Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Sturt

Sturt’s sentence is advice with a knife-edge: if you think emigration is a financial strategy, your real wager isn’t land or wages, it’s people. Coming from an explorer in the high colonial era, the line quietly punctures the romantic sales pitch of “new worlds” as blank slates where capital automatically multiplies. He’s telling would-be settlers that money travels poorly when the surrounding social fabric is unstable, predatory, or simply incompatible with their expectations.

The syntax does a lot of ideological work. “Those who, possessing some capital” draws a firm boundary around the intended audience: not the desperate, but the aspiring improvers, the class that can choose and shape a destination. “Improving their condition” has the Victorian ring of self-help and respectability; it’s not just about getting richer, it’s about upgrading one’s station. Then Sturt pivots to the true “main consideration”: “the society likely to be found.” In a colonial context, “society” doubles as both a promise (civil institutions, familiar norms, protection of property) and a warning (rough frontier improvisation, corruption, social isolation).

The subtext is bluntly modern: migration is never just economics; it’s governance, culture, and who gets to belong. Sturt’s world was one where emigration brochures and imperial boosters emphasized resources and opportunity. He’s smuggling in a counter-metric: will you be surrounded by communities that sustain order, trust, and status, or by conditions that make your capital a target and your identity unmoored? For an explorer who watched settlements fail and succeed, “society” is the infrastructure that doesn’t show up on a map.