The labors of the missionaries have been great, their earnestness and

devotion unsurpassed. Up to the day of the outbreak of Hau-Hauism, their

influence with the natives was thought to be enormous. The entire Maori

race had been baptized, thousands of natives had attended the schools,

hundreds had become communicants and catechists. In a day the number of

native Christians was reduced from thirty thousand to some hundreds.

Right and left the tribes flocked to the bush, deserting mission

stations, villages, herds, and fields. Those few who dared not go were

there in spirit; all sympathized, if not with the Hau-Hau movement, at

least with Kingism. The archdeacon and his brethren of the holy calling

were at their wits’ ends. Not only did Christianity disappear:

civilization itself accompanied religion in her flight, and habits of

bloodshed and barbarity, unknown since the nominal renunciation of

idolatry, in a day returned. The fall was terrible, but it went to show

that the apparent success had been fictitious. The natives had built

mills and owned ships; they had learnt husbandry and cattle-breeding;

they had invested money, and put acre to acre, and house to house; but

their moral could hardly have kept pace with their material, or even

with their mental gains.

A magistrate, who knows the Maories well, told me that their

Christianity is only on the surface. He one day asked Maténé té Whiwhi,

a Ngatiraukawa chief, “Which would you soonest eat, Maténé--pork, beef,

or Ngatiapa?” Maténé answered, with a turn up of his eyes, “Ah! I‘m a

Christian!” “Never mind that to me, you know,” said the Englishman. “The

flesh of the Ngatiapa is sweet,” said Maténé, with a smack of the lips

that was distinctly audible. The settlers tell you that when the Maories

go to war, they use up their Bibles for gun-wadding, and then come on

the missionaries for a fresh supply.

The Polynesians, when Christianity is first presented to them, embrace

it with excitement and enthusiasm; the “new religion” spreads like

wildfire; the success of the teachers is amazing. A few years, however,

show a terrible change. The natives find that all white men are not

missionaries; that if one set of Englishmen deplore their

licentiousness, there are others to back them in it; that Christianity

requires self-restraint. As soon as the first flare of the new religion

is over it commences to decline, and in some cases it expires. The story

of Christianity in Hawaii, in Otaheite, and in New Zealand, has been

much the same: among the Tahitians it was crushed by the relapse of the

converts into extreme licentiousness; among the Maories it was put down

by the sudden rise of the Hau-Hau fanaticism. A return to a better state

of things has in each case followed, but the missionaries work now in a

depressed and saddened way, which contrasts sternly with the exultation

that inspired them before the fresh outbreak of the demon which they

believed they had exorcised. They reluctantly admit that the

Polynesians are fickle as well as gross; not only licentious, but

untrustworthy. There is, they will tell you, no country where it is so

easy to plant or so hard to maintain Christianity.

The Maori religion is that of all the Polynesians--a vague polytheism,

which in their poems seems now and then to approach to pantheism. The

forest glades, the mountain rocks, the stormy shores, all swarm with

fairy singers, and with throngs of gnomes and elves. The happy laughing

islanders have a heaven, but no hell in their mythology; of “sin” they

have no conception. Hau-Hauism is not a Polynesian creed, but a

political and religious system based upon the earlier books of the Old

Testament; even the cannibalism which was added was not of the Maori

kind. The Indians of Chili ate human flesh for pleasure and variety;

those of Virginia were cannibals only on state occasions, or in

religious ceremonials; but the Maories seem originally to have been

driven to man-eating by sheer want of food. Since Cook left pigs upon

the islands, the excuse has been wanting, and the practice has

consequently ceased. As revived by the Hau-Haus, the man-eating was of a

ceremonial nature, and, like the whole of the observances of the Hau-Hau

fanaticism, an inroad upon ancient Maori customs.

There is one great difference which severs the Maories from the other

Polynesians. In New Zealand caste is unknown; every Maori is a gentleman

or a slave. Chiefs are elected by the popular voice, not, indeed, by a

show of hands, but by a sort of general agreement of the tribe; but the

chief is a political, not a social superior. In the windy climate of New

Zealand men can push themselves to the front too surely by their energy

and toil, to remain socially in an inferior class. Caste is impossible

where the climate necessitates activity and work. The Maories, too, we

should remember, are an immigrant race; probably no high-caste men came

with them--all started from equal rank.

