Emigration at this time was hailed by many, including _Punch_, as a remedy for existing discontent with conditions, and in the cartoon "Here and There," and the verses "Know'st Thou the Land where the Kangaroos Bound?" _Punch_ gives a roseate picture of Australia, "deficient in mouths, overburdened with meat," and urges John Bull to help his paupers to go thither and live in plenty at high wages. A little time later the Female Emigration Scheme, started by Sidney Herbert and other practical philanthropists, furnished _Punch_ with a text for his oft-repeated sermon on the Two Nations. The writer was one of those who witnessed the departure of a party of thirty-eight women from Fenchurch Street station for Gravesend, and thence to Australia, and after describing the group, their homely appearance and dress and manners, continues in a vein of self-reproach:-- What a confession it is that we have almost all been obliged to make! A clear and earnest-minded writer gets a commission from the _Morning Chronicle_ newspaper, and reports upon the state of our poor in London; he goes amongst labouring people and poor of all kinds--and brings back what? A picture of London life so wonderful, so awful, so piteous and pathetic, so exciting and terrible, that readers of romances own they never read anything like to it; and that the griefs, struggles, strange adventures here depicted exceed anything that any of us could imagine. Yes; and these wonders and terrors have been lying by your door and mine ever since we had a door of our own. We had but to go a hundred yards off and see, for ourselves, but we never did. Don't we pay poor-rates, and are they not heavy enough in the name of patience? Very true; and we have our own private pensioners, and give away some of our superfluity very likely. You are not unkind; not ungenerous. But of such wondrous and complicated misery as this you confess you had no idea. No. How should you? You and I--we are of the upper classes; we have had hitherto no community with the poor. We never speak a word to the servant who waits on us for twenty years; we condescend to employ a tradesman, keeping him at a proper distance--mind, of course, at a proper distance; we laugh at his young men if they dance, jig and amuse themselves like their betters, and call them counter-jumpers, snobs, and what not; of his workmen we know nothing--how pitilessly they are ground down, how they live and die, here close by us at the backs of our houses; until some poet like Hood wakes and sings that dreadful _Song of the Shirt_; some prophet like Carlyle rises up and denounces woe; some clear-sighted energetic man like the writer of the _Chronicle_ travels into the poor man's country for us, and comes back with his tale of terror and wonder.