to the records can be found; and the narrow limits within which the writers moved may be seen from the fact that the period in question is disposed of in forty pages by one, in fifty by a second, and in less than seventy by a third.[1]
It is obvious that the events connected with the foundation of the colony, extending as they did over several years, cannot be satisfactorily treated on such a plan, in any work pretending to be historical. When a mass of material, more than enough in itself to form a volume, is condensed into a few pages, the result cannot be history in the proper sense of the term; it is, in fact, nothing more than elaborated almanac. For many reasons, the period in question might be termed the most important as well as the most interesting in our annals; and the records relating to it cannot fail to command attention wherever the history of an infant nation is regarded with interest—whether as a matter of national concern, or simply as a field for the development of novel theories in politics and sociology.
No one can read the letters and despatches written by Phillip without feeling the varied interest — human as well as historical — that attaches to them. Extending as they do over the whole period of his connection with the colony, they contain all the essential facts connected with its foundation and its years of infancy, when its life seemed so often trembling in the balance ; but at the same time we have something more than the essential facts ; for we find them everywhere interwoven with many little details of social life, as well as of Phillip's personal experience, which often, no doubt, fall far below "the dignity of history," but are much too valuable as well as interesting to be omitted. His despatches were written out from his journal, and consequently they possess the peculiar charm which makes all journals more or less attractive ; great historical events and little personal matters being mixed up in the narrative just as they are in daily life. Many of the trifling details with which the reader will meet
- ↑ Lang, Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales, 1834, vol. i, pp. 21-60 ; Flanagan, History of New South Wales, 1862, vol. i, pp. 21-71 ; Bennett, History of Australian Discovery and Colonisation, 1867, pp. 107-171. The fact mentioned in the text does not detract in any way from the merits of these works, which were all written with definite ends in view.