Like the Tongans, the Maories pay great reverence to their well-born

women; slave women are of no account. The Friendly Islanders exclude

both man and woman slave from the Future Life; but the Maori Rangatira

not only admits his followers to heaven, but his wife to council. A

Maori chief is as obedient to the warlike biddings, and as grateful for

the praising glance or smile of his betrothed, as a planter-cavalier of

Carolina, or a Cretan volunteer; and even the ladies of New Orleans

cannot have gone further than the wives of Hunia and Ihakara in spurring

on the men to war. The Maori Andromaches outdo their European sisters,

for they themselves proceed to battle, and animate their Hectors by

songs and shouts. Even the scepter of tribal rule--the greenstone

_meri_, or royal club--is often intrusted to them by their warrior

husbands, and used to lead the war-dance or the charge.

The delicacy of treatment shown by the Maories toward their women may go

far to account for the absence of contempt for the native race among the

English population. An Englishman‘s respect for the sex is terribly

shocked when he sees a woman staggering under the weight of the wigwam

and the children of a “brave,” who stalks behind her through the streets

of Austin, carrying his rifles and his pistols, but not another ounce,

unless in the shape of a thong with which to hasten the squaw‘s steps.

What wonder if the men who sit by smoking while their wives totter under

basketsful of mould on the boulevard works at Delhi are called lazy

scoundrels by the press of the Northwest, or if the Shoshonés, who eat

the bread of idleness themselves, and hire out their wives to the

Pacific Railroad Company, are looked upon as worse than dogs in Nevada,

where the thing is done? It is the New Zealand native‘s treatment of his

wife that makes it possible for an honest Englishman to respect or love

an honest Maori.

In general, the newspaper editors and idle talkers of the frontier

districts of a colony in savage lands speak with mingled ridicule and

contempt of the men with whom they daily struggle; at best, they see in

them no virtue but ferocious bravery. The Kansas and Colorado papers

call Indians “fiends,” “devils,” or dismiss them laughingly in peaceful

times as “bucks,” whose lives are worth, perhaps, a buffalo‘s, but who

are worthy of notice only as potential murderers or thieves. Such, too,

is the tone of the Australian press concerning the aboriginal

inhabitants of Queensland or Tasmania. Far otherwise do the New Zealand

papers speak of the Maori warriors. They may sometimes call them

grasping, overreaching traders, or underrate their capability of

receiving civilization of a European kind, but never do they affect to

think them less than men, or to advocate the employment toward them of

measures which would be repressed as infamous if applied to brutes. We

should, I think, see in this peculiarity of conduct, not evidence of the

existence in New Zealand of a spirit more catholic and tolerant toward

savage neighbors than that which the English race displays in Australia

or America, but rather a tribute to the superiority in virtue,

intelligence, and nobility of mind possessed by the Maori over the Red

Indian or the Australian Black.

It is not only in their treatment of their women that the Maories show

their chivalry. One of the most noble traits of this great people is

their habit of “proclaiming” the districts in which lies the cause of

war as the sole fighting-ground, and never touching their enemies,

however defenseless, when found elsewhere. European nations might take a

lesson from New Zealand Maories in this and other points.

The Maories are apt at learning, merry, and, unlike other Polynesians,

trustworthy, but also, unlike them, mercenary. At the time of the

Manawatu sale, old Aperahama used to write to Dr. Featherston almost

every day: “O Pétatoné, let the price of the block be £9,999,999 19_s._

9_d._,” the mysteries of eleven pence three farthings being far beyond

his comprehension. The Maories have, too, a royal magnificence in their

ideas of gifts and grants--witness té Héké‘s bid of 100,000 acres of

land for Governor Fitzroy‘s head, in answer to the offer, by the

governor, of a small price for his.

