As time went on he established farms, planned a town of wide, imposing
streets (a plan afterwards departed from by his successors, to the
everlasting regret of their successors), and introduced a system of land
grants which has ever since formed the basis of the colony's land laws,
although politicians and lawyers have too long had their say in
legislation for Phillip's plans to be any longer recognizable or the
existing laws intelligible.[B]

[Footnote B: A leader of the Bar in New South Wales, an eminent Q.C. of
the highest talent, has publicly declared (and every honest man agrees
with him) that the existing land laws are unintelligible to anyone, lawyer
or layman.]

The peculiar fitness of Phillip for the task imposed on him was, there is
little doubt, due largely to his naval training, and no naval officer has
better justified Lord Palmerston's happily worded and well-deserved
compliment to the profession, "Whenever I want a thing well done in a
distant part of the world; when I want a man with a good head, a good
heart, lots of pluck, and plenty of common-sense, I always send for a
captain of the navy."

A captain of a man-of-war then, as now, began at the bottom of the ladder,
learning how to do little things, picking up such knowledge of detail as
qualified him to teach others, to know what could be done and how it ought
to be done. In all professions this rule holds good, but on shipboard men
acquire something more. On land a man learns his particular business in
the world; at sea his ship is a man's world, and on the completeness of
the captain's knowledge of how to feed, to clothe, to govern, his people
depended then, and in a great measure now depends, the comfort, the lives
even, of seamen. So that, being trained in this self-dependence--in the