The black men in Western Australia were certainly not treated with exceptional harshness,--were perhaps treated with exceptional kindness,--but they were very troublesome to the new-comers. There was much of spearing on the one side, and much of shooting and hanging on the other. There seem to have been two pertinacious chiefs, or resolute leading natives, named Yagar and Midgegoroo, who gave a great amount of trouble. They carried on the war for four or five years, by no means without success. The records speak of them as horrible savages. They were probably brave patriots, defending their country and their rights. Midgegoroo was at last taken and shot. What was the end of Yagar, or whether he came to an end, no one seems to know. And there were many other troubles in the young settlement which, as we read the record, make us feel that it was no easy thing to be an early colonist. Food for the new-comers was often wanted. The young crops of wheat, on which so much depended, were destroyed by moths and red rust. There was great lack of any circulating medium. The soil, though good in many places, was good only in patches very distant from each other; and there were no roads,--so that the settler who produced meat in one place could not exchange it for the corn and wheat produced elsewhere. And there was no labour. That of all evils was perhaps the one most difficult to be encountered and overcome. The black man would not work; and the white man who had his block of ground thickly covered with gum-trees and blackboys,--a large resinous shrub common in the country is called by the latter name,--could not clear it and till it and sow it with sufficient rapidity to procure sustenance for himself and family. It must be remembered in regard to all the Australian colonies that the country, which has proved itself to be exceptionally rich in repaying industrial enterprise, produced almost nothing ready to the hands of the first comers. There were no animals giving meat, no trees giving fruit, no yams, no bread-trees, no cocoa-nuts, no bananas. It was necessary that all should be imported and acclimatized. The quickness with which the country has received the life and products of other countries is marvellous. In some districts of certain Australian colonies,--especially of Victoria and Tasmania,--the English rabbit is already an almost ineradicable pest; in others is the sparrow. The forests are becoming full of the European bee. Wild horses roam in mobs of thousands over the distant sheep and cattle stations. In Western Australia grapes of an enormous size are sold retail at a penny a pound. Mutton through the colonies averaged twopence a pound in 1871. But everything was at first brought from Europe, and at first the struggle for existence was very hard.