Building.

Having fortune enough for all my wants, I proposed to get a large domain, to build a good house, to keep enough land in my own hands for pleasure-grounds, park, and game preserves; and to let the rest, after erecting farm-houses in the most suitable spots.  My mansion, park, preserves, and tenants, were all a mere dream.  I have not one of them.  When, upon my first arrival, I talked of these things to some sensible men, to whom I was recommended, they laughed in my face.  I soon found that a house would, though the stone and timber were to be had for nothing, cost three times as much as in England.  This was on account of the very high wages required by mechanics; but this was not all.  None of the materials of a house, except stone and timber, are produced in the colony.  Every pane of glass, every nail, every grain of paint, and every piece of furniture, from the kitchen copper to the drawing-room curtains, must have come from England.  My property is at a distance of nearly seventy miles from the sea, and there is no road, but a track through the forest, for two-thirds of that distance.  The whole colony did not contain as many masons, carpenters, glaziers, painters, black and whitesmiths, and other mechanics, as I should have required.  Of course, I soon abandoned all thought of building a mansion.  As for a park, my whole property was a park, and a preserve for kangaroos and emus.

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A friend of ours, a free emigrant, has more than once facetiously wished for our company in the colony; but judging from the following, we had rather “let well alone,” and stay at home, than play the schoolmaster or march-of-intellect-man at Sydney:—­

As for mental wants, talking and reading are out of the question, except it be to scold your servants, and to con over a Sydney newspaper, which contains little else but the miserable party politics of this speck upon the globe, reports of crime and punishment, and low-lived slang and flash, such as fill the pothouse Sunday papers of London.

Literary men, men of science, philosophers, do not emigrate to new countries where their acquirements would be neither rewarded nor admired.  Sir Walter Scott, Sir Humphry Davy, and Mr. Malthus, would not earn as much in this colony as three brawny experienced ploughmen; and though the inordinate vanity of a new people might be gratified by the possession of them, they would be considered as mere ornaments, and would often be wholly neglected for things of greater utility.

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House-rent, that great bugbear of certain economists, is indeed a grievous affair at Sydney, as page 20 proves:—­

Behold me established at Sydney, in a small house, a poor vamped-up building, more inconvenient, and far more ugly, than you can imagine, for which I pay a rent of L250 a year.  For half the money you could get twice as good a house in any English country town.  This excessive house-rent is caused by the dearness of labour, which enhances the cost of building; for, either the builder will exact a rent proportioned to his outlay, or (if he cannot obtain such a rent) he will not build.