In those early days the colony was non-supporting.  All the necessaries of life—­food, clothing, and all—­were sent out from England, and kept in great government store-houses, and given to the convicts and sold to the settlers—­sold at a trifling advance upon cost.  The Corps saw its opportunity.  Its officers went into commerce, and in a most lawless way.  They went to importing rum, and also to manufacturing it in private stills, in defiance of the government’s commands and protests.  They leagued themselves together and ruled the market; they boycotted the government and the other dealers; they established a close monopoly and kept it strictly in their own hands.  When a vessel arrived with spirits, they allowed nobody to buy but themselves, and they forced the owner to sell to them at a price named by themselves—­and it was always low enough.  They bought rum at an average of two dollars a gallon and sold it at an average of ten.  They made rum the currency of the country—­for there was little or no money—­and they maintained their devastating hold and kept the colony under their heel for eighteen or twenty years before they were finally conquered and routed by the government.

Meantime, they had spread intemperance everywhere.  And they had squeezed farm after farm out of the settlers hands for rum, and thus had bountifully enriched themselves.  When a farmer was caught in the last agonies of thirst they took advantage of him and sweated him for a drink.  In one instance they sold a man a gallon of rum worth two dollars for a piece of property which was sold some years later for $100,000.  When the colony was about eighteen or twenty years old it was discovered that the land was specially fitted for the wool-culture.  Prosperity followed, commerce with the world began, by and by rich mines of the noble metals were opened, immigrants flowed in, capital likewise.  The result is the great and wealthy and enlightened commonwealth of New South Wales.

It is a country that is rich in mines, wool ranches, trams, railways, steamship lines, schools, newspapers, botanical gardens, art galleries, libraries, museums, hospitals, learned societies; it is the hospitable home of every species of culture and of every species of material enterprise, and there is a, church at every man’s door, and a race-track over the way.

CHAPTER XI.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—­and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid.  She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—­and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.