AUSTRALIANS IN THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT.

Dunstan Times, Issue 221, 20 July 1866, Page 1 (Supplement)

AUSTRALIANS IN THE ENGLISH PARLIAMENT.

Successful Australians, men who have been the architects of their own fortunes, appear to be highly prized by English constituencies, their practical businesshabits, and knowledge of the world doubtless renders them peculiarly eligible for Members of Parliament; and the folks in the old-country show good judgment in selecting men to manage the offices of the state, possessing the recommendation of having been eminently successful in the management of their own. Mr Robert Campbell, late of Sydney, New Wales, and father of Mr Robert Campbell, of the firm of Campbell and"Lowe, Manuherikia, and the representative for Oamaru in the General Assembly; when the last mail left was a candidate for the representation of the ancient borough of llelston, Cornwell. The West Briton and Cornwell Advertiser gives a long report of M r Campbell's speech. Mr Campbell goes in in the liberal cause, and in showing his fitness for the office, he seeks instances, some of his successes in the Australian Colonies, he says : —ln my youth I was very much attached to science in general, and particularly to the study of chemistry, and when the gold discovery took place in Aiistralia, I happened to be in the colony engaged in mercantile pursuits. My brother merchants were afraid to have anything to do with the gold, but owing to my knowledge of chemistry, I was enab'ed to assay it, and found it was the pure metal. I went to the banks, of one of which with a capital of one million, I am a director, but the banks did not want to purchase the gold, and I then said that if they would honor my bills on England I would buy as much of the gold as they would so advance me. I went on and bought three-quarters of a million worth of the gold at £2 10s an ounce. 'I his go d fetched in London .£4 an ounce and this operation resulted in a profit of nearly £IOO,OOO. That was owing to my knowledge of chemistry, and shows how valuable knowledge may become when we least expect it." In England Mr Campbell's energy of purpose has not deserted him, and having purchased an estate of 5,000 acres, at Datchet, on the river Thames, near Windsor, he sets at once about improving it, and appears to have been remarkably successful, the improvements appearing to have been upon a most gigantic scale, and a complete innovation of authorised customs, Mr Campbell thus descriliesthem:— " I found that growing corn was not the most profitable system for farming my estate, and I accordingly accomplished the formation of a great sheep-walk—the largest in England. After I had done this, 1 discovered ' that I had committed one great error—that under the course I had adopted, it would be necessary to employ so much labor, and that this would lead to the serious consequences of a dearth of employment among the labouring classes. I then devoted my attention to the consideration of this matter, and found that the evil which I feared, might be avoided my making the English acre the concentrated essence of production. I accomplished this by the adoption of a system of sewage irrigation. The river Thames ran for a distance of six miles, along my estate, and this gave me a large water power. I then constructed a reservoir capable of containing one million of tons, and by means of a 20-horse.power water-wheel, I pumped up from the river into this reservoir, and then by the rainfall on my estate, which was equal to two millions of tons gravitation, I was enabled to apply this water to the land. It took me some time to eflect this. I travelled in.ltaly, and saw the means of irrigation adopted in Lombardy, by which the production of the soil was enormously increased. I saw as much as from 70 to 90 tons of hay per acre, and although the sun has a great deal to do with this production, it was also lai'gely owing to the power of water and manure. 1 also ascertained that the plan had been introduced in the meadows near Edinburgh, for the last 50 yeai-s, and where every year the land is put up to public auction, and lets for £3O an acre, per annum, owing to the emormous weight of grass—from 70 to 80 tons in a summer —grown by sewage irrigation. You will ask how do I obtain manure as well as water for effecting the growth of such enormous crops of grass? I get it by keeping as many as 15,000 sheep and G,00() lambs, and next year I hope to have 30,000 of them. (Hear, hear.) Now, why have I referred to this matter] For this reason. I have only been in the neighbourhood for a few days, but during that time I have seen what might be accimplished in Helston in the same direction."

Mr Campbell will make the third Australian of note in the English Parlia-

ment, and it must be highly gratifying to the colonists to find that although removed so many thousands of miles from the lands of their births, they have not deteriorated one iota in the social scale, and that those who by assiduous attention to business have amassed sufficient wealth to once more return to their old haunts and homes are we corned back, not as mere lucky adventurers, but as the pioneers of society, amd selected by their countrymen to fulfill positions of trust and honor.