The discovery of gold alone was enough to instil this restless drop into the blood of a people whose very presence in the country was indeed first proof of such a tendency. In the wholesale rush which followed the first discovery of gold in Bendigo and Ballarat, it must have seemed to onlookers as if the merely agricultural and commercial Australia would cease to exist. Vessels lay in the docks, rotting for the want of men to repair them and hands to work them; for the sailors and the dock hands, the Government clerks, the policemen, the shopkeepers and their employees, even the very domestic servants, all joined in the stampede to that delectable land, where a casual miner could earn from thirty to forty pounds a day; while the Governor, like a modern Alexander Selkirk, was left “monarch of all he surveyed,” with no one to dispute his rights, certainly, but equally with no one to obey his orders. In the year following the discoveries at Bendigo—1851—ten tons of gold were said to have been taken from Victoria, gold then being worth £4 an ounce, while a quarter of a million of presumably adventurous spirits landed in Melbourne, all eagerly confident of making their fortunes. When this lure was sufficient to induce people to risk the discomfort and peril of the long voyage in a sailing-ship, and all the dangers of an unknown land, it was not to be wondered at that the earlier settlers, who were already on the spot, relinquished their ideas of a pastoral life in favour of the enthralling possibilities of mining, and, forsaking their farms, joined in the general rush to the gold countries.