It may, perhaps, be taken as a rule,--though a rule with very wide exceptions,--that the produce of a country comes from the industry of those who live out of the metropolis, and that they who live in the metropolis exercise their energies, and make or mar their fortunes, in the management of that produce. Politicians, lawyers, merchants, government officials, and even retail dealers, with the concourse of people who are got together with the object of providing for them, form a community which can hardly be said to be, itself, productive, though it gives to the products of a country very much of the value which they possess, and which they would not possess without such metropolitan arrangement. I do not know that any political economist has as yet cared to inquire what proportion of the population of a community should be metropolitan,--so that the affairs of the community might be ordered in the very best manner. Nor could such inquiry be made with any exact result, as the circumstances of countries and of towns vary very greatly; but the proportions of population as shown in the Australian cities above named cannot be taken as showing a healthy state of things. It goes towards proving that what we may perhaps call the pioneer immigration into these colonies has been checked,--a fact of which we have much other proof. The men who are here, and the men who come afresh, prefer the city, and eschew a life of agricultural labour. The nomadic race of miners will rush after tidings of gold, and will form communities of their own; but the fields of Australia, the vast territories of the continent which we would fain see bearing crops of wheat and Indian maize, as do the vast prairies of the central States of America, do not entice the population. It will be said, and said truly, that if a people can find a living in a city, with all their wants supplied to them by caterers near at hand, why should such a people encounter the hardships of the backwoods,--or bush, as it is called in Australia? Why should not a man stay in town, if he can live in town? We all feel that, as regards any individual man, the argument is good;--but we feel at the same time that cities without country to feed them cannot long be continued; and that a community with extensive means of management, and sparse powers of production, is like a human body without arms or legs. What is the use of the best stomach which nature ever gave to a man without the means of filling it?