The praises of the Maories have been sung by so many writers, and in so

many keys, that it is necessary to keep it distinctly before us that

they are mere savages, though brave, shrewd men. There is an Eastern

civilization--that of China and Hindostan--distinct from that of Europe,

and ancient beyond all count; in this the Maories have no share. No true

Hindoo, no Arab, no Chinaman, has suffered change in one tittle of his

dress or manners from contact with the Western races; of this essential

conservatism there is in the New Zealand savage not a trace. William

Thompson, the Maori “king-maker,” used to dress as any Englishman;

Maories on board our ships wear the uniform of the able-bodied seamen;

Governor Hunia has ridden as a gentleman-rider in a steeple-chase,

equipped in jockey dress.

Savages though they be, in irregular warfare we are not their match. At

the end of 1865, we had of regulars and militia seventeen thousand men

under arms in the North Island of New Zealand, including no less than

twelve regiments of the line at their “war strength,” and yet our

generals were despondent as to their chance of finally defeating the

warriors of a people which--men, women, and children--numbered but

thirty thousand souls.

Men have sought far and wide for the reasons which led to our defeats in

the New Zealand wars. We were defeated by the Maories, as the Austrians

by the Prussians, and the French by the English in old times--because

the victors were the better men. Not the braver men, when both sides

were brave alike; not the stronger; not, perhaps, taking the average of

our officers and men, the more intelligent; but capable of quicker

movement, able to subsist on less, more crafty, more skilled in the

thousand tactics of the bush. Aided by their women, who, when need was,

themselves would lead the charge, and who at all times dug their

fern-root and caught their fish; marching where our regiments could not

follow, they had, as have the Indians in America, the choice of time and

place for their attacks, and while we were crawling about our military

roads upon the coast, incapable of traversing a mile of bush, the

Maories moved securely and secretly from one end to the other of the

island. Arms they had, ammunition they could steal, and blockade was

useless with enemies who live on fern-root. When they found that we

burnt their pahs, they ceased to build them; that was all. When we

brought up howitzers, they went where no howitzers could follow. It

should not be hard even for our pride to allow that such enemies were,

man for man, in their own lands our betters.

All nations fond of horses, it has been said, flourish and succeed. The

Maories love horses and ride well. All races that delight in sea are

equally certain to prosper, empirical philosophers will tell us. The

Maories own ships by the score, and serve as sailors whenever they get a

chance: as deep-sea fishermen they have no equals. Their fondness for

draughts shows mathematical capacity; in truthfulness they possess the

first of virtues. They are shrewd, thrifty; devoted friends, brave men.

With all this, they die.

“Can you stay the surf which beats on Wanganui shore?” say the Maories

of our progress; and, of themselves: “We are gone--like the _moa_.”

CHAPTER VI.

THE TWO FLIES.

“As the Pakéha fly has driven out the Maori fly;

As the Pakéha grass has killed the Maori grass;

As the Pakéha rat has slain the Maori rat;

As the Pakéha clover has starved the Maori fern,

So will the Pakéha destroy the Maori.”

These are the mournful words of a well-known Maori song.

That the English daisy, the white clover, the common thistle, the

chamomile, the oat, should make their way rapidly in New Zealand, and

put down the native plants, is in no way strange. If the Maori grasses

that have till lately held undisturbed possession of the New Zealand

soil, require for their nourishment the substances A, B, and C, while

the English clover needs A, B, and D; from the nature of things A and B

will be the coarser earths or salts, existing in larger quantities, not

easily losing vigor and nourishing force, and recruiting their energies

from the decay of the very plant that feeds on them; but C and D will be

the more ethereal, the more easily destroyed or wasted substances. The

Maori grass, having sucked nearly the whole of C from the soil, is in a

weakly state, when in comes the English plant, and, finding an abundant

store of untouched D, thrives accordingly, and crushes down the Maori.

