in healthy and vigorous independence. This wise method is borrowed
from family life. If a child is either too much coddled, or too much
kept under in its young days, it will rarely grow to the best and most
vigorous manhood or womanhood. British colonies grow into healthy
nations just as British schoolboys grow into healthy men, because they
are, at an early stage, taught to be self-reliant.

It was not until 1688 that Australia was in any way explored by the
English Captain, William Dampier. His reports on the new land were not
very flattering. He spoke of its dry, sandy soil, and its want of water.
This Sleeping Beauty had a way of pretending to be ugly to the
new-comer.

From 1769 to 1777 Captain Cook carried on the first thorough British
exploration of Australia, and took possession of it and New Zealand for
the British Crown. In 1788, just a century after its first exploration
by a British seaman, Australia was actually occupied by Great Britain,
"the First Fleet" founding a settlement on the shores of Port Jackson,
by the side of a little creek called the Tank Stream. That was the
beginning of Sydney, at present one of the greatest cities of the
British Empire.

A great continent had been thus entered. The Sleeping Beauty was aroused
from the slumber of centuries. But very much had yet to be done before
she could "marry the Prince and then live happily ever afterwards." The
story of how that was done, and how Australia was explored and settled,
is one of the most heroic of our British annals. True, no wild animals
or warlike tribes had to be faced; but vast distances of land which of
itself produced little or no food for man, the long waterless stretches,
the savage ruggedness of the mountains, set up obstacles far more
awesome because more strange. Man had to contend, not with wild animals,
whose teeth and claws he might evade, nor with wild men whose weapons he
could overmatch with his own, but with Nature in what seemed always a
hostile and unrelenting mood. It almost seemed that Nature, unwilling to
give up to civilization the last of the lonely lands of the earth, made
a conscious effort to beat back the advance of exploration and
civilization.

On the little coastal settlement famine was soon felt. The colonists did
not understand how to get crops from the soil. They attempted to follow
the times and the manners of England; but here they were in the
Antipodes, where everything was exactly opposite to Eng