Reflections After a Wandering Life in Australasia

I.

Two feelings make it hard for an American visitor in the Australasian colonies to bring to what he sees an open and sympathetic mind. Both feelings are natural, and neither is quite justifiable. The one is the feeling that this new world is too remote from his own to excite in him any very warm interest. The other feeling is that, if he knows his own great West, he can have nothing essentially new to learn in these regions of the Southern Cross. The two feelings contradict each other ; but they unite to obscure the minds of many of us when we hear or speak of Australia and New Zealand, and they accompany us when we journey thither. “ Those must be vast, dull regions, full, no doubt, of scenery, of stock-raisers, and of squatters. — regions like our Western States, only still more tedious in the crudity of their life: ” so one or two friends of mine, people themselves not precisely appreciative of our own great West, have said to me, in speaking of the colonies.

Now Australia has indeed some strong analogies to our great West, but these analogies are not nearly so important as the differences that set them off. On the other hand, the feeling that so many thousand miles of ocean part us from Australia as to make it impossible to remember often or warmly such distant brethren is not, after all, an easy feeling to remove. Distance is in one sense almost annihilated nowadays ; but we annihilate it for the mind much more easily than for the heart, which is a stubborn barbarian in most of us, loving what is near and clear to it, but seldom glowing for disguised and remote objects. As a foreign tongue refuses to come to the lips when we are in earnest, so a very distant land refuses to appear to us like a perfectly fit habitation for the truest-hearted men or the best of women. All nations accuse foreigners of being unsympathetic and cold-hearted. Elsewhere in the world, they all say, one may find cleverness, courage, wit, skill, refinement of manners, but for genuine warmheartedness you must look amongst us here at home ! As men thus attribute to foreigners the cold-heartedness with which they themselves regard everything strange, so we all of us find that new stars seem to shine more coldly upon us from their unaccustomed sky, and we doubt whether very lovable people can ever really love such stars at all. The southern heavens above Australia vex one, moreover, not only with their new constellations, but with their distortions of the familiar ones. Orion half upset when well up towards his meridian, is a sight not to be tolerated. The Southern Cross itself is no consolation, for it is, as all tourists declare, disappointing. Sirius is there brighter far than one often sees him in New England, though never finer than on a calm January night in California: but he has a sort of half-rival in Canopus, whose claims to princely rank appear in those southern latitudes much greater than we should have supposed. Yet I experienced a certain doubt as to whether Canopus would have any right to such a dignity in a well-regulated sky. As for the two Centauri and the Magellan Clouds, were they sufficient consolation to eyes that sought in vain for the Great Bear ?

Of course, if one thus cherishes Philistine prejudices regarding the stars of the south, he will be apt also to feel absurd prejudices concerning the men. Early Yankee tourists to Europe, in the days when traveling was not so commonplace as it is now, used to speak of the shock it gave them when they first heard the very children in the streets actually talking French. And so now the abstract knowledge that these Australasians are indeed our brethren by blood and by our common traditions does not prevent one from finding it a trifle thrilling not merely to know, but actually to see, that a happy home in Australia is the same warm English fireside institution that it is with us. One’s prejudice leads him to expect it to be something singular, altered, remote, in short antipodean. It is nothing of the kind, but on the contrary is most disappointingly human and delightful.

Enough, however, of preliminaries. This paper will record a few impressions derived from a recent tour in Australasia, with special reference to certain studies that the author has sought to make regarding general social and political conditions in the colonies.

I.

Australia is the second New World, and doubtless has a destiny before it as distinct in many respects from ours as ours is from that of Europe. But for the moment, of course, the analogies already referred to as existing between our own conditions and those of colonial life attract our attention. Let us look, then, at our own Orion, half inverted in this Australian sky.

