which has always been free. This evil is of course curing itself by degrees. The colony receives no more convicts, and the very birth and growth of its young citizens will gradually obliterate the flavour. But this would be done much more quickly and much more effectually by an influx of new blood. Nothing would tend so much to the improvement of the people as any step that would enable the enfranchised convict to move about among his fellow-labourers without being known as a convict. It is so in New South Wales and Tasmania. Intimate intercourse will probably reveal the secrets of a man’s past life in any country; and if a man once degraded afterwards rise high, his former degradation will be remembered. But in these once convict colonies time is having its effect, and men’s minds are not always referring to the matter. It does not affect the rate of wages, nor the character of the work to be done. The once convict does not feel that every one regards him as a convict, and does not therefore work as convicts work. In Western Australia the man who never was a convict will fall into such habits of work, simply because they form the rule of life around him. Nothing but an increasing population will cure this quickly. But the very fact that it is so, the very injury to which the colony has been subjected in this matter, gives in one respect the surest promise that here a new-comer may find a prosperous home. In England, as all the world knows, residences of all kinds are to be had at a much cheaper rate to the east of London than at the west. The east has all its disadvantages,--which are chiefly of a sentimental or fashionable nature. The man who can despise these may live there in a commodious house, who would be forced to put up with straitened quarters if he allowed himself to follow the fashion. Western Australia is the east side of London. The objections to it, bad as they are, concern chiefly sentiment and fashion. I do not recommend the man who is taking out £20,000 to a colony, with the idea of becoming a great man, to go there; but to him who feels that with £200 or £300 he has but little hope in England, and who would prefer independence and property of his own to the composite luxuries and miseries of a crowded country, I think that Western Australia offers perhaps as good a field for his small capital as any other colony.