employment.  In this conjuncture, therefore, many of the next richer class abandoned their farms, and with the funds which they were enabled to collect, set up shops or public-houses in Sydney.  This town was at that time the more favourable to such undertakings, in consequence of the brisk commerce carried on with China, by means of American and India-built vessels, that were in part owned by the colonial merchants, and procured sandal wood in the Fegee Islands, at a trifling expense, which they carried direct to China, and bartered for return cargoes of considerable value.  The Seal Islands too, which were discovered to the southward of the colony, furnished about the same period, an extensive and lucrative employment for the colonial craft, and contributed not less than the sandal wood trade to the flourishing condition of this port.  It was also about this time that the valuable whale fisheries, which the adjacent seas afford, were first attempted; but repeated experiment has proved that the duties which are levied, as well in this country as in the colony, on oil procured in colonial vessels, amount to a complete prohibition.  Many of the merchants, whose enterprising spirit prompted them to repeated efforts, in order to bear up against the overwhelming weight of these duties, have found to their cost, that they are an insuperable obstacle to the successful prosecution of these fisheries, which would otherwise prove an inexhaustible source of wealth to the colony, and provide a permanent outlet for its redundant population.  These two branches of commerce, so long as they were followed, afforded a support to great numbers of the colonists, and rendered the shock which the agricultural body had sustained, less sensible and alarming.  I say these two, because the third has never been prosecuted but with loss; and has, in fact, proved a vortex which has devoured a great part of the profits which the othertwo yielded.  For some years, however, these two channels have been so completely drained, that they are only at present pursued by desperate adventurers, who seldom or never obtain a return commensurate with the risk they run, and the capital they employ.  But even during the period of their utmost productiveness, the number of persons who were immediately engaged in them, or who abandoned the plough to place themselves behind the counter, was far from providing a remedy for the disease of the agricultural body:  because in the former instance these two branches of commerce were only capable of affording employment to a limited population; and in the latter a capital was necessary, not so great indeed as had been required to enter successfully on the grazing system, but yet far more considerable than it was in the ability of the majority of the colonists to raise.  By these migrations, therefore, the pressure and embarrassment of the agricultural body, which by this time had gradually lost the richest and most respectable portion of its members, was but