To the labouring man, to the settler with moderate capital, or to the merchant, Swan River offers fair prospects of success, but to those who possess merely education without money to back up their acquirements, to the clergyman, the banker's clerk, the struggling and disappointed man of business for whom competition has been too severe at home, to such as these the colony is unsuited, and they would have a far better chance of eventually doing well in England.
Of the value of the colony as a settlement within easy reach of India, and admirably suited for the establishment of a Sanitarium for our troops, much has been said and written, and it is to be hoped, in the course of time, these discussions may bear their legitimate fruit.
In conclusion, I will only add that if I were asked what I thought would benefit one whose lungs were weak but as yet undiseased, I should recommend a twelvemonth's visit to Western Australia as a probable means of averting consumption, but I should advise that the time was spent amongst the homes of the colonists in the bush rather than in the towns. A stranger would meet much hospitality in either place, but the same causes which render the petty provincial towns of England notorious for dullness and gossip exist in far greater force in the embryo cities of a colony, whilst the fact that the habits of life in vogue are framed after the English pattern brings more strikingly into notice the colonial backwardness of thought and education as compared with recollections of the mother country.
But life in the bush has an original character of its own, and although books are scarcer there than in the towns,
