In such terms does a recent eye-witness describe the splendid prosperity attained within the last two or three decades by that Australia which our fathers thought of chiefly as a kind of far-off rubbish-heap where they could fling out the human garbage of England, to rot or redeem itself as it might, well out of the way of society’s fastidious nostril, and which to our childhood was chiefly associated with the wild gold-fever and the wreck and ruin which that fever too often wrought.  The transportation system, so far as Australia was concerned, came virtually to an end with the discovery of gold in the region to which we had been shipping off our criminals.  The colonists had long been complaining of this system, which at first sight had much to recommend it, as offering a fair chance of reformation to the convict, and providing cheap labour for the land that received him.  But it was found, as a high official said, that convict labour was far less valuable than the uncompelled work of honest freemen; and the contagious vices which the criminal classes brought with them made them little welcome.  When to these drawbacks were added the difficulties and dangers with which the presence of the convict element in the population encumbered the new gold-mining industry, the question reached the burning stage.  The system was modified in 1853, and totally abolished in 1857.  Transports whose sentence were unexpired lingered out their time in Tasmania, whence the aborigines have vanished under circumstances of cruelty assuredly not mitigated by the presence of convicts in the island; but Australia was henceforth free from the blight.

The political life of these colonies may be said to have begun in the same year—­1853—­when the importation of criminals received its first check.  New South Wales, the eldest of the Australian provinces, received a genuine constitution of its own; Victoria followed in 1856—­Victoria, which is not without its dreams of being one day “the chief State in a federated Australia,” an Australia that may then rank as “a second United States of the Southern Hemisphere.”  Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, Tasmania, and New Zealand, one after another, attained the same liberties; all have now representative governments, modelled on those of the mother country, but inevitably without the aristocratic element.  Such an aristocracy as that of England is the natural growth of many centuries and of circumstances hardly likely to be duplicated—­a fact which the Prince Consort once had occasion to lay very clearly before Louis Napoleon, anxious to surround himself with a similar nobility, if only he could manage it.  But though the aristocratic element be lacking, the patriotic passion and the sentiment of loyalty are abundantly present; nor has the mother country any intellectual pre-eminence over her colonies, drawn immeasurably nearer to her in thought and feeling as communication has become rapid and easy.