these he gets paid, hence but few men are willing to follow professions.
Clergymen too often turn farmers and speculators, even if they do not
altogether throw aside their sacred character. Medical men but rarely
pursue their practice, when such remunerating fields of enterprise are
laid open to them; soldiers abandon their calling; and the government
officers are all virtually farmers and stock-owners.

This is to be expected, from the character of man. In a new colony
everything increases rapidly in worth--a landed estate which can be
bought in the early stages of its existence at a mere nominal price grows
yearly in value without a penny being expended upon it; stock increases
in a geometrical ratio, at little or no cost, for there is plenty of land
to pasture them upon. Nothing of this kind either does or can take place
in England; and when the settler finds how changed his prospects are, and
how new means of acquiring wealth are opened to him, he too often devotes
his every thought and energy to the one object; and so far will this
passion lead men that I have known an honourable member of council and
leading magistrate in a colony take out a retail license, and add to his
already vast wealth from the profits of a gin shop.

But as stock is that species of property from which the largest returns
are realized, and that with the least labour, it is to this branch of
industry that settlers generally direct their attention; indeed until
plenty of stock is introduced into a new colony its success is wavering
and uncertain, and its inhabitants are generally compelled to undergo a
degree of poverty and privation which contrasts strangely with the
affluence of the people occupying the more settled countries. The degree
of care and attention which is bestowed upon the breeding of stock
necessarily ensures both a constant supply of it and its rapid diffusion
over all accessible portions of the continent.

It is extremely difficult to convey to a mind which has never
contemplated the subject an idea of the rapid advance of stock stations
over the continent of Australia; there is something about it which bears
an almost fabulous character; and the same circumstance takes place with
regard to the rise in the price of town and country lands. Those who have
not witnessed such things can scarcely give credit to them. In Western
Australia town land was bought for twenty-three pounds an acre in the
month of December 1839; and in th