become owners of land in the new territory. We know that no such desire existed as regarded Australia when Pitt reBoh^ed to occupy the scene of Cook's diBcoveries. The intention being good, he deserves well of his country who avails himself of the only practical means of accom- plishing his purpose, and there can he no doubt that Pitt'a object was patriotic,^* A colony such as the world had never before seen had been rent from England m spite of warnings from his father. A jealous continent was banded together to aid the insurgent colonists; only the kindred race of the Germana abstaining from unfriendliness. The sun of England was said to be setting, her humiliation complete. Submitting herself not to the gusts of popular passion, nor to the exigencies of party, but to the genius of a man who rose above party and dared to keep his equal w^ay despite the clamour of the crowd, England was able, before the federa- tion of the United States was completed in 1789, to found a new state into which, within three generations, her ■children were to be absorbed by millions, and wbere they may yet flourish, as her children, till some ill-omened North or Grenville shall be permitted, while public atten- " In the *'Hiatory of N 8 W. from the Records-^ the Editor devotes many pages to the disparagement of Pitt's claim to any credit for the settlement of Aiiatraliu,. He admits that *'the proposal to occupy the territory necessarily required the sanction of the Prime Minister/* but thinks that ** there was nothing in it that appealed to liia imagination or stirred the current of his ambition." He adds fp, ^^81) that *' there does not appear to be any foundation for the idea, to which some writers have given expression^ that the scheme for the settlement waft matured by Pitt, still lees that it originated with lujn in a patriotic desire to create new colonies in place of the old. " The writers alluded to are not named, but flurely they may urge that Pitt's object in adopting the scheme was pa- triotic, and that by adoption of it he founded a new state which nothing but w^iekedne&a or folly can detach from the United Kingdom. Mr. Barton hints in aoveral pasHinges that there was reaUy no idea of founding an Australian eoh:>ny as an equivalent for the states in Americji, but in one passage he generously proves that the idea existed. He quotes these Hues pnbUahed in 1786: —
- 'Let no one think much of a trifling expense;
Who knows what may happen a hundred ^^ears hence? The losa of America what can repay? New colonies seek for at Botany Bay I" Asauredly the satirist of 17H6 might have wondered if he had been tohl that in a huiifireil years a writer would assert that the satirist invented the ** idea in order to quiz it.
