It needs no great stretch of fancy to see a mysterious design in the world-history of Australia. Here was a great area of land stuffed with precious and useful minerals, hidden away from the advancing civilisation of man as effectually as if it had been in the planet Mars. In other parts of the globe great civilisations rose and fell--the Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Greek, the Roman,--all drawing from the bowels of the earth her hidden treasures, and drawing on her surface riches with successive harvests. In America, the Mexican, Peruvian and other civilisations learned to gather from the great stocks of Nature, and built up fabrics of greatness from her rifled treasures. In Australia alone, amid dim, mysterious forests, the same prehistoric animals roamed, the same poor nomads of men lived and died, neither tilling nor mining the earth--tenants in occupation, content with a bare and accidental livelihood in the midst of mighty riches. Australia too was not discovered by the White Man until the moment when a young nation could be founded on the discovered principles of Justice. To complete the marvel, as it would seem, Providence ordained that its occupation and development should be by the one people most eminently fitted for the founding of a new nation on the virgin soil. The fostering care of Nature did not end there. The early settlers coming to Australia not only found that nothing had been drawn from the soil or reef, that an absolutely virgin country was theirs to exploit, but also were greeted by a singularly happy climate, free of all the diseases which afflicted older lands. Prolific Australia, with all its marvellous potentialities, lay open to them, with no warlike tribes to enforce a bloody beginning to history, no epidemics to war against, no savage beasts to encounter. And they were greeted by an energising climate which seemed to encourage the best faculties of man, just as it gave to harvests a wonderful richness and to herds a marvellous fecundity.