The positions of flies and grasses, of plants and insects, are, however,

not the same. Adapted by nature to the infinite variety of soils and

climates, there are an infinite number of different plants and animals;

but whereas the plant depends upon both soil and climate, the animal

depends chiefly upon climate, and little upon soil--except so far as his

home or his food themselves depend on soil. Now, while soil wears out,

climate does not. The climate in the long run remains the same, but

certain apparently trifling constituents of the soil will wholly

disappear. The result of this is, that while pigs may continue to thrive

in New Zealand forever and a day, Dutch clover (without manure) will

only last a given and calculable time.

The case of the flies is plain enough. The Maori and the English fly

live on the same food, and require about the same amount of warmth and

moisture: the one which is best fitted to the common conditions will

gain the day, and drive out the other. The English fly has had to

contend not only against other English flies, but against every fly of

temperate climates: we having traded with every land, and brought the

flies of every clime to England. The English fly is the best possible

fly of the whole world, and will naturally beat down and exterminate, or

else starve out, the merely provincial Maori fly. If a great singer--to

find whom for the London stage the world has been ransacked--should be

led by the foible of the moment to sing for gain in an unknown village,

where on the same night a rustic tenor was attempting to sing his best,

the London tenor would send the provincial supperless to bed. So it is

with the English and Maori fly.

Natural selection is being conducted by nature in New Zealand on a

grander scale than any we have contemplated, for the object of it here

is man. In America, in Australia, the white man shoots or poisons his

red or black fellow, and exterminates him through the workings of

superior knowledge; but in New Zealand it is peacefully, and without

extraordinary advantages, that the Pakéha beats his Maori brother.

That which is true of our animal and vegetable productions is true also

of our man. The English fly, grass, and man, they and their progenitors

before them, have had to fight for life against their fellows. The

Englishman, bringing into his country from the parts to which he trades

all manner of men, of grass seeds, and of insect germs, has filled his

land with every kind of living thing to which his soil or climate will

afford support. Both old inhabitants and interlopers have to maintain a

struggle which at once crushes and starves out of life every weakly

plant, man, or insect, and fortifies the race by continual buffetings.

The plants of civilized man are generally those which will grow best in

the greatest variety of soils and climates; but in any case, the English

fauna and flora are peculiarly fitted to succeed at our antipodes,

because the climates of Great Britain and New Zealand are almost the

same, and our men, flies, and plants--the “pick” of the whole

world--have not even to encounter the difficulties of acclimatization in

their struggle against the weaker growths indigenous to the soil.

Nature‘s work in New Zealand is not the same as that which she is

quickly doing in North America, in Tasmania, in Queensland. It is not

merely that a hunting and fighting people is being replaced by an

agricultural and pastoral people, and must farm or die: the Maori does

farm; Maori chiefs own villages, build houses, which they let to

European settlers; we have here Maori sheep-farmers, Maori ship-owners,

Maori mechanics, Maori soldiers, Maori rough-riders, Maori sailors, and

even Maori traders. There is nothing which the average Englishman can do

which the average Maori cannot be taught to do as cheaply and as well.

Nevertheless, the race dies out. The Red Indian dies because he cannot

farm; the Maori farms, and dies.

There are certain special features about this advance of the birds,

beasts, and men of Western civilization. When the first white man landed

in New Zealand, all the native quadrupeds save one, and nearly all the

birds and river-fishes, were extinct, though we have their bones, and

traditions of their existence. The Maories themselves were dying out.

The moa and dinoris were both gone; there were few insects, and no

reptiles. “The birds die because the Maories, their companions, die,” is

the native saying. Yet the climate is singularly good, and food for

beast and bird so plentiful that Captain Cook‘s pigs have planted

colonies of “wild boars” in every part of the islands, and English

pheasants have no sooner been imported than they have commenced to swarm

in every jungle. Even the Pakéha flea has come over in the ships, and

wonderfully has he thriven.

The terrible want of food for men that formerly characterized New

Zealand has had its effects upon the habits of the Maori race. Australia

has no native fruit trees worthy cultivation, although in the whole

world there is no such climate and soil for fruits; still, Australia has

kangaroos and other quadrupeds. The Ladrones were destitute of

quadrupeds, and of birds, except the turtle-dove; but in the warm damp

climate fruits grew, sufficient to support in comfort a dense

population. In New Zealand the windy cold of the winters causes a need

for something of a tougher fiber than the banana or the fern-root. There

being no native beasts, the want was supplied by human flesh, and war,

furnishing at once food and the excitement which the chase supplies to

peoples that have animals to hunt, became the occupation of the Maories.

