to be unsuitable for the more intensive formš of agriculture and thought to allow but extensive stock-farming on a grand scale.

Secondary agents resulting from human action were just as impor-tant. The character of the first Settlements as convict-settlements was a firm support of a military and almost despotic regime which of course could not appear inviting to the independent enterprising elements of the United Kingdom, accustomed to a great deal of civic rights and liberty.

For the sake of order and disciplině the governors themselves and their staff had no wish for an immigration of new inhabitants who would have legal claims to a more liberal civic life, as they had their hands fuli with the Settlements of whalers on remote coasts, always trying to baffle their control.

Among the colonists who compulsorily or at their own request were brought to Australia during the first half of the 19th Century, there were with few exceptions, no non-British elements. This national homoge-neousness, though less apparent in the social structure, was doubtlessly another prohibitive agent deterring immigration from other countries. Only in South Australia founded by free colonists with the assistance of the Wakefield Colonial Society, a few Settlements were established by German religious and political malcontents who had but little inter-course with their neighbours of British origin and English language.

In the middle of the 19th Century, when the discovery of gold could no longer be kept secret, Australia was simply overwhelmed with the rush of immigrants whom it was for a long time impossible to control. Neither the government nor the earlier settlers feit much inclination towards these new intruders invading the country, but from a materiał standpoint their activity was adventageous to the colonial treasury as well as to the earlier settlers, and so the government and especially the squatters were bent to derive every possible profit from the gold-diggers. With the help of the new-comers they succecded in obtaining colonial autonomy with a parliamentary system, but the squatters took hold of the new institutions and only after long political struggles the new comers were ąble to secure a democratic reform of the electoral law and of the whole system of government.

During the boom of the gold-fever in the fifties and sixties, other nations contributed a fair number of immigrants to the otherwise British stock of Australia, but they did not stick together and were less diffi-cult in assimilating with the English speaking population than the originally agricultural German Settlements grouped around their own parsonage and school.

The old settlers represented the solid foundation of the primáry, entirely English character, and with them all the elements of the white population amalgamated into a unit connected by common manners and customs and to which the new physiographic surroundings gave a specific Australian character.

At first the governor of New South Wales residing in Sydney was the highest authority of the whole of Australia and Tasmania. But the establishment of new Settlements in Victoria and South Australia led to the complete independence of each colony which obtained autonomy