The city of Sydney has a wharfage two miles in extent. The communication from the port to the interior is thus described:--"Imagine the Great Western Railroad, instead of terminating in a splendid station, with every means of conveying and removing goods to roads in every direction, ending suddenly in swamp, forest, and sand, through which, by dint of lashing, and swearing, and unloading, and reloading, a team of bullocks and a dray drag their Manchester goods ten miles _per diem_, at 50_l._ or 80_l._ per ton for the journey. The channel of trade is all that civilization, science, and capital can make it, from the threshold of the Manchester factory to the edge of the Sydney wharf. There it breaks suddenly, and beyond all is primitive, rude, and barbarous in the means of conveyance. The bale of goods last unloaded from the railway train is transferred to the bullock dray, to begin its 'crawl' up the country, costing all its freight from England for every twenty miles. It cannot be otherwise. There are no passable roads."
It is impossible to have a more vivid picture than this of the sudden impediment which the commercial enterprise of one country receives from the want of the commonest means of communication in another. The bullock-cart of Syria, and the Australian bullock-cart, would be useful instruments if they had roads to work in. But there must be general civilization before there are extensive roads. Carts and bullocks are of readier creation than roads. It has taken eighteen centuries to make our English roads, and the Romans, the kings of the world, were our great road-makers, whose works still remain:--
"labouring pioneers, A multitude with spades and axes arm'd, To lay hills plain, fell woods, or valleys fill, Or where plain was raise hill, or overlay With bridges rivers proud, as with a yoke."--PARADISE REGAINED.
What the Romans were to England, the colonized English must be to Australia. But the discovery of great natural wealth, the vigour of the race, the intercourse with commercial nations of the old and new world, the free institutions which have been transplanted there without any arbitrary meddling or chilling patronage, will effect in a quarter of a century what the parent people, struggling with ignorant rulers and feeble resources, have been ages in accomplishing.