But how shall the rural labourer out of Sussex, Suffolk, Essex, or Cambridgeshire get to Western Australia? If there were no pecuniary difficulty in the journey,--if every labourer were empowered by Act of Parliament to go to some parish officer and demand to be sent across the ocean,--it is probable that a very large fleet of transport ships would soon be required, and that English farmers would find it difficult to get in their seed. This can never be the case, but something towards it is done. The colonies assist intending immigrants, and the mother country too assists, or, in some cases, pays the entire expense of emigrants. We sent out those ill-born and ill-bred women who were wanted as convicts’ wives,--and who, when received, were found to be mere Irish. But it is ill bringing a man out who will not stay when he is brought. If you, my philanthropical reader, send out some favoured tenant or parishioner, your object is fairly achieved whether the man make himself happy in Western Australia or Victoria. But it is by no means so with the colony, when the colony pays. When a colony has paid for three or four hundred immigrants, and finds after a few months that they have all disappeared, and gone to more fortunate lands, the colony not unnaturally becomes disgusted. Then it is that the colony feels that nothing will do but gold. And the mother country is affected somewhat in the same way, though less bitterly. It is said now that England has promised a certain number of free emigrants to Western Australia, and that she has not kept her word. But the mother country says that, as regards Western Australia, it is useless to send her emigrants unless she can keep them. In speaking of the continuance of the obligation on the part of England, Lord Granville, in July, 1869, wrote as follows:--“It has already been laid down as a condition of that continuance that the immigration should be wanted, and such as the colony can provide for; but it is clear from the census returns that the large proportion of these persons who reach Western Australia do not remain in it. There is therefore the strongest primâ facie evidence that the immigration is not wanted.” The men are tempted away; and do the colony, for whose benefit they were sent, no good by their short sojourn. Then why send them? Renewed petitions for emigrants, emigrants to be sent out at the expense of the government, were made; but the Secretary of State was firm. Nominated emigrants would remain,--emigrants nominated by friends in the colony. So pleaded the governor, with an anxiety which showed that at any rate his heart was in the matter. But the Secretary of State was still hard. “Her Majesty’s Government are fully aware,” he said in 1870, “that nominated emigrants are more likely to remain in the colony than others; but unfortunately they have no evidence before them that either one or the other class do in fact remain.”