And first of all comes a certain analogy between the industrial and agricultural problems of Australia and some of these in our own country. Our new West has come to depend more and more for its progress upon an understanding of what used to be called “ desert” conditions. In Southern California and in the Rocky Mountain regions, our settlers have learned that a desert is by no means always an enemy. Cultivation and pasturage have proved possible and remunerative in places where early explorers and settlers saw only hopeless barrenness. Reclaiming such wildernesses has been one of our problems ; developing vast mineral resources by novel methods that in more cases than one have had to be learned through decades of work and expenditure, — this has been another characteristic problem amongst us. Australia, as everybody knows, has depended for the progress and the triumphs of the last, forty years upon the solution of very similar problems. In case of the war with the great interior desert, however, the Australian settler has fought in his way a far more serious fight than we have known in our desert. When he advanced into the barren central plateau, he had no Mississippi Valley to use as his great base line. His desert was more forbidding, on the whole, than even ours. It kept its secrets better, concealed its genuine wealth under more numerous disguises, drove him oftener to utter ruin. The very names of numerous mountains at its edge suggest, as several writers have long since noted, the bitterness of the early conflict: Mount Desolation, Mount Disappointment, Mount Despair. Regions that have since proved very wealthy were the graves of the first explorers. The consequence of this struggle has been the development of a type of frontiersmen quite different from our own,—a type already of world-wide reputation in popular novels, and deserving at any rate our hearty respect. We shall have a word to say of this type later. But for the moment let us glance at the material side of this conquest of the desert. 1 found my curiosity greatly aroused about the matter as I traveled in the colonies, for so much has evidently depended upon this part of Australian history. Fortunately, an official account of the greater explorations has lately appeared, issued under the auspices of the governments of the Australian colonies, and written by one who is himself an ardent and successful explorer, — Mr. Ernest Favenc; so that the general reader finds in comparatively small compass a summary of a century of hard work. For the early Australian began with his desert almost as soon as he landed ; and even yet not absolutely all the interior has been seen by expert eyes. In Australia, as with us, the story of exploration goes hand in hand with the story of conquest and of general progress on the various frontiers.

The theatre of all this toil, the continent of Australia, may be described in general as a great plateau, beveled off around the edges. Encircling the plateau are coast ranges of mountains ; the plateau itself is destitute of any great elevations. From the summits of the coast ranges to the ocean, down the beveled edges of the continent, is a decidedly variable distance, and in some places comparatively wide stretches of accessible and level coast lands separate the mountains from the sea. The drainage of the coast ranges towards the ocean gives a system of short rivers ; while in the interior there are two great systems of drainage, one leading through the Murray River to the sea, the other consisting of salt lakes and " sinks.” Both these latter systems of drainage — the labyrinthine windings of the tributaries of the Murray and the hopeless wanderings of the lost streamlets of the saltlake region — gave the early explorers their principal geographical problems. “ The unique formation of the country,” says Favenc, “ set at naught all the approved deductions and theories of the scientific world.” At the outset, as appears from Favenc’s account, the very least that an explorer hoped to find was a Mississippi. So vast an interior must needs have an appropriate drainage, men said ; and explorers of the coast were long on the lookout for a great estuary, fit for some new Amazon. In 1818 one of the most noted pioneers of exploration, Wentworth, commenting upon Oxley’s newly made discovery of the Macquarie (a little tributary of the Darling, belonging to the Murray system), expressed his belief, founded upon its size and its direction, that it must flow across the continent to the northwest coast, the only coast of Australia which had not yet been fully explored for river mouths. “ If this river,” Favenc says, " be already of . . . sufficient depth to float a seventy-four gun ship” at a distance of two thousand miles from the northwest coast, “it is not difficult to imagine what must be its magnitude at its confluence with the ocean.” Here, then, he hopes, Australia has a river equal to any in the world. But when this inland-river theory had at length to be given up, for the simple reason that no large river mouth could be found on the coast, explorers were still not without hopes of magnificent wonders to come. There was a vast inland sea in the centre of Australia. If you could n’t get an Amazon, of course you might look for a Caspian ; or if this too failed to exist, then at least there was a vast central range of snow mountains. For Australia, being a continent, must needs have true continental dignity. Either a Caspian, or an Amazon, or an Himalayan range was necessarily needed for such a purpose.

