SPECULATION, CHARITY, AND A BOOK.
In the meantime my family history went on. My nephew was sent to the
Northern Territory to take over the branch of the English and Scottish
Bank at Palmerston, and he took his sister from school to go with him
and stay three months in the tropics. He was only 21 at the time. Four
years after he went to inspect the branch, and took his sister with him
again. I think she loved Port Darwin more than he did, and she always
stood up for the climate. South Australia did a great work in building,
unaided by any other Australian State, the telegraph line from Port
Darwin to Adelaide, and at one time it was believed that rich
goldfields were to be opened in this great empty land, which the
British Government had handed over to South Australia, because Stuart
had been the first to cross the island continent, and the handful of
South Australian colonists bad connected telegraphically the north and
the south. The telegraph building had been contracted for by Darwent
and Dalwood, and my brother, through the South Australian Bank, was
helping to finance them. That was in 1876-7. This was the first, but
not the last by any means, of enterprises which contractors were not
able to carry out in this State, either from taking a big enterprise at
too low a rate or from lack of financial backing. The Government, as in
the recent cases of the Pinnaroo Railway and the Outer Harbour, had to
complete the halfdone work as the direct employer of labour and the
direct purchaser of materials. A great furore for goldmining in the
Northern Territory arose, and people in England bought city allotments
in Palmerston, which was expected to become the queen city of North
Australia, Port Darwin is no whit behind Sydney Harbour in beauty and
capacity. The navies of the world could ride safely in its waters. A
railway of 150 miles in length, the first section of the great
transcontinental line, which was to extend from Palmerston to Port
Augusta, was built to connect Pine Creek, where there was gold to be
found, with the seaboard. South Australia was more than ever a misnomer
for this State. Victoria lay more to the south than our province, and
now that we stretched far inside the tropics the name seemed
ridiculous. My friend Miss Sinnett suggested Centralia as the
appropriate name for the State, which by this gift was really the
central State; but in the present crisis, when South Australia finds
the task of keeping the Northern Territory white too arduous and too
costly, and is offering it on handsome terms to the Commonwealth,
Centralia might not continue to be appropriate. Our northern possession
has cost South Australia much. The sums of money sunk in prospecting
for gold and other metals have been enormous, and at present there are
more Chinese there than Europeans. In the early days, when the Wrens
were there, Eleanor was surprised when their wonderful Chinese cook
came to her and said, "Missie, I go along a gaol to-morrow. You take Ah
Kei. He do all light till I go out!" The cook had been tried and
condemned for larceny, but he was allowed to retain his situation till
the last hour. Instead of being kept in gaol pending his trial he
earned his wages and did his work. He had no desire to escape. He liked
Palmerston and the bank, and he went back to the latter when released.
He was an incorrigible thief, and got into trouble again; but as a cook
he was superlative.
That decade of the eighties was a most speculative time all over
Australia and New Zealand. I was glad that leaving the English and
Scottish Bank enabled my brother to go into political and official
life, but it also allowed him to speculate far beyond what he could
have done if he had been manager of a bank. Everybody speculated--in
mines, in land, and in leases. I was earning by my pen a very decent
income, and I spent it, sometimes wisely and sometimes foolishly. I
could be liberal to church and to good causes. I was able to keep a
dear little State child at school for two years after the regulation
age, and I was amply repaid by seeing her afterwards an honoured wife
and mother, able to assist her children and their companions with their
lessons. I helped some lame dogs over the stile. One among them was a
young American of brilliant scholastic attainments, who was the victim
of hereditary alcoholism. His mother, a saintly and noble
prohibitionist worker, whom I afterwards met in America, had heard of
me, and wrote asking me to keep a watchful eye on her boy. This I did
for about 12 months, and found him employment. He held a science
degree, and was an authority on mineralogy, metallurgy, and kindred
subjects. During this speculative period he persuaded me to plunge
(rather wildly for me) in mining shares. I plunged to the extent of 500
pounds, and I owe it to the good sense and practical ability of my
nephew that I lost no more heavily than I did, for he paid 100 pounds
to let me off my bargain.
My protege continued to visit me weekly, and we wrote to one another
once a week or oftener. The books I lent to him I know to this day by
their colour and the smell of tobacco. I wrote to his mother regularly,
and consulted with his good friend, Mr. Waterhouse, over what was best
to be done. One bad outburst he had when he had got some money through
me to pay off liabilities. I recollect his penitent, despairing
confession, with the reference to Edwin Arnold's poem
He who died at Azun gave
This to those who dug his grave.
