To the north of Australia, and almost within sight--another vast and lovely region, and another contrast to the great continent--lies New Guinea, fourteen hundred miles long, and two hundred broad. Its appearance from the sea is magnificent--an immense undulation of luxuriance covering the coasts, and rising up the sides of mountain ranges loftier than Mont Blanc. But the tropical excess of vegetation may render it dangerous to European life: at all events, it will be only wisdom to people Australia before we intrude on the naked foresters, and do battle against the more fatal enemy, the swamps of New Guinea.
Borneo, which has so lately become an object of English interest, by the settlement of Sir James Brooke, is also a large and noble island; it has the bold mountain interior, the table-lands, the rivers, and the harbours, which belong to New Guinea. The English settlement, and the presence of British ships, may introduce such imperfect civilisation as the Oriental savage can ever receive; piracy may be partially put down, and even honesty may be partially introduced. But there is this great drawback to the success of English colonisation--that the land is already peopled, and that the strangers are more likely to fall into the indolent habits and luxurious vice of the native, than the native ever to rise to the manly habits of the Englishman.
The Indian Archipelago is almost a new world to the European. Though known to the Dutch soon after the decay of that empire which the Portuguese secured by the discoveries of de Gama, and occasionally touched upon by English commerce, it had been almost forgotten among the stirring scenes in which Europe was involved in the last three centuries. Our conquests in Hindostan, our possession of Ceylon, the capture of the Dutch colonies in the French war, and, later still, our establishment at Singapore, and the opening of China, have turned the eyes of England to those exuberant countries; and we shall now probably reunite them to the world of Europe.
But we must hope that, beyond commerce, and the communication of the comforts and intelligence of English life, our ambition will not extend. Those climates are generally hazardous to European life; they are not less hazardous to the manliness and vigour of English habits, and even to the force of the English character. It has been said that, if the first generation of colonists are English to the grave, the second are Indian from the cradle. They contract the lassitude of the tropics; they become incapable of effort: dissipation is the natural resource of opulent idleness; they linger through life from excess to excess; and, unless a revolution of the hardier native drives them out, or an emigration of their hardier countrymen keeps them in, the colony sinks into the ground.