As a monument of the golden wealth of Australia, there is in the International Exhibition a wooden obelisk dead gilt on the outside.  This column is nearly seventy feet high, and some ten feet square at the base.  It represents exactly the bulk of gold which Australia has sent to this country since 1851, and which in all amounts to nearly 800 tons.  Valuing the precious metal at its ascertainable worth, it appears that gold to the value of upwards of L15,000 sterling was dug from the bowels of the earth, washed from the sand of the rivers, or discovered by fortunate diggers in various parts of Australia in a single year.

The interior of Australia is still comparatively unknown.  Last year an expedition was undertaken to discover a way across the Continent, and entrusted to a vigilant and enterprising commander named Burke.  Although a certain amount of success attended the object of the expedition, the fate of Burke and his immediate companions was most deplorable.  They perished by starvation!

CONCLUSION.

I have now told you all that my present limits will admit, of those interesting portions of the globe, called America and Australia, and I wish you to read again all that I have said, and I wish you also to view the inhuman conduct of the first discoverers of the former with proper feelings of aversion.  If you have read an account of William Penn’s first colony of Pennsylvania, you will see that his was the only just way of establishing himself among the Indians.  You must rejoice within yourselves on this occasion, that they were not Englishmen who practised these acts of cruelty and treachery towards the unoffending Mexicans and Peruvians.  The workings of Providence are full of mystery, and I cannot help thinking that the state of anarchy and civil war in which Spain and Portugal are now and ever have been engaged, is an act of retribution awarded to their barbarity in the great scheme of God’s providence.

It makes one blush for the sake of Christianity, to think that the perpetrators of the outrages upon the original possessors of the Americas were persons professing that sublime religion,—­and that in the midst of their slaughter and plunder, they impiously held forth the cross of Christ.  The confiding but dignified nature of the idolatrous Mexicans, did much more honour to the purity of the Christian religion than did the base treachery of their invaders, who professed Christ but knew him not.

Had they by mildness, perseverance, and reason convinced the inhabitants of the truth of the Christian religion, they might have become faithful converts, but it was unreasonable to expect that they should cast off the religion which their forefathers had professed, for a religion which they knew not at all, and the professors of which came with the sword to deprive them of their lives and their property.

I wish you, my young friends, to weigh all these circumstances whenever you read.  It will impress the different subjects more thoroughly upon your memory; and if your minds be properly constituted, it will cultivate the good and eradicate the bad.  I will again ask you to read this book a second time, and refer occasionally to the maps.  And now good-bye!