Hence in some degree the depopulation of the land; but other causes

exist, by the side of which cannibalism is as nothing.

The British government has been less guilty than is commonly believed as

regards the destruction of the Maories. Since the original misdeed of

the annexation of the isles, we have done the Maories no serious wrong.

We recognized the claim of a handful of natives to the soil of a country

as large as Great Britain, of not one-hundredth part of which had they

ever made the smallest use; and, disregarding the fact that our

occupation of the coast was the very event that gave the land its value,

we have insisted on buying every acre from the tribe. Allowing title by

conquest to the Ngatiraukawa, as I saw at Parewanui Pah, we refuse to

claim even the lands we conquered from the “Kingites.”

The Maories have always been a village people, tilling a little land

round their pahs, but incapable of making any use of the great pastures

and wheat countries which they “own.” Had we at first constituted native

reserves, on the American system, we might, without any fighting, and

without any more rapid destruction of the natives than that which is

taking place, have gradually cleared and brought into the market nearly

the whole country, which now has to be purchased at enormous prices, and

at the continual risk of war.

As it is, the record of our dealings with the Queen‘s native subjects in

New Zealand has been almost free from stain, but if we have not

committed crimes, we have certainly not failed to blunder: our treatment

of William Thompson was at the best a grave mistake. If ever there lived

a patriot he was one, and through him we might have ruled in peace the

Maori race. Instead of receiving the simplest courtesy from a people

which in India showers honors upon its puppet kings and rajahs, he

underwent fresh insults each time that he entered an English town or met

a white magistrate or subaltern, and he died, while I was in the

colonies--according to Pakéha physicians, of liver complaint; according

to the Maories, of a broken heart.

At Parewanui and Otaki, I remarked that the half-breeds are fine

fellows, possessed of much of the nobility of both the ancestral races,

while the women are famed for grace and loveliness. In miscegenation it

would have seemed that there was a chance for the Maori, who, if

destined to die, would at least have left many of his best features of

body and mind to live in the mixed race, but here comes in the prejudice

of blood, with which we have already met in the case of the negroes and

Chinese. Morality has so far gained ground as greatly to check the

spread of permanent illegitimate connections with native women, while

pride prevents intermarriage. The numbers of the half-breeds are not

upon the increase: a few fresh marriages supply the vacancies that come

of death, but there is no progress, no sign of the creation of a

vigorous mixed race. There is something more in this than foolish pride,

however; there is a secret at the bottom at once of the cessation of

mixed marriages and of the dwindling of the pure Maori race, and it is

the utter viciousness of the native girls. The universal unchastity of

the unmarried women, “Christian” as well as heathen, would be sufficient

to destroy a race of gods. The story of the Maories is that of the

Tahitians, and is written in the decorations of every gate-post or

rafter in their pahs.

We are more distressed at the present and future of the Maories than

they are themselves. For all our greatness, we pity not the Maories more

profoundly than they do us when, ascribing our morality to calculation,

they bask in the sunlight, and are happy in their gracelessness. After

all, virtue and arithmetic come from one Greek root.

CHAPTER VII.

THE PACIFIC.

Closely resembling Great Britain in situation, size, and climate, New

Zealand is often styled by the colonists “The Britain of the South,” and

many affect to believe that her future is destined to be as brilliant as

has been the past of her mother country. With the exaggeration of phrase

to which the English New Zealanders are prone, they prophesy a marvelous

hereafter for the whole Pacific, in which New Zealand, as the carrying

and manufacturing country, is to play the foremost part, the Australias

following obediently in her train.

