and unseen in the distance, he feels that that distance is almost annihilated, when his own singular position on the habitable globe reminds him that he is a native of the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia-the land that sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in swift vessels upon the waters. To the north, the Indian Archipelago extends far and wide, from the shores of New Holland to the sea of Japan; and on fixing his eye for a moment on its numerous and populous isles, he almost fancies he already beholds the half-naked and furious Malay sitting clothed, and in his right mind, at the feet of Europeans. Adown the vista of these islands, his eye reaches even to the shores of China-that fruitful womb of the morning, in which, perhaps, may yet be hidden the future kings of the East; and as his mind fills with the glowing and sublime ideas which the thought engenders, he almost exclaims, "O for the lever of Archimedes to elevate the world!"

Soon after my first arrival in New South Wales, it appeared to me that there were three ways in which a person in my own comparatively uninfluential situation might nevertheless be useful in promoting the general welfare and advancement of the colony, and in preparing the way for the future accomplishment of the higher objects to which I have alluded; viz. 1st, By securing for the Scotch and other Presbyterian inhabitants of the colony, the regular dispensation of the

* Isaiah xviii. 1, 2.

"Behold, these shall come from far and lo, these from the north and from the west; and these from the land of Sinim."-Isaiah xlix. 12.

ordinances of religion, agreeably to the customs and institutions of the Scottish National Church. 2nd, By devising ways and means of introducing into the colony a numerous, industrious, and virtuous free-emigrant population of the working classes of society: and 3rd, By promoting the establishment of an academical institution for the education of youth in the colony, on the liberal and economical principles of the schools and colleges of Scotland.

I have already detailed the measures adopted for the attainment of the first two of these objects, and the degree in which they have hitherto been attained. On embarking for Europe in the year 1824, I proposed making some effort during my stay in England, in reference to the third of the objects I have mentioned -the establishment of some provision for the general education of youth in the colony; but from circumstances, of which it is unnecessary to inform the reader, the attempt proved abortive. On returning to New South Wales in January, 1826, I found that an institution, designated The Free Grammar School, had just been formed in Sydney, on the plan of various institutions of a similar kind in the mother country; and a few months thereafter, I was utterly astounded, in common with most of the colonists, at the promulgation of a Royal Charter appointing a Church and School Corporation for the religious instruction, and for the general education of the youth, of the colony, on the principles of the Church of England, exclusively, and allotting a seventh of the whole territory, for that purpose, to the Episcopal clergy, with free access, in the mean

time, to the Colonial Treasury Chest. It will scarcely be believed that so wanton an insult, as this precious document implied, could have been offered to the common sense of a whole community, even by the late Tory administration; or that men could have been found in the nineteenth century to perpetrate so gross an outrage on the best feelings of a numerous body of reputable men. But so it was; and the education of the colony thus appeared to have passed completely into other hands, and seemed likely to be little indebted to Presbyterian instrumentality.

The course of the Free Grammar School was short and inglorious. The masters were speedily dismissed; and the patrons of the institution, who had been at best but a rope of sand, speedily quarrelled with each other, and broke up. By this means, the field of competition was left entirely unoccupied for no fewer than four or five years together; and during the whole of that period-the period of the high and palmy state of the Church and School Corporation-it was completely in the power of the Archdeacon and the Episcopal clergy of the colony to have formed a noble institution for the general education of the youth of Australia, with the very crumbs that fell from their Corporation table. Nay, if they had only been possessed of the smallest modicum of common sense, that can rationally be supposed to be allotted to any body of privileged and chartered individuals; or if they had even been actuated by those instinctive feelings of self-preservation, that are commonly supposed to be strongly operative in all such bodies of men; the members of the Corporation

might have secured the exclusive predominance of Episcopacy in the management of the education of the whole colony, for all time coming. But the Venerable the Archdeacon, and the other members of the Church and School Corporation, seem to have been possessed with a spirit of absolute infatuation; which, however, has at length, I trust, happily accomplished the deliverance of the colony from a yoke which would otherwise have proved intolerable in the end, and would sooner or later have been violently broken asunder during some general burst of public indignation. To think of twelve or fifteen colonial ministers of religion managing for years together to spend public money to the amount of upwards of £20,000 a year, under pretence of providing for the religious instruction and the general education of so small a colony as New South Wales, without providing the colony all the while with a single school in which a boy could be taught the simplest elements of mathematics or the merest rudiments of the Latin tongue-why, the thing appears so monstrous in the present age of light and of learning, that it would have been absolutely incredible, if it had not actually occurred! By one of those strange anomalies, the frequent occurrence of which in all the colonies of the empire evinced the wisdom and beneficence of the late Tory administration, a considerable proportion of the gentlemen who were appointed by Royal Charter to preside over the department of public instruction in New South Wales, consisted of persons who had only received the commonest education themselves, and who could not have axed their way through a page of Virgil

or Homer to save them from the knout. It was accordingly whispered in the colony, that it was the object and design of the gentlemen I allude to, to prevent the youth of Australia from ever rising superior to their own humble level, and that they had wisely concluded this maxim of a distant age to be in every respect suitable for a distant settlement,-"Ignorance is the mother of devotion" to colonial Episcopacy.

I have already stated, that for some time after the institution of the Church and School Corporation, the mere management of that institution cost upwards of £2000 a year. The present Archdeacon has reduced that monstrous item of expenditure to £840 per annum. It should never have exceeded this comparatively smaller amount: it should never have equalled one half of it. Was it expedient, I would ask, to expend hundreds a year for the rent of one of the largest houses in the colony for a Corporation Office, at a time when hundreds of miles of inhabited country in the territory were utterly unprovided with the ordinances of religion in any form? If the use of a room could not have been obtained gratuitously from the Government, why was there not some upper chamber hired in Sydney for one-fourth of the actual rent of the Corporation Office, till some decent provision had been made for supplying the spiritual wants of the colony? Again, was it expedient for the Corporation to maintain an expensive establishment of four clerks to keep their petty accounts of a dozen churches and two dozen schools, and to give the first of these clerks a salary of £400 a year, and the rest in proportion, so long as they were

VOL. II.

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