But alas ! the cruel gods who made this wilderness loved not to be worshiped, and left for the coming men no such natural shrines as have adorned other lands. In fact, the most superficial view of Australia confirms the notion that you get from Favenc’s book, and from all who know Australia well: its scenery, its whole natural aspect where it is noteworthy at all, is weird, startling, dream-like — a rebellion against the conventional forms of beauty in nature — impressive, admirable, but not what even the most experienced traveler would have expected. A certain monotony of effect soon strikes the eye, to be sure, after the first surprise wears off; but if Australia, according to all accounts, shows a great deal of any one of her marvels to the spectator, these marvels are at any rate original. One of the cleverest of the Australian popular writers, the author of the famous novel of convict days called For the Term of his Natural Life, once summarized the natural characteristics of the land in a too sentimental but not precisely ineffective way, thus: —

“ What is the dominant note of Australian scenery ? That which is the dominant note of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry,— weird melancholy. A poem like L’Allegro could never be written by an Australian. It is too airy, too sweet, too freshly happy. The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying Year is mourned, the falling leaves drop lightly on his bier. In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock clefts. From the melancholy gums strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life of these frowning hills is either grotesque or ghostly. Great gray kangaroos lope noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out into horrible peals of semi-human laughter. The natives aver that, when night comes, from out the bottomless depth of some lagoon the Bunyip rises, and, in form like a monstrous sea-calf, drags his loathsome length from out the ooze. From a corner of the silent forest rises a dismal chant, and around a fire dance natives painted like skeletons. All is fear-inspiring and gloomy.” ¹

Clarke then goes on to cite the aforesaid names of the mountains.

But this forbidding land held its treasures, nor were its secrets all gloomy. Favenc’s account is a very instructive lesson in the virtues of courage and patience. These Wentworths and Oxleys and Sturts failed to find what they went to seek, but still they found an empire, and that too even where they personally felt the most disappointment with their discovery. One of the most unfortunate names on the list of the early explorers is that of Captain Charles Sturt, just referred to. " Cracked and gaping plains, desolate, desert, and abandoned of life, scorched beneath a lurid sun of burning fire, waterless, hopeless, relentless, and accursed : that,” says Favenc,² " is the picture he draws of the great interior.” Yet what Sturt saw (in 1828) was a region now in New South Wales and Victoria, just west of the line of the Great Blue Mountain Range, and at the present time known as a very productive country. Sturt had the ill-luck to come in a time of drought, and since he did not know the value of many of the new grasses that he met with and had no experience of how a desert can be reclaimed, what he saw was this: " In the creeks, weeds had grown and withered, and grown again ; the young saplings were now rising in their beds, nourished by the moisture that still remained ; but the large forest trees were drooping, and many were dead. The emus, with outstretched necks, gasping for breath, searched the channels of the rivers for water in vain; and the native dog, so thin that he could hardly walk, seemed to implore some merciful hand to dispatch him.” This is a fair type of what others besides Sturt saw everywhere inland.

But now, out of this weird land of desolation, has come the modern Australia, which, still in its infancy, feels itself already a wealthy young country. And it is not the mere strip of land by the coast, that has the wealth; Sturt’s desert, also, where the emus gasped for breath and the forest trees died, has its share of the treasures. To be sure, by far the larger part of the vast interior is still unreclaimed. But the Australian is now an expert in his own land, and knows how to reclaim. His arts, according to the authorities, are chiefly these : he has learned that the native grasses, which at first seemed to him part of the desolation of the desert itself, are many of them of the first value for grazing; he has taught himself how to utilize, for both agriculture and horticulture, land that appeared too barren to be thought of in the beginning ; he has discovered that drought is not an unmixed evil under all circumstances ; and finally, he is coming to know that his desert is full of buried water, — springs, cave-streams, and wells all gradually teaching him that he has a vast treasury under his feet, wherein the irregular contributions of the sudden and transient rains are stored up for a long period by the comparatively regular rock formations of a great portion of his desert.