Even if the differences of Separatists, Provincialists, and Centralists

should be healed, the future prosperity of New Zealand is by no means

secure. Her gold yield is only about a fifth of that of California or

Victoria. Her area is not sufficient to make her powerful as an

agricultural or pastoral country, unless she comes to attract

manufactures and carrying trade from afar, and the prospect of New

Zealand succeeding in this effort is but small. Her rivers are almost

useless for manufacturing purposes owing to their floods; the timber

supply of all her forests is not equal to that of a single county in the

State of Oregon; her coal is inferior in quality to that of Vancouver

Island, in quantity to that of Chili, in both respects to that of New

South Wales. The harbors of New Zealand are upon the eastern coasts, but

the coal is chiefly upon the other side, where the river bars make trade

impossible.

The coal that has been found at the Bay of Islands is said to be

plentiful and of good quality, and may be made largely available for

steamers on the coast; the steel sand of Taranaki, smelted by the use of

petroleum, also found within the province, may become of value; her own

wool, too, New Zealand will doubtless one day manufacture into cloth and

blankets; but these are comparatively trifling matters: New Zealand may

become rich and populous without being the great power of the Pacific,

or even of the South.

The climate of the North Island is winterless, moist, and warm, and its

effects are already seen in a certain want of enterprise shown by the

government and settlers. I remarked that the mail steamers which leave

Wellington almost everyday are invariably “detained for dispatches:” it

looks as though the officers of the colonial or imperial government

commence to write their letters only when the hour for the sailing of

the ship has come. An Englishman visiting New Zealand was asked in my

presence how long his business at Wanganui would keep him in the town.

His answer was: “In London it would take me half an hour; so I suppose

about a week--about a week!”

In Java, and the other islands of the Indian archipelago, we find

examples of the effect of the supineness of dwellers in the tropics upon

the economic position of their countries. Many of the Indian isles

possess both coal and cheap labor, but have failed to become

manufacturing communities on a large scale only because the natives have

not the energy requisite for the direction of factories and workshops,

while European foremen have to be paid enormous wages, and, losing their

spirit in the damp, unchanging climate of the islands, soon become more

indolent than the natives.

The position of the various stores of coal in the Pacific is of extreme

importance as an index to the future distribution of power in that

portion of the world; but it is not enough to know where coal is to be

found without looking also to the quantity, quality, cheapness of labor,

and facility for transport. In China (in the Si Shan district) and in

Borneo, there are extensive coal fields, but they lie “the wrong way”

for trade. On the other hand, the Californian coal--at Monte Diablo, San

Diego, and Monterey--lies well, but is bad in quality. The Talcahuano

bed in Chili is not good enough for ocean steamers, but might be made

use of for manufactures, although Chili has but little iron. Tasmania

has good coal, but in no great quantity, and the beds nearest to the

coast are formed of inferior anthracite. The three countries of the

Pacific which must, for a time at least, rise to manufacturing

greatness, are Japan, Vancouver Island, and New South Wales, but which

of these will become wealthiest and most powerful depends mainly on the

amount of coal which they respectively possess so situated as to be

cheaply raised. The dearness of labor under which Vancouver suffers will

be removed by the opening of the Pacific Railroad, but for the present

New South Wales has the cheaper labor; and upon her shores at Newcastle

are abundant stores of a coal of good quality for manufacturing

purposes, although for sea use it burns “dirtily,” and too fast, the

colony possesses also ample beds of iron, copper, and lead. Japan, as

far as can be at present seen, stands before Vancouver and New South

Wales in almost every point: she has cheap labor, good climate,

excellent harbors, and abundant coal; cotton can be grown upon her soil,

and this, and that of Queensland, she can manufacture and export to

America and to the East. Wool from California and from the Australias

might be carried to her to be worked, and her rise to commercial

greatness has already commenced with the passage of a law allowing

Japanese workmen to take service with European capitalists in the

“treaty-ports.” Whether Japan or New South Wales is destined to become

the great wool-manufacturing country, it is certain that fleeces will

not long continue to be sent half round the world--from Australia to

England--to be worked, and then round the other half back from England

to Australia, to be sold as blankets.

