CHAPTER XI
TRANSITION: THE GOLDEN AGE
Pitcairn Island belongs as much to the first as it does to A Pacific the second and third epochs ; indeed, some writers think thaty^^ Wfl it belongs more properly to that unreal, immutable golden age of which poets have sung.
Although innumerable Utopias have flourished and perished in sequestered nooks of America and Africa outside the shadow of the Roman empire, Utopists have shunned Australia ; Lane's ' New Australians ' fled to Paraguay (1893); and only one spiritual architect has dared to build a new Heaven and a new Earth on one of the many vacant earthly paradises of the Pacific, and in doing so he quite unconsciously attained beauty and quite unconsciously fulfilled some of the oddest paradoxes which ever puzzled English brains.
The project of colonizing Australia with criminals was wild ; by ^ Sir W. Eden's project of converting the heathen by means ^^half- of criminals sounded rank hypocrisy 1 , and the instructions breeds in
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prepared in 1787 by Lord Sydney, Sir G. Young and / s / anc / Captain Phillip to import Polynesian women so that Australia might be peopled with half-breeds seemed worthy of Bedlam. The theory maintained by Banks, ' pater patriae,' that islands 3,000 miles away were included in the ' adjacent islands on the east ' over which the Governor's commission extended, must have sounded like idle bombast to the Governors of the second epoch, who would not stir as far as New Zealand without special authority. The arguments
1 History of JVezo Hoi/and (1787), Pref. xx.