In view of all this, the material future of Australia becomes fairly well assured, even quite apart from any thought of its mineral wealth. If one considers the agricultural resources of the land, its vast stores of iron, of coal, and of precious metals, it is plain enough that those who toiled so long in the bush to win a first sight of what seemed to them so wretched a land did not live in vain. This whole material struggle is one more triumph of human endurance over the wiles and the mysteries of nature. Contrasting the process with our own story of conquest over a new land, one sees, as a special point of difference, that where we met great obstacles we were always (after those first heroic colonial days had once passed) in possession of far greater resources. When we crossed the Alleghenies, we were already a nation. When the Australians crossed the Blue Mountains to go towards their west, they were still Crown colonists, and their colony was a penal settlement. Long afterwards, when the discovery of gold led to the modern era of rapid progress in Australia, the resources at hand for this progress were still not nearly as well proportioned to the task as were ours after the year 1840. On the other hand, the growth of Australia has of course never been marked by anything equal to the finer crises and incidents of our own career. Our colonies were at least in part originally founded for ideal purposes ; and if we have grown grosser in much of our life as time has gone on. we have always our heroic ages to look hack upon. — our Revolution, our Pilgrim Fathers, our struggle with slavery. Australia has had no heroes save the explorers and the bushmen, — fine men and noble, to be sure ; but her early history is purely a collection of incidents, some of which, like those of the convict life, are simply lamentable and degrading, while the rest, if they are frequently admirable, are never imposing.

As a result of the war with the desert, and as an outcome of the wealth of successful stock-raisers, farmers, and miners, we have at length the growing Australian civilization of to-day. It is this at which we are to look a little more particularly.

II.

Some travelers gather a great deal from personal interviews and from looking out of car-windows. I had a few opportunities of both sorts in Australia, which I prized very highly. But for the transient visitor the personal observation needs most decidedly to be supplemented by a study of the current literature of the land that he is visiting. Newspapers cannot tell a visitor everything, but they can at least be as useful to him as are shop windows. As affording a notion of the conditions of Australian life, the newspapers of that region are exceptionally valuable ; for, especially in their weekly editions, they are simply encyclopædic. The stranger at once, in his ignorance. takes an Australian weekly to be intended for use far out in the country, at lonely “stations,”by men who find time, once in a while, to adjust all their relations to the universe at one long sitting. The reader of such a weekly acts as a sort of father confessor. while the editor spreads out before him a general confession of all the sins of mankind, from Melbourne horseraces to European complications, in wellclassified order and in very good language. All the Australasian colonies are represented in the weekly general summaries ; two or three serial novels run their even courses in the few columns allotted to each ; the endless list of colonial sports, races, cricket-matches, foot-hall games, is duly set forth ; letters from New York, London, Paris, together with pages of telegraphic foreign material, prevent the colonial reader from being too much absorbed in home affairs ; while these home affairs are treated in lengthy political summaries, in long editorials, in shorter editorial notes, in correspondence. Meanwhile, practical interests are not forgotten. The farm, the vineyard, cattle-raising, and mining, are discussed at length by experts. Games, puzzles, essays, book reviews, gossip, close the solid feast of some thirty large closely printed fivecolumn pages of actual text (exclusive of the advertisements). Most of our terrible Sunday papers are far outdone as to quantity of matter, and, on the whole, as to quality of matter as well. None of our weeklies can rival these in encyclopædic character, in well-edited, many-sided variety of appeal, joined, as is here the case, with excellence of workmanship. The only objection that our own badly spoiled newspaper reader would make would be that all this was too dry for him, and too vast. For my own part, since my return from Australia, I have been taking one of these fine weeklies regularly, and reading, not all of it, but as much as I desired, and with no little profit. I know no better means to become acquainted with the drift and the forces of Australasian life.

I had several good opportunities, moreover, to converse with men of affairs, both in Australia and in its close neighbor. New Zealand. Especially did I prize a ramble of several days amongst the dark gorges of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, in company with a prominent public man, who, as he said, requiring rest, for the time forsook politics, and devoted himself to hospitality. He discoursed to me of politics, and, in my ignorance, I could offer him only metaphysics in return, which he received very kindly. We talked particularly of colonial federation, of the good and evil of the colonial systems of responsible government, and of the future of Australasia. From my friend I learned where to look later, in New Zealand, for other sources of information concerning colonial life ; and I owe him more, in the way of suggestion, than he himself is aware. On my return voyage, as well as in New Zealand, I saw much of still another prominent Australasian public man, then on his way to London. His views were in many respects strongly contrasted with those of my companion of the Blue Mountains, and they gave me, for that very reason, so much the more instruction. After all, what I have to offer here are but stray impressions and reflections.

