Growth of British-Australasian Colonies. 77
than 22,000 had found their way to Canada. Very often they drifted over the Canadian boundary into the United States, and Great Britain lost tens of thousands of her colonizing subjects. Lord Durham wrote, after exposing the terrible privations and utter bad management of our methods of emigration: “It is far from my purpose, in laying these facts before Your Majesty, to discourage emigration to your North American Colonies. On the contrary, I am satisfied that the chief value of those Colonies to the mother-country consists in their presenting a field where millions even of those distressed at home might be established in plenty and happiness. All the gentlemen whose evidence I have quoted are warm advocates of systematic emigration. I object, along with them, only to such emigration as now takes place—without forethought, preparation, method, or system of any kind.”
Chapter IV. 1
The Growth of the British-Australasian Colonies (1837-1897).
In 1838 the population of our Australasian Colonies was calculated by Merivale to be 130,000; in 1891 it had reached 3,809,895. In 1838 the value of imports from the mother-country to Australiawas valued at^ji,336,662, or^jio, 5.J. o d. per head; in 1891 the “Seven Colonies of Australasia” imported from the United Kingdom goods to the value of ^30,823,474. For the same year the total value of all imports and exports amounted, collectively, to ^84,651,48s. 1 The growth of population and the increase in trade has been more marked in
Coghlan's Seven Colonies of Australasia.