MR. KINGLAKE'S INVASION OF THE CRIMEA.

(NOTE TO NO. CCXL.)

MR. KINGLAKE, conceiving that the note in page 309. of our last Number implies that his services were professionally retained in the defence of Sir Richard Airey before the Chelsea Board of Enquiry in 1855, wishes us to state that this was not the case, and that the part he took in that defence was gratuitous.

He also informs us that access to the unpublished political correspondence relating to the causes of the war was not refused to him by the Foreign Office (as we had been led to believe), in as much as he made no application to obtain it.

As Mr. Kinglake has expressed to us his desire that these two points should be explained we readily comply with his request. The anonymous strictures, which have appeared in several forms, but apparently from the same pen, upon the criticisms of Mr. Kinglake's History, do not appear to us to require any notice.

No. CCXLII. will be published in October.

THE

EDINBURGH REVIEW,

OCTOBER, 1863.

No. CCXLII.

ART. I.-1. Queensland—a highly eligible Field for Emigration, and the future Cotton-field of Great Britain. By JOHN DUNMORE LANG, D.D., Representative of the City of Sydney in the Parliament of New South Wales. London: 1861.

2. Pugh's Queensland Almanac, Directory, and Law Calendar for 1863. Brisbane: 1862.

3. Statistical Register of Queensland for the Years 1860-61-62. Compiled in the Office of the Registrar-General. Brisbane :

1861-62-63.

THE

HE Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew are chiefly indebted for their Australian flora to the researches of Alan Cunningham, a gentleman sent to Sydney by the British Government for the purpose of procuring specimens of the various productions of the Australian Continent, who so endeared himself to the inhabitants of that city by his amiable qualities, and his indefatigable zeal in the cause of geographical discovery, then of vital importance to its mountain-locked population, that his virtues and early death are commemorated by a public statue adorning their own very beautiful public gardens. In 1828, Mr. Cunningham, returning to Sydney from a botanical exploration conducted in the previous year, brought to its inhabitants the very welcome intelligence that upon an immense plateau, situated almost within the tropic, he had found the boundless waving pastures, the perennial streams, and the cool breezes so long sighed for by the flock-owners of New South Wales. He proposed to call this region the Darling Downs,

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in honour of General Darling, then Governor of the vast and, as yet, undivided British territories of the Western Pacific. Dr. Leichhardt, whose fate is still involved in inscrutable mystery, pushed discovery with equally happy results still further to the north only a few months previous to that expedition of which all trace has been so strangely obliterated. Subsequently, Sir Thomas Mitchell, then Surveyor-General of New South Wales, reached the Fitzroy Downs, the Mantuan Downs, the Peak Downs, and various other portions of this vast tableland - advancing everywhere through a network of cool streams, and finding delicious breezes welcoming us to the Torrid Zone.' And in 1845, Dr. Lang, whose work we have placed at the head of this article, visited for the first time these newlydiscovered territories, and was chiefly instrumental in procuring their more direct settlement from the mother-country by three shiploads of emigrants. The scene of these discoveries, passing for several years under the name of the Moreton Bay District, is now known as the Colony of Queensland.

This latest addition to our Colonial Empire, and the fifth of the offshoots which the vast and vaguely defined colony of New South Wales has, from time to time, reluctantly suffered to assume an independent form of government, differs so materially in soil, climate, and capabilities from all the other Australasian settlements, that it may not be uninteresting if we devote to it some separate consideration-without, however, entirely losing sight of its Australian sisterhood, with which it must needs possess many common institutions and characteristics. It might, indeed, at first sight appear that the vast slopes and table-lands which constitute Queensland would most closely resemble those districts of the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria, through which the Great Coast Range of Eastern Australia continues its course. In reality, however, they have scarcely a natural feature in common. The hilly districts of Victoria, without soil or stream, and worthless if they did not yield gold, as well as the contorted, broken, and impassable ranges of New South Wales*, offer, each in its way, a strange contrast to this more tropical extension of the Australian Cordillera, as it expands into richly-clothed and well-watered table-lands, plains, and downs.

In availing ourselves of the researches and considerable colo

* A Government surveyor, sent to examine a portion of this mountainous district of New South Wales, concluded his report to the Governor of the colony by thanking God that he had got out of 'it with his life.'

nial experience of Dr. Lang, as we propose to do in the course of the present article, we must do that gentleman the justice to acknowledge the large share of merit to which he is entitled in the formation of the new colony. While Alan Cunningham must be considered as the discoverer of Queensland, Dr. Lang may claim the credit of having wrested it from the tenacious grasp of New South Wales, as will be seen from the following resolution, unanimously adopted in the new Parliament of the colony:

(1.) That the thanks of this House be given to the Rev. John Dunmore Lang, D.D., for his able and successful efforts for the separation of Moreton Bay from New South Wales, and to found the colony of Queensland. (2.) That this resolution be transmitted to His Excellency the Governor, with a request that he will be pleased to forward a copy of the same to Dr. Lang.'

Hitherto, fortunately, the gradual disintegration of the vast territories comprised within the limits of the Royal Commission issued to Captain Phillip in 1787, as first Governor of New South Wales, has been accomplished without any more violent commotion than the demolition of a few election hustings, and an occasional shower of stones directed against the daring candidate venturing to represent his somewhat neglected province in the distant Parliament of New South Wales. The extreme reluctance, however, with which the parent colony has consented to the erection of each independent State, and more especially the impediments placed in the way of the Port Phillip District in establishing its independence as the colony of Victoria, have left an amount of intercolonial jealousy which is very little understood in Europe, and which still retards the formation of that bond of union which should unite the Australian provinces. Indeed, grudgingly as Queensland has been permitted to assume her rights as one of these independent States, we must think that she has not yet come into the full enjoyment of them. The due administration of Australian affairs would certainly seem to favour the claim of her settlers-and, more especially, of a large body of settlers now excluded from her boundaries-to a further extension of territory towards the south from her niggard parent.

The case of Queensland against the parent colony of New South Wales appears to stand thus. In an Act of the Imperial Parliament, passed in 1850, for the better government of the Australian Colonies,' a clause had been inserted, reserving to Her Majesty the right to separate from New South Wales, and to erect into an independent colony, the territory situated to the north of the thirtieth parallel of south latitude—that parallel