What most strikes the observer in either Australia or New Zealand is the remarkable political maturity of the colonies ; and this political maturity is not merely the result of the English heritage that is common to all of us. For in addition to this common heritage, one finds in Australasia a rapid growth of state organization, — a growth taking forms that are partly novel. No English community elsewhere has sought to govern itself in just the way here exemplified. Here are pure democracies, with what an American must unhesitatingly call strongly socialistic tendencies. Whether these tendencies are destined to bear fruit I do not know, but certain it is that a land where state ownership of railways is already not a theory nor yet an exception, but an old established institution, whose existence has become for the inhabitants an axiom, is a land in which English democracy must experience, sooner or later, remarkable developments. It is not, indeed, that state railways are themselves very odd institutions in the world at large, but that, if our experience in this country counts for anything, democracies of English origin have not elsewhere than in Australasia tended to produce the habits of mind of which such state ownership is the natural expression. In this land we are still much in the habit of regarding the state as a means, and not as an end. Our protective tariff is something very different in character from a true experiment in state socialism. Our interstate commerce legislation is still far from government ownership of railways. In many of our States constitutional provisions hamper the legislature whenever it tries to make laws of a meddlesome kind. In fact, the changes introduced into the newer state constitutions of our country have consisted, in a number of instances, of provisions intended to restrict legislation. The other tendency, that towards state socialism, has from time to time appeared amongst us, and is probably just now on the increase ; but it is to be noticed that our state socialists are generally philanthropists rather than men of business, and desire more to take care of the subject’s soul and stomach than to carry his goods to market. But in the colonies the drift is the other way. The state is first in every man’s thought, and its purposes are commercial rather than philanthropic. if we find our presidential year a serious financial inconvenience by reason of the uncertainties connected with every canvass, how much more, should one think, must not the colonial capitalist feel the presence and the risks of politics in his life, when, for him, a general election is always possible, is very often expected, and may at any time lead to important changes in the business policy of the government, and so of the whole community! But the colonist, used to the vigorous political activity amidst which he has so long lived, makes few or no complaints of these risks. He seems to enjoy the game. When I asked people, during my travels, how they could endure to hear so much of their government, they were generally surprised to learn how little many Americans have occasion to remember, from moment to moment, what their legislatures are actually doing. Government by responsible ministries is always picturesque, even if it is not dangerously drastic ; and the colonist thinks so much about the latest great political speech and the most recent ministerial crisis that he hardly knows how a freeman could live and be so completely without dread, as we here in America often are, concerning what may happen next in the political world. A presidential canvass, like our recent struggle, is for us a refreshing draught of genuine national politics, after a number of years of comparative dullness. But the colonist is used to excitements that for him are almost as great, and that perhaps once a session. This doubtless is one reason why he expects so much from the state. If the gods will always be appearing to mix in the affairs of daily life, then, to be sure, even the herdsman must try to get the gods to do his work for him. With us the gods often inhabit for years a heaven all their own, and we are thankful enough if they mind their own business, and do no more serious mischief than somehow to spend the revenues.

Seriously, however, the elaborate social organization of the colonies is, in view of their tender age, their complete independence of external political interference, and their purely democratic constitutions, a most remarkable fact. Can it be that the problem of state socialism is, after all, to be worked out in these young communities ? The impartial observer, remembering what political Frankensteins artificial social organisms are apt to prove, feels some real dread for the future of the Australasian countries when he asks himself this question. Highly organized life is as much the goal of all our efforts in this world as it is an unattainable ideal wherever nature does not accomplish for us the most of the work of organization. State socialism usually seems to be an effort to make live things out of dead theories.

But however this may be, the future of state organization in Australasia will be greatly dependent upon the special causes that are there at work affecting the process ; and some, at least, of these causes are patent to any observer.

The first of them lies in the history of the colonies, since the organization of Crown colonies long preceded the coming of the mass of their population.

