island like Van Dieman’s land might fairly be expected to go on more rapidly to good manners and sound institutions than a wide region like Australia. The United States might be expected to make no great way in civilization till they be fully peopled to the Pacific; and it might not be unreasonable to expect that, when that even has occurred, the greatest civilizations of that vast territory will be found in the peninsula of California and the narrow stripe of country beyond the Rocky Mountains. This, however, is a digression. To return: it is also necessary for a civilization that at least a portion of the community should be placed above mean and engrossing toils. Man’s mind becomes subdued, like the dyer’s hand, to that it works in. In rude and difficult circumstances we unavoidably become rude, because then only the inferior and harsher faculties of our nature are called into existence. When, on the contrary, there is leisure and abundance, the self-seeking and self-preserving instincts are allowed to rest, the gentler and more generous sentiments are evoked, and man becomes that courteous and chivalric being which he is found to be amongst the upper classes of almost all civilized countries. These, then, may be said to be the chief natural laws concerned in the moral phenomenon of civilization. If I am right in so considering them, it will of course be readily admitted that the earliest families of the human race, although they might be simple and innocent, could not have been in anything like a civilized state, seeing that the conditions necessary for that state could not have then existed. Let us only for a moment consider some of the things requisite for their being civilized,—namely, a set of elegant homes ready furnished for their reception, fields ready cultivated to yield them food without labour, stores of luxurious appliances of all kinds, a complete social enginery for the securing of life and property,—and we shall turn from the whole conceit as one worthy only of the philosophers of Utopia.