“Meanwhile applications for assistance were made on behalf of Germans and Swiss, and, by a very respectable committee at Madras, of the half-caste population of India. But the growing eagerness to reach Australia soon rendered it unnecessarily pressing for us either to close with applications of this kind, or to relax our ordinary rules in regard to British emigrants. This eagerness soon became excessive—so much so, that, at one time, our office contained no less than 18,000 applications for passages to Australia. The number of letters received in the month of June, which, in 1850, was 1564, and, in 1851, 2884, amounted in 1852 to 18,910, being at an average rate, excluding Sundays, of 727 a day. And when it is remembered that a large number of these transmitted small sums of money, requiring considerable accuracy of treatment, and that a far greater number respected the time and manner in which poor emigrants were to leave their country for ever—a matter in which any inaccuracy, though trifling in respect to the magnitude of the whole service, was of the greatest importance to the individuals—that a great number of our correspondents were persons who could not be counted upon for expressing their own meaning with clearness, or understanding correctly what was written to them—and, finally, that all this mass of details, by no means capable of a cursory or careless treatment, was to be disposed of by persons _partly overtaxed and partly new to those details_, it will be seen, we hope, that _we laboured under no ordinary difficulty in meeting the unusual pressure_.”