The Australian Commonwealth. By Greville Tregarthen. "Story of the Nations"
Series. (T. Fisher Unwin.)—We regret to say that this book, on a subject of the highest interest, is not com- piled in a manner to inspire interest enough to justify a long review. The writer has lost himself in the potty details and miserable personalities of the early history of New South Wales, without managing to convey to us a picture of tho curious state of society which prevailed, or the stages through which it passed to attain its present development. For later times, the information given is singularly meagre. Yet the story of the early struggles of the various convict settlements might have been made highly effective, if only for the striking contrasts presented by the different origins of the various Colonies,—the convict and Governmental settlements of New South Wales and Tasmania; the casual and volunteer emigration which created Melbourne in spite of, and not through, official interference; the would-be scientific and ordered colonisation of New South Wales; and the hasty military occupation of Western Australia to keep out the French. It is curious also to see how history repeats itself ; how the Tasmanian and Australian natives have been exterminated by the modern English with little less, if any loss, cruelty, callousness, and rapidity, than the natives of the West Indian Islands by the sixteenth-century Spaniards ; while the warlike Maoriea of Now Zealand have been gradually "oaten " like the North-American Indians.
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