Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/248

order to render markets accessible to the new centres of agricultural industry. Among the immigrants I designed to reach a new class, from whom I anticipated important advantages: Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, and Spaniards, capable of teaching those light and genial industries of Southern Europe for which the soil and climate of Australia are so propitious. A section (one square mile) of each area was to be reserved for public purposes, in order that churches, schools, savings banks, mechanics' institutes, courts, post-offices, public gardens, baths, markets, and other agencies of civilisation, might in good time follow the settler. In the same spirit licenses for the introduction of new r industries were authorised, not to exceed a hundred in a year, under which twenty acres of suitable land could be hired at a nominal rent and purchased at £1 an acre as soon as the industry for which the license had been granted was duly established. It was confidently asserted by persons of experience that there were already in the country men accustomed to many of the industries we hoped to introduce. Americans, familiar with the culture of cotton (for which the Murray district was considered to be well adapted); Ulstermen, trained to grow and dress flax (for which the demand is practically as inexhaustible as that for cotton or wool); Frenchmen, who have made mulberry plantations and conducted sericultural establishments in their own country; Italians, skilled in expressing the oil of the olive, that "mine over ground," as it has been called; Belgians, who have manufactured sugar from beetroot, and Californians, who have manufactured from sorghum saccaratum both sugar and syrup, of which many millions of gallons are consumed annually in the States; and Chinese, reared upon tea plantations, who, it was asserted, would not be unwilling to cooperate with Europeans in planting that profitable industry on our soil. Indian corn had not yet been acclimatised in Victoria, but in America larger and more populous cities had sprung from that wonderful cereal than from our goldfields. It was the prime resource of the settler in the American prairie, furnishing him in succession with a delicious vegetable, household bread, dainty pudding, and wholesome spirits; a cereal of which six hundred millions of bushels