The streets are almost empty. Nobody looks busy. Nobody is in a hurry. Converse with anyone about the state of the Colony, and the word _depression_ is one of the first you hear, and it will come over and over again till you are weary of it. Different people mean different things by it, and feel the tendency from prosperity to adversity in different ways, but few or none dispute the fact. Elderly ladies lament the old days when there was more society, and a more abundant supply of soldier and sailor ball-partners; merchants and tradesmen the time when Hobart Town promised to be the emporium if not the metropolis of Australia. It is seldom indeed that anyone can be heard to speak cheerily of the present, or hopefully of the future of Tasmania. Nor is the colony suffering merely from one of those temporary checks in the advance of prosperity, which always occur from time to time in young colonies,—such as, for instance, the wide-spread ruin in Queensland, which was mainly, and so strangely, caused by the commercial panic in London, and which is already passing away. Tasmania (or Van Diemen’s Land, as it was originally called—the name was changed to efface, if possible, the very memory of its identity and existence as a convict colony) is the oldest next to New South Wales of the Australian colonies, and till twenty or twenty-five years ago was still, next to it, the most important. Now it is thrown completely into the shade by Victoria, South Australia, and even by Queensland. For the last fifteen years the revenue, the trade, the shipping, and the general prosperity and enterprise of the colony have been steadily decreasing. And although the population has increased, the increase has been due solely to the excess of births over deaths, and not at all to immigration—the number of persons who have left the colony during this period being considerably in excess of those who have arrived in it, in spite of very large sums spent out of the public money on immigration—and hence the population of adults has remained nearly stationary, while only that of old people and children has increased. A settler of twenty or thirty years’ standing, especially in the southern part of the island, can perhaps point to only one or two houses in his township which have been built since he came.