In country districts, however, though the wages may be good and the cost of living low, men often exist under conditions compared with which a prison life might be considered gay, and it is to these conditions that the Victorian Government will have to turn its attention more fully if they wish to count on all the emigrants, whom Messrs. M’Kenzie and Mead have been drawing into their net, not only settling upon the land, but writing home such accounts of their life there as may lead more of their fellows, in the Old Country, to follow their example. More irrigation centres, more railways, cheaper freight and railway accommodation for passengers in the far country districts are all needed, and, I believe, for the thinking man or woman, a better sort of encouragement for putting money and labour into the land than that afforded by the mere fact of taking it away from the old settlers and their descendants, who, on the whole, have worked as consistently for it and paid as honestly as any new emigrants are ever likely to do. “They have robbed others that we may have the land,” the new-comers might well say. “Let us make haste and get all we possibly can out of it, for what has happened once may happen again.” [Picture: Buck-scraping] Poverty at home is truly terrible, but I doubt if any poverty has ever been as unbearable as the utter loneliness and strangeness of this country and its ways will seem to many a new immigrant—used, as he has been, to the close community of village life—on finding himself twenty or thirty, or even fifty, miles from a doctor, beyond all reach of church or school, facing droughts which descend upon him like the incomprehensible, awful vengeance of some unknown God; day after day of blazing sun, of incredible toil, no leaf or blade of grass even reminding him of home. The best—the very best—the ablest, the strongest, above all, the least imaginative, will fight through; they will grow to love the gum-trees, the sunshine, and the silence of the Bush, but the first few years will prove a hard fight against home-sickness and hopelessness. It is a fight worth waging, a country worth living in. All the same, I only hope that the hundreds of people, the families of 2,206 persons—including 1,591 women and children—concerning whom M’Kenzie and Mead are so jubilant, and over whom the _Argus_ has almost shed inky tears of sheer joy—do realize that, if they are to take their intended place on the land, it is to a real fight, and not to beer and skittles that they are coming.