The ancients, says Dr Hind, "began by nominating to the honourable office of captain, or leader of the colony, one of the chief men, if not the chief man of the state--like the queen bee leading the workers. Monarchies provided a prince of the blood royal; an aristocracy its choicest nobleman; a democracy its most influential citizen." In order to entice some one of our gentry--some one of wealth, station, and cultivated mind, to act as "queen bee" of the colony--seeing that a prince of the blood royal, or a Duke of Northumberland, would be hard to catch--the Doctor proposes to bestow upon him a patent of nobility. Wealth he has already, and wealth would not bribe him, but honour might. We see nothing ridiculous whatever in the suggestion. A patent of nobility might be much worse bestowed; but, unless we err greatly in our notion of what colonisation really is, the bribe would be lamentably insufficient. The English gentleman of fortune and of taste, who should leave his park and mansion in the county of Middlesex, to share the squabbles and discomforts of a crowd of emigrants--too often turbulent, anxious, and avaricious--would have well earned his earldom. He would be a sort of hero. Men of such a temper you may decorate with the strawberry leaf, but it is not the coronet, nor any possible bribe--nothing short of a certain thirst for noble enterprise can prompt them.
The other ideal of what colonisation might be is quite the reverse, presents a picture every way opposite to this of our classical dean. Many energetic and not uncultured spirits, wearied with the endless anxieties, cares, hypocrisies, and thousand artificialities of life, are delighted with the idea of breaking loose from the old trammels and conventionalities of civilisation. Their romance is to begin life afresh. Far from desiring to form a part of the little model-England, they would take from the Old World, if possible, nothing more than knowledge, seeds, and tools. To a fresh nature they would take a fresh heart, and a vigorous arm. Fields rescued by themselves from the waste should ripen under their own eyes. Thus, with a rude plenty, care and luxury alike cut off, no heartburnings, no vanity, a cultivated temper and coarse raiment--they and their families, and some neighbours of kindred dispositions, would really enjoy the earth, and the being God had given them. Not theirs the wish to see a matured society spring from the new soil. They regret to think that their own rustic community must inevitably advance, or decline, into some one of the old forms of civilisation; but they and their children, and perhaps their grandchildren, would be partakers of a peculiar and envied state of social existence, where the knowledge and amenity brought from the old country would be combined with the healthy toil and simple abundance of the new; where life would be unanxious, laborious, free; where there would be no talk of wars, nor politics, nor eternal remediless distress; but a disciplined humanity, in face of a kindly nature whose bounty had not yet been too severely taxed.