Book Description

Excerpt from A Historical Geography of the British Colonies, Vol. 6: Australasia; Part I, Historical Again, American colonists included African slaves at the bottom of the scale, and at the top of the scale spiritual out casts who cast one another out, and did the deeds described by Longfellow in John Endicott' and 'giles Corey', and somewhere in the middle of the scale the cosmopolitan colonists of New York and Pennsylvania. These classes were not represented, nor were the deeds with which they are associated possible in Australasia. Again, the bad old colonial system of which Adam Smith wrote was dead or dying when Sydney was founded; England no longer looked on its colonies as means for promoting English trade or navigation; and before long set itself to the task of en couraging colonial self-government, inter-colonial federation, and last but not least the subjection of Crown colonies to self-goveming colonies. Finally the geographical environ ment of Australia and North America is as dissimilar as its spiritual atmosphere. North American civilization crept mile by mile Up some waterway, then over some short low portage, and then down some waterway into the heart of the con tinent; but in Australasia short low portages between river head and riverhead have had no influence, and in Australia each river was usually discovered by sections, each section being regarded as a different river and called by a different name. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.