Australasia

a fort, and the very mission stations were guarded by soldiers; in Australasia soldiers were used chiefly to guard convicts; missionaries were escorted, only, by their wives and their numerous children; the word fort is rarely, and the word conquest is never used by Englishmen; and when Frenchmen write of their 'conquests' in the Pacific the word sounds like a hollow anachronism or an oxymoron.

Again, American colonists included African slaves at the bottom of the scale, and at the top of the scale spiritual outcasts who cast one another out, and did the deeds described by Longfellow in 'John Endicott' and 'Giles Corey', and somewhere in the middle of the scale the cosmopolitan colonists of New York and Pennsylvania. These classes were not represented, nor were the deeds with which they are associated possible in Australasia. Again, the bad old colonial system of which Adam Smith wrote was dead or dying when Sydney was founded; England no longer looked on its colonies as means for promoting English trade or navigation; and before long set itself to the task of encouraging colonial self-government, inter-colonial federation, and last but not least the subjection of Crown colonies to self-governing colonies. Finally the geographical environment of Australia and North America is as dissimilar as its spiritual atmosphere. North American civilization crept mile by mile up some waterway, then over some short low portage, and then down some waterway into the heart of the continent; but in Australasia short low portages between riverhead and riverhead have had no influence, and in Australia each river was usually discovered by sections, each section being regarded as a different river and called by a different

name.

For these reasons I try to avoid the temptation of looking beyond the century, or, except where imperial or world-wide policy forces itself upon my notice, the hemisphere with which I am dealing.

The world-wide policy which brings Australasia into contact with Europe is mainly conspicuous in the first and last chapters of the history. But the world-wide policy with which the first chapter deals is anarchical, confused, conflicting, and big with the possibilities of future war; while that with which the last chapter deals is harmonious, definite, and divided among separate claimants in a manner and to an extent which may fall short of perfection or disappoint the expectations of interested parties, but which is full of peaceful promise and would have been inconceivable to the people who lived and groped and waged blind wars or made mad claims in the crude cruel centuries which preceded the nineteenth century. Between the dates of these two chapters the world had progressed in its ideas. Ideas rule the world; and the chapters which intervene between the first and last will show how a wrong, unwholesome ideal of colonization was corrected partly by the higher idealism of one or two men only-notably Sir J. Banks-partly by the patient efforts of men like Phillip and McArthur; and how in the succeeding generation the wholesome but narrow ideals of men like the Wakefields were again enlarged and ennobled by the higher idealism of men like Coleridge and Carlyle, by the logic of facts and the unerring instincts of the race, and paved the way for that saner imperialism which dominates the English race to-day, and which is destined as some men believe to usher in an 'Imperium Pacificum', world-wide but not universal, united though free, whose example and influence may help to wean the world from its old wicked ways and contribute towards its regeneration. But I am already indulging in dreams, idle dreams, and must now descend or ascend from prospects to facts.