The time came when I felt I could hold him no longer, although that
escapade was forgiven, and I determined to send him to his mother--not
without misgivings about what she might have still to suffer. He wrote
to me occasionally. His health was never good, and I attribute the
craving for drink and excitement a good deal to physical causes; but at
the same time I am sure that he could have withstood it by a more
resolute will. The will is the character--it is the real man. When
people say that the first thing in education is to break the will, they
make a radical mistake. Train the will to work according to the
dictates of an enlightened conscience, for it is all we have to trust
to for the stability of character. My poor lad called me his Australian
mother. When I saw his real mother, I wondered more and more what sort
of a husband she had, or what atavism Edward drew from to produce a
character so unlike hers. I heard nothing from herself of what she went
through, but from her friends I gathered that he had several outbreaks,
and cost her far more than she could afford. She paid everything that
he owed in Adelaide, except her debt to me, but that I was repaid after
her death in 1905, and she always felt that I had been a true friend to
her wayward son. I recollect one day my friend coming on his weekly
visit with a face of woe to tell me he had seen a man in dirt and rags,
with half a shirt, who had been well acquainted with Charles Dickens
and other notables in London. My friend had fed him and clothed him,
but he wanted to return to England to rich friends. I wrote to a few
good folk, and we raised the money and sent the wastrel to the old
country. How grateful he appeared to be, especially to the kind people
who had taken him in; but he never wrote a line. We never heard from
him again. Years afterwards I wrote to his brother-in-law, asking where
the object of our charity now was, if he were still alive. The reply
was that his ingratitude did not surprise the writer--that he was a
hopeless drunkard, a remittance man, whom the family had to ship off as
soon as possible when our ill-judged kindness sent him to England. At
that time he was in Canada, but it was not worth while to give any
address. When Mr. Bowyear started the Charity Organization Society in
Adelaide, he said I was no good as a visitor; I was too credulous, and
had not half enough of the detective in me. But I had not much faith in
this remittance man.
I have been strongly tempted to omit altogether the next book which I
wrote; but, as this is to be a sincere narrative of my life and its
work, I must pierce the veil of anonymity and own up to "An Agnostic's
Progress." I had been impressed with the very different difficulties
the soul of man has to encounter nowadays from those so triumphantly
overcome by Christian in the great work of John Bunyan in the first
part of "The Pilgrim's Progress." He cannot now get out of the Slough
of Despond by planting his foot on the stepping stones of the Promises.
He cannot, like Hopeful, pluck from his bosom the Key of Promise which
opens every lock in Doubting Castle when the two pilgrims are shut in
it by Giant Despair, when they are caught trespassing on his grounds.
Even assured Christians, we know, may occasionally trespass on these
grounds of doubt; but the weapons of modern warfare are not of the
seventeenth century. The Interpreter's House in the old allegory dealt
only with things found in the Bible, the only channel of revelation to
John Bunyan. To the modern pilgrim God reveals Himself in Nature, in
art, in literature, and in history. The Interpreter's Hand had to do
with all these things. Vanity Fair is not a place through which all
pilgrims must pass as quickly as possible, shutting their eyes and
stopping their ears so that they should neither see nor hear the wicked
things that are done and said there. Vanity Fair is the world in which
we all have to live and do our work well, or neglect it. Pope and Pagan
are not the old giants who used to devour pilgrims, but who can now
only gnash their teeth at them in impotent rage. They are live forces,
quite active, and with agents and supporters alert to capture souls. Of
all the influences which affected for evil my young life I perhaps
resented most Mrs. Sherwood's "Infant's Progress." There were three
children in it going from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City
by the route laid down by John Bunyan; but they were handicapped even
more severely than the good Christian himself with his heavy
burden--for that fell off his back at the first sight of the Cross and
Him who was nailed to it, accepted by the eye of Faith as the one
Sacrifice for the sins of the world--for the three little ones, Humble
Mind, Playful, and Peace, were accompanied always and everywhere by an
imp called Inbred Sin, who never ceased to tempt them to evil.
The doctrine of innate human depravity is one of the most paralysing
dogmas that human fear invented or priestcraft encouraged. I did not
think of publishing "An Agnostic's Progress" at first. I wrote it to
relieve my own mind. I wanted to satisfy myself that reverent agnostics
were by no means materialists; that man's nature might or might not be
consciously immortal, but it was spiritual; that in the duties which
lay before each of us towards ourselves and towards our
fellow-creatures, there was scope for spiritual energy and spiritual
emotion. I was penetrated by Browning's great idea expressed over and
over again--the expansion of Paul's dictum that faith is not certainty,
but a belief without sufficient proof, a belief which leads to right
action and to self-sacrifice. Of the 70 years of life which one might
hope to live and work in, I had no mean idea. I asked in the newspaper,
"Is life so short?" and answered. "No." I expanded and spiritualized
the idea in a sermon, and I again answered emphatically "No." I saw the
continuation and the expansion of true ideas by succeeding generations.
To the question put sometimes peevishly, "Is life worth living?" I
replied with equal emphasis, "Yes." My mother told me of old times. I
recalled half a century of progress, and I hoped the forward movement
would continue. I read the manuscript of "An Agnostic's Progress" to
Mr. and Mrs. Barr Smith, and they thought so well of it that they
offered to take it to England on one of their many visits to the old
country, where they had no doubt it would find a publisher. Trubner's
reader reported most favourably of the book, and we thought there was
an immediate prospect of its publication; but Mr. Trubner died, and the
matter was not taken up by his successor, and my friends did what I had
expressly said they were not to do, and had it printed and published at
their own expense. There were many printer's errors in it, but it was
on the whole well reviewed, though it did not sell well. The Spectator
joined issue with me on the point that it is only through the wicket
gate of Doubt that we can come to any faith that is of value; but I am
satisfied that I took the right stand there. My mother was in no way
disquieted or disturbed by my writing the book, and few of my friends
read it or knew about it. I still appeared so engrossed with work on
The Register and The Observer that my time was quite well enough
accounted for. I tried for a prize of 100 pounds offered by The Sydney
Mail with a novel called "Handfasted," but was not successful, for the
judge feared that it was calculated to loosen the marriage tie--it was
too socialistic and consequently dangerous.