The colony of New South Wales had its beginning in a convict settlement in Sidney Harbor, in 1787. Transportation was not abolished until 1840, and the settlements in New South Wales were necessarily under arbitrary government in the interim. Bourke, governor of New South Wales from 1831 to 1837, laid indeed the foundations of the later free constitution; but that he found so much to do in the cause of liberty, that, for instance, he even had to establish religious liberty in the land, and to discontinue the monopoly of government aid enjoyed by the Established Church, — this shows how far the colonial life was from the first a government affair. Responsible government was established in New South Wales in 1855, a little more than four years after the discovery of gold in Australia. But the habit of looking to government for aid was well established. At the time of the gold discovery, certain squatters, whose regular pastoral occupations were interfered with by the departure of their laborers for the mines, petitioned the government to stop all mining, to even use military force for the purpose. The request was an extreme one, but we have to observe that it was characteristic. In the summer of 1848, in California, the military governor, Colonel Mason, did indeed doubt whether he ought not to stop the mining in the Sierra, because, as he thought, this misuse of the public lands of the United States was of doubtful legality. But these Australian squatters were interested not so much in the public lands as in the protection of their own industry against the new one. Their appeal went unheeded.³ But not all similar appeals have been unheeded in Australia, in the days since that time. The subject very generally demands much of his government and gets it.

The early history of Victoria begins with the founding of Melbourne in 1835 ; and although Victoria was never a convict colony, the influence of the twenty years of irresponsible government that preceded the constitution of 1855 left their trace here also. The Victorian colony first existed as “ the Port Phillip District,” until 1851, when the connection with New South Wales was ended, and the name " Victoria ” was given to the region. In both of the sister colonies, after 1855, the political development was evidently greatly influenced by the need of adapting established governmental traditions to the wants of a rapidly growing population. One perceives, in fact, that the order of events so characteristic! of California’s early history was precisely reversed in the development of these two goldmining communities. In California, in 1849, nearly one hundred thousand newcomers found themselves, by accident, as it were, in a territory to which the United States Congress, for reasons of national politics, had found it so far impossible to grant any form of government. The new-comers formed, so to speak, overnight, a full-grown free state constitution, and gave Congress the choice between admitting the new State or dealing with a rebellious Pacific republic. Congress promptly gave way, and the California constitution, less a main feature than a necessary incident of the life of the new community, came into force without impressing people with any new sense of the dignity of state governments. The State was a convenience to the early Californian, but he hoped and expected that it would keep out of his way, and plague him little with advice or constraint. In Australia, all was different. An existing government, which was nothing if not, in its provincial fashion, a “strong” government, found itself at first much embarrassed by the new-coming miners, undertook from the outset to regulate the use of the mines, was obliged to keep pace in its growth with the needs of the country, and has so remained, ever since, the central object of social interest in the colonial mind. The early life of California was full of popular movements, intended to make up temporarily for the shortcomings of a deliberately incompetent political organization; but Australia knew of no vigilance committees. In California, there were several times great riots in mining districts ; but they were wars among rival miners. In Australia, the Ballarat riots of 1854 were the outcome of a conflict between the miners and the government concerning the miners’ tax. The government was victorious after a pitched battle.⁴ and then the tax was later abolished ; the moral victory of organized society, however, being complete. To sum up : In that American community which is most analogous to the Australian goldcolonies of the fifties, political order, during those early days, was always regarded as a very subordinate means to an end. In Australia, political order was in the field almost before its subjects existed ; it felt deeply its own dignity ; it grew to be regarded rather as an end in itself. So it has come about that the colonist thinks natural and inevitable the rule that his state shall construct his railways, protect his fortunes, and secure his general welfare by all manner of devices.

But the second cause of this continued government activity and officiousness in Australia is obviously the natural tendency of responsible ministerial institutions in small communities. If a responsible ministry, always ready to be slain by a single adverse vote, makes life under a “ strong ” system of governmental interference somewhat exciting for the private citizen, the exciting nature of the life tends rather to increase than to diminish the love of interference. A ministry in danger makes bids for popularity. The existing ministry in Victoria is an example in my mind. It has been a strong ministry ; it was formed by a coalition ; its leaders are amongst the ablest and most high-minded politicians in all the colonies. Yet very lately, as the current news has shown, this ministry, owing to the dissatisfaction of some of its supporters from the farming districts, found itself without a majority upon its Budget proposals. The session was the last one of a moribund Parliament, and a bill for the redistribution of seats was before the assembly. The ministry, upon the plea that this redistribution measure was in all justice much needed before an appeal could properly be made to the country, obtained a postponement of its Budget proposals for the time, and so provisionally retained office pending the passage of redistribution and the dissolution of the House. Under these circumstances the temporarily discredited ministry must try to regain the confidence of the country, and did so by promises which outdid in variety the most extravagant projects of our legislators. The Melbourne Leader of October 6, 1888, referring to a series of speeches recently delivered by members of the ministry, in connection with the ceremonies held in honor of the completion and opening of some new lines of railway, observes : “ In the speeches of ministers there was nothing of special moment, beyond the tone of sanguine expectation with which they looked forward to an appeal to the country under circumstances in which they would be able to come as the bearers of rich gifts, bonuses to new rural industries, reductions of freight on agricultural produce, large additions to municipal endowments, and last, but not least, a new railway bill.”

