It appears now to be agreed that this grant system was as injudicious as it was lavish. Middle-class capitalists came to reside on their estates, and not to work, and the settler of humbler but more useful pretensions was led to believe that the colony was closed to him. The settlement was hapless from the first. Old colonists give lively descriptions of how ladies, blood horses, pianos, and carriages, were landed on a desolate coast, while no one knew where his particular allotment lay. The settlers found that they had no control whatever over the men they brought out, and in some instances they were left to establish their homes in the wilderness as they best could by themselves. Many, deciding from the arid appearance of the place that there was no prospect of success, abandoned it. Some who believed at one time that the Garden of Eden lay on the banks of the Swan River, and that colonisation was a perpetual picnic, returned wiser, poorer, and sadder, to the more congenial sphere of settled and civilised England. Others, like the Messrs. Henty, sought more favourable fields, and ultimately, in _Australia Felix_, acquired both riches and reputation. Many of those who remained do not seem to have possessed the stuff the real settler is made of, but thought more of giving entertainments and seeking pleasure than of work. When the supplies they had brought from England ran out, they were very nearly starved, and they had to expend much of their capital in importing provisions.