority than purchase or force; the savages must be Christianized. If the wild people lose their old country, they will receive for it in return a new faith. Once plant the cross upon the shore, and the new land belongs to Christ and his people."

Perhaps the planting of the cross in the domains of these unapprehensive and silly beings is meant to typify, as it certainly was when so set up by the Spaniards, that, in the new scene of operations, Christ would again be crucified in the tears,

the groans, and agonies, of outraged humanity; in the unutterable barbarities and atrocities to be inflicted on a timid and defenceless people.

Nothing is more necessary or just than that, as one country is over-peopled, the supernumerary inhabitants should distribute themselves over new and more thinly occupied countries. God, who said "replenish the earth," never, indeed, meant twelve square miles of the earth's commonly productive surface to belong, as in Australia, to one only human being; nor ever gave, save in one instance, any one country to one race of men exclusively. By cultivating the soil, solely, do we obtain any property in it; nor has any man a right to more than he can occupy with advantage to himself and his kind. Of the rest he is but a steward, and must give an account of his stewardship to the Universal Owner.

William Penn did right in again purchasing of the Indians the territory given him by his sovereign, although it neither belonged to the one or the other; for, by so doing, he satisfied his own conscience, and conciliated the goodwill of the old inhabitants of the woods. His sterling integrity, his Christian philanthropy, impressed a new idea of the greatness of man, and of his goodness, upon that wild yet intellectual people, immeasurably productive of good to both races through many succeeding generations.

It was a lesson that should not have been forgotten. Still, if we have given them, in the worst of our species, ill example, we have afforded to such of them as do not fall in mutual conflict before we understand each other, what they did not possess before our arrival, an opportunity of raising themselves in the scale of being; of embracing the arts and comforts of civilised existence; of acquiring the knowledge, by intercourse and comparison, that they are naturally something more than mere brutes, or capable of enfranchisement from that condition.

This right to Australia is a sore subject with many of the British settlers, and they strive to satisfy their consciences in various ways. We will listen now to what a settler says on the subject:

"The feeling that most of us possess, is, that we have robbed the blacks of their territory; and that we are, in a moral and just view, debtors to them for the soil. To this I will reply; Europe, the wide and flourishing part of the globe from which most of us come, was, at one time, a vast mountainous and woody district; many parts of which, as Britain, Germany, Hungary, and the Northern states, consisted either of wide

morasses or interminable forests, inhabited chiefly by wild beasts, and scantily peopled by wandering tribes, subsisting by hunting and predatory excursions.

*

"Such were its inhabitants when the Egyptians, Phoenicians, and Tyrians, increasing in population, began to send out parties, who, settling along the shores of the Mediterranean, advanced inland and laid the foundation of those mighty empires, the Grecian, Roman, and Venetian, &c., under whom religion was preserved, philosophy advanced, and the arts and sciences encouraged and perfected. Were these colonists considered as robbers of the soil? Were they responsible for the evils and the bloodshed which these wandering tribes brought upon themselves by their aggressions upon the new-comers? for if they were not, neither are we, who have been led by the same providential hand to a continent little less in extent than ancient Europe, and little more inhabited, to be looked upon as usurpers of a pre-occupied country. More than this; (for I look upon the question as one of vital importance) the blacks themselves bear among them so many distinct characteristics of different nations and periods, whose habits, language, and appearances, are totally distinct, and who seldom meet but to fight, that we may reasonably conclude, that they are descended from ancestors borne here at different times and from different nations, for the African and the Asiatic are most clearly distinguishable. Who, then, is to judge, to whom a territory so extensive belongs; or to say that wandering tribes, whom accident has probably thrown on these shores at different periods, are the rightful and sole owners of such a country?

"Considering, then, that the protectorate is a boon given to satisfy a feeling within ourselves; that we have robbed these natives with one hand, and must give them something with the other; and that it is also a salvo to stop the hue and cry of a body in the mother country, not inaptly termed humanitymongers; who, to use the words of an American writer, can sympathise with the remotest corners of the earth, while they are deaf to the cries of their starving countrymen: I contend, that we are in no way bound in justice, whatever pity for them might lead us to do, to keep up the expensive pageantry of a protectorate; while, if we examine into the ends proposed by the protectorate, we shall see of how little service they are.

"To feed and instruct the blacks 16,000l. a year is voted by

*Religion! What? Arts and sciences perfected? I should like to know when and where !-R. H.