Edward Wilson of The Argus, riding overland to Adelaide about 1848, was amazed to see from Willunga onward fenced and cultivated farms, with decent homesteads and machinery up to date.  The Ridley stripper enabled our people to reap and thresh the corn when hands were all too few for the sickle.  He said he felt as if the garden of Paradise must have been in King William street and that the earliest difference in the world—­that between Cain and Abel—­was about the advantages of the 80-acre system.  Australia generally had already to realize the fact that the pastoral industry was not enough for its development, and South Australia had seemed to solve the problem through the doctrinaire founders, of family immigration, small estates, and the development of agnculture, horticulture, and viticulture.  We owed a great deal in the latter branches to our German settlers—­sent out originally by Mr. G. F. Angas, whose interest was aroused by their suffering persecution for religious dissent—­who saw that Australia had a better climate than that of the Fatherland.  We owed much to Mr. George Stevenson, who was an enthusiastic gardener and fruitgrower, and lectured on these subjects, but the contrast between the environs of Adelaide and those of Sydney and Melbourne were striking, and Mr. Wilson never lost an opportunity of calling on the Victorian Legislature and the Victorian public to develop their own wonderful resources.  When you take gold out of the ground there is less gold to win.  When you grow golden grain or ruddy grapes this year you may expect as much and as good next year.  My brother David went with the thousands to buy their fortunes at the diggings, but my brother John stuck to the Bank of South Australia.  My brother-in-law’s subscribers and his printers had gone off and left him woefully embarrassed.  He went to Melbourne.  My friend John Taylor left his sheep in the wilderness and came to Adelaide to the aid of The Register.  He had been engaged to Sophia Stephens, who died, and her father John Stephens also died soon after; and Mr. Taylor shouldered the management of the paper until the time of stress was over.

When Andrew Murray obtained employment on The Argus as commercial editor, he left his twice-a-week newspaper in the charge of Mr. W. W. Whitridge, my brother John, and myself.  If anything was needed to be written on State aid to religion I was to do it, as Mr. Whitridge was opposed to it.  This lasted three months.  The next quarter there were no funds for the editor. so John and I carried it on, and then let it die.  At that time I believed in State aid, which had been abolished by the first elected Parliament of South Australia, although that Parliament consisted of one-third nominees pledged to vote for its continuance.

CHAPTER V.

NOVELS AND A POLITICAL INSPIRATION.