power of the government to extinguish, and which will
propel them, whenever an opportunity offers, to renounce
the control of such unwise and unfeeling masters.
Passing from this gloomy picture of vexatious tyranny
and unmerited suffering, he will proceed to the more
grateful contemplation of the remedies that are proposed
as a cure for the present evils, and as a preventive
against the future tremendous eruption with which
the existing system, a mountainous agglomeration of
impolicy and barbarity, is so fatally pregnant.
He will be satisfied that the application of the restoratives
prescribed, will both reintegrate the agricultural
body, now in the last stage of debility and consumption,
and impart fresh life and vigour into the commercial,
which is equally impaired; and that while the parent
country will by these means restore the tone and energies
of the colony, she will be contributing in the most
effectual manner to her own strength and greatness.
He will be persuaded that all these most desirable
ends will inevitably follow the establishment of a
free representative government; and that however salutary
the adoption of the measures proposed might be, unaccompanied
with that internal power of legislation from which
they would have eventually proceeded, they would of
themselves be utterly inadequate to effect a perfect
and permanent cure for the existing evils; and that
nothing short of a local legislature, properly constituted,
can on the one hand either inspire into capitalists
that confidence which is essential to the free unimpeded
extension of industry, or be competent on the other,
to provide an instant relief for those growing wants,
which spring out of the progress of advancement, and
are contingent on those changes of circumstances and
situation, to which incipient communities are so peculiarly
liable. He will, in fine, be convinced even to
demonstration, that the erection of a free government
in the colony of New South Wales would be a panacea
for all its sufferings; that it is the only measure
which can ease this country of the enormous burden
which it will otherwise entail on her, and save the
unspent millions that will be ingulphed, uselessly
ingulphed, in the devouring vortex of the present
system; and that the creation of an export trade of
raw materials, and the consequent extended consumption
of her manufactures which the proposed change of government
would superinduce, is the only way in which she can
ever repay herself for the immense expence that she
has lavished on this colony, as well during the period
of its really helpless infancy, as during the still
longer interval of its restrained growth and fictitious
imbecillity.
PART IV.
VARIOUS CHANGES PROPOSED IN THE SYSTEM OF GOVERNMENT.