Circumstances have made Tasmania lean more than any other of the Australian Colonies towards sober conservatism in its ideas and its social and political aspect. Perhaps the youthful ideal of those who are now middle-aged and influential was generally the British regimental officer, as he was to be found, some twenty or thirty years ago, in quarters at Hobart Town, or retired and occupied with his grant of land up the country. For in those days there were sometimes a couple of regiments in the colony, which formed no unimportant or inconsiderable proportion of its population, besides a number of government officials in various capacities. The original landed proprietors were mostly retired officers of the army or navy, army doctors, or other government officials, to whom up to about thirty-five years ago grants of land were made by the Crown. Land was not worth very much then. Ploughing your field with a sentry keeping guard at one end of it lest you should be speared by a black fellow crawling out of the bush, was farming under difficulties: to say nothing of the probability of having the station cleared out by bushrangers from time to time, and the chance of being shot, as a precaution against identification, by men who had already forfeited their lives. It is better than any novel to get an old Tasmanian settler to tell you about those old times, the uproarious, dare-devil, killing and robbing heroic age of the colony. The crowning event, the great joke of the time—soon after which things began to get comparatively peaceable and prosaic—was the ‘black war,’ as it is ironically called. This was one of the wildest and most impracticable schemes ever devised by a really wise man, for catching the black fellows alive and unhurt and deporting them to some island where they might be both harmless and safe. All available soldiers and settlers were mustered and posted in a continuous line across the south-eastern corner of the country, which line, advancing day by day and gradually converging, was at length to enclose and catch them as in a trap. It was like sending half a dozen mastiffs to drive rabbits out of a wood, as almost every one knew beforehand it would be. Somebody caught (I think) one black man and a woman, very much by accident, and no more were even _seen_. But 30,000_l._ or 40,000_l._ had been spent on the campaign, and when the campaigners sent the bill home accompanied by a memorial setting out magniloquently the glorious results attained, John Bull unsuspectingly paid it, and the colony was so much the richer for its ‘black war.’