The Colonist in Australia, Or, the Adventures of Godfrey Arabin (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER VI. INTERNAL STRUGGLES. It is necessary, for the information of our readers, that we delay our narrative to glance for a moment at the prospects of Arabin. We have said that he was unacquainted with the inhabitants of the town in which he resided; the society was not good enough for him, and he was not good enough for it. In plain language, there exists in the Colonies but one aristocracy, and that is of wealth: rank and talent are nothing in the scales. The Colonists worship no god but Plutus: rank is not of much account; talent is respected abstractedly, but it commands almost no respect for individuals. In some of our Eastern Colonies, attempts have been made to form an exclusive circle by the more aristocratic emigrants; but in every instance these attempts have turned out failures. For a time it is all very well; but fine gentlemen are the most unfortunate set of Colonists, and the more plebeian class soon acquire the money which they expend. Without money, they sink beneath the very classes they had treated with contempt. In fact, society must not be formed by emigrants, whatever their pretensions; it must be first decomposed, and the successful Colonists raise themselves into a superior rank by their industry and good name. There has been a spirit of reckless speculation abroad in the Australian Colonies, which has brought many of the apparently wealthy to insolvency. The majority of them will do no good in future; we think when once that a person is insolvent, he has no chance of getting forward in business afterwards?at any rate, where he is known. It is true, there are exceptions; there are honest as well as dishonest insolvents: the former may succeed, the latter will not. Fraud is bad policy; indeed, it is better (and we advise every perso...