In the debate upon those very Budget proposals upon which the government finally found itself in a minority, Mr. Alfred Deakin, the Chief Secretary of the colony, in a very able speech, appealed to the country members to remember that, if there were some things in the government proposals that they could not approve, the government had still done all it could for them. His enumeration of what the government had offered or intended to offer to the country districts as their due, and as a return for their votes, is highly characteristic of what the colonist nowadays expects of his government.

“ I will not,” he says, “ do more than refer to the encouragement which has been given to the mining industry, the reductions of the railway freights, . . . which are solely for the benefit of the country districts. . . . While considering the country districts, the government have not ignored the towns. . . . There are new duties and increased duties for a number of our great town industries, which it is unnecessary to recapitulate. Taking them only as they affect the farmer, we find that a series of remissions of duties are proposed, . . . remissions on tea, coffee, kerosene, . . . all of which are largely used in the country districts. In fact, in all the remissions proposed in its Budget, the government has had an eye to the country districts. Take again the proposal for transferring the inmates of the present immense asylums of the metropolis to the country districts. . . . What are honorable members to say of the proposal to increase the municipal endowment ? ... It will help the farmers, by making it more possible for their local governing bodies ... to provide them with roads, bridges, and other improvements. . . . Then there are changes proposed in the existing law to further benefit the arid areas.” Thus the appeal continues for some time. Bonuses for farmers’ products, a proposition to establish a refrigerating depot, a new freight system for the purpose of bringing about new commercial relations for Victorian agriculturists abroad, all these things are set forth at length for the benefit of the farmers’ representatives, who are all the time complaining that the government is doing nothing for them, and who want relief from all their recent misfortunes to be given by the levying of a new tariff on oats, barley, and stock, to protect them from the competition of the farmers of New South Wales.

It must not be supposed that this fashion of making proposals is in any sort exceptional. Such issues as these seem to be the regular ones of colonial life. " Make me prosper, or I will turn you out,”says the subject to the government. The ministry, attacked, can only say to the subject, “ When saw we thee an hungered, and gave thee no bonuses, irrigation proposals, refrigerating depots, roads, and free kerosene, even if we refuse thee still prohibitory import duties on thy own productions ? ” When one sees that such are the proposals, not of demagogues by any means, but of the sincerest and ablest statesmen in Australia, one sees how far this system of responsible government can lead people.

In company with my friend, in the gorges of the Blue Mountains, I talked more than once about the comparative merits of the colonial ministerial system and our own. I could not envy him, I said, the evils of his own too officious methods of cabinet government. Even in New South Wales, I observed, in the free-trade colony, there is still government interference enough and to spare, quite apart from any talk of tariff. But, said I, all this is in one great aspect of it refreshing, when contrasted with our apathetic methods of work in America, with our indifference, with the lack of sympathy between our legislators and our people. My friend, by no means himself averse to the system of state interference. was still full of fervor in his condemnation of certain aspects of the Australian system. It sacrificed ministers. he said, to a system of bidding for popularity, and of frittering away their time in wrangling and in petty legislation. At the end of all our talks, my friend, in a farewell note, briefly compared the two methods, those of our democracy and those of his own, and, summing up, said, in what I think excellent words, “ He will be the genius of political reform who shall give us responsibility with greater stability of the executive than we possess.” I fancy that with changes of this sort, a change for the better would come over the methods not only of Australian legislation but also of our own.

Josiah Royce.