one thing is certain, that, for many years to come, a large expenditure of Government money will be required in Western Australia. The colony has been saturated with professors of crime, and if, by the withdrawal of home supplies, the dangerous classes within it should ever want bread, the position of the free settlers would be very terrible.
The frequent reference in West Australia to the word "Government," and the manner in which it was alluded to, might have led one to suppose that it was an imaginary creature whose character varied with that of each person who spoke of it, and with the peculiar views which he or she took of things in general. Thus I have known it quoted by children to sanction their having pelted a turkey to death, on the plea that "Mother says as how it is Government ground, and we may do as we like."
Or again, it was represented as possessed with especial spite and malice towards one individual convict, who would express his inward belief that "Government had a down upon him." Or as a landlord to whom no sort of consideration was due; thus I remember a warder's wife telling me what trouble she had taken in their last "quarters" to keep the boards white by scrubbing them with sand, but who broke off in her recital as if ashamed of the pleasure that she had felt in her cleanliness, and sighed out "the more fool I, for wasting such pains upon a Government floor."
"Government men" is also the self-chosen style and title of the convicts, and the only definition of their estate which they accept from the outer world without resentment. Happily for the future of Western Australia, it
