In marshalling the facts which prove how much error has been accepted as truth with regard to the pilgrim fathers of Australia, I have allowed the actors to speak for themselves as much as possible. An author may labour to incorporate as the coinage of his own brain the wit or sense which emanated from those of whom he writes; but success in such effort would be, after all, ignoble, and would rob his page of the dramatic element which makes it lifelike. The day will come when men will be glad to know how the colonizers of Australia lived and moved; what were their daily tasks and distractions; how and by whom troubles were created or overcome; by what passions men were stirred from time to time; how sometimes the blasts of tyranny were resisted by the growing plant, and how were engendered within it parasites which preyed upon its powers and threatened to bring low many a noble bough fitted to adorn it in season, and to render back the healthy sap which, coursing from root to branch, gives health and life to the tree.
If events and their causes have been rightly recorded and traced in the following pages, it must be admitted that for some evils in the colonies the British Government has been largely responsible. The most successful colonization is that which founds abroad a society similar to that of the parent country. The composite forces which built and sustained the England of the past have not been cherished in her colonies. She scattered the seeds of one, but refused
your reader to be only of the present age, or to live within ten miles of London. There is nothing more vexes me in old historians than when they leave me in the dark in some passages which they suppose every one to know." The hope of future usefulness must support a writer in the least attractive portions of his work. Already I have reaped some reward. One critic objected to the microscopic accuracy of my "History of New Zealand;" but the London "Spectator" (26th May, commended it for being as trustworthy as it was minute.