The future of the Pacific shores is inevitably brilliant; but it is not

New Zealand, the center of the water hemisphere, which will occupy the

position that England has taken in the Atlantic, but some country such

as Japan or Vancouver, jutting out into the ocean from Asia or from

America, as England juts out from Europe. If New South Wales usurps the

position, it will be not from her geographical situation, but from the

manufacturing advantages she gains by the possession of vast mineral

wealth.

The political power of America in the Pacific appears predominant: the

Sandwich Islands are all but annexed, Japan all but ruled by her, while

the occupation of British Columbia is but a matter of time, and a Mormon

descent upon the Marquesas is already planned. The relations of America

and Australia will be the key to the future of the South.

* * * * *

On the 26th of December I left New Zealand for Australia.

APPENDIX.

A MAORI DINNER.

For those who would make trial of Maori dishes, here is a native

bill-of-fare, such as can be imitated in the South of England:

HAKARI MAORI--A MAORI FEAST.

_BILL-OF-FARE._

SOUP.

KOTA KOTA Any shell-fish.

FISH.

INANGA Whitebait (boiled in milk, with leeks).

PIHARAU Lamprey (stewed).

TUNA Eels (steamed).

MADE-DISHES.

PUKÉKO Moor-hen (steamed).

KOURA Craw-fish (boiled).

TUI TUI Thrush (roast).

KÉRÉRU Pigeon (baked in clay).

ROAST.

POOKA Pork (_short_ pig).

GAME.

PARÉRA Wild Duck (roasted on embers).

VEGETABLES.

PAUKÉNA Pumpkin.

KAMU KAMU Vegetable Marrow.

KAPUTI Cabbage (steamed).

KUMATA Sweet Potatoes.

SWEETS.

TATARAMOA Cranberries (steamed).

TANA Damsons (steamed with sugar).

DESSERT.

KARAMU Currants.

PIKAKARIKA, _Dec._ 1866.

END OF VOL. I.

GREATER BRITAIN.

_A RECORD OF TRAVEL_

IN

ENGLISH-SPEAKING COUNTRIES

DURING 1866-7.

BY

CHARLES WENTWORTH DILKE.

VOL. II.

WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

[Illustration]

PHILADELPHIA:

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO.

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO.

1869.

PART III.

AUSTRALIA.

GREATER BRITAIN.

CHAPTER I.

SYDNEY.

At early light on Christmas-day, I put off from shore in one of those

squalls for which Port Nicholson, the harbor of Wellington, is famed. A

boat which started from the ship at the same time as mine from the land,

was upset, but in such shallow water that the passengers were saved,

though they lost a portion of their baggage. As we flew toward the mail

steamer, the _Kaikoura_, the harbor was one vast sheet of foam, and

columns of spray were being whirled in the air, and borne away far

inland upon the gale. We had placed at the helm a post-office clerk, who

said that he could steer, but, as we reached the steamer‘s side, instead

of luffing-up, he suddenly put the helm hard a-weather, and we shot

astern of her, running violently before the wind, although our

treble-reefed sail was by this time altogether down. A rope was thrown

us from a coal hulk, and, catching it, we were soon on board, and spent

our Christmas walking up and down her deck on the slippery black dust,

and watching the effects of the gale. After some hours the wind

moderated, and I reached the _Kaikoura_ just before she sailed. While we

were steaming out of the harbor through the boil of waters that marks

the position of the submarine crater, I found that there was but one

other passenger for Australia to share with me the services of ten

officers and ninety men, and the accommodations of a ship of 1500 tons.

“Serious preparations and a large ship for a mere voyage from one

Australasian colony to another,” I felt inclined to say, but during the

voyage and my first week in New South Wales I began to discover that in

England we are given over to a singular delusion as to the connection of

New Zealand and Australia.

Australasia is a term much used at home to express the whole of our

Antipodean possessions; in the colonies themselves the name is almost

unknown, or, if used, is meant to embrace Australia and Tasmania, not

Australia and New Zealand. The only reference to New Zealand, except in

the way of foreign news, that I ever found in an Australian paper, was a

congratulatory paragraