in an
unexhausted soil, the fable of Midas is reversed; food does not turn
to gold, but the gold with which the land is teeming converts itself
into farms and vineyards, into flocks and herds, into crops of wild
luxuriance, into cities whose recent origin is concealed and
compensated by trees and flowers."

In such terms does a recent eye-witness describe the splendid
prosperity attained within the last two or three decades by that
Australia which our fathers thought of chiefly as a kind of far-off
rubbish-heap where they could fling out the human garbage of England,
to rot or redeem itself as it might, well out of the way of society's
fastidious nostril, and which to our childhood was chiefly associated
with the wild gold-fever and the wreck and ruin which that fever too
often wrought. The transportation system, so far as Australia was
concerned, came virtually to an end with the discovery of gold in the
region to which we had been shipping off our criminals. The colonists
had long been complaining of this system, which at first sight had
much to recommend it, as offering a fair chance of reformation to the
convict, and providing cheap labour for the land that received him.
But it was found, as a high official said, that convict labour was
far less valuable than the uncompelled work of honest freemen; and
the contagious vices which the criminal classes brought with them
made them little welcome. When to these drawbacks were added the
difficulties and dangers with which the presence of the convict
element in the population encumbered the new gold-mining industry,
the question reached the burning stage. The system was modified in
1853, and totally abolished in 1857. Transports whose sentence were
unexpired lingered out their time in Tasmania, whence the aborigines
have vanished under circumstances of cruelty assuredly not mitigated
by the presence of convicts in the island; but Australia was
henceforth free from the blight.

The political life of these colonies may be said to have begun in the
same year--1853--when the importation of criminals received its first
check. New South Wales, the eldest of the Australian provinces,
received a genuine constitution of its own; Victoria followed in
1856--Victoria, which is not without its dreams of being one day "the
chief State in a federated Australia," an Australia that may then
rank as "a second United States of the Southern Hemisphere." Western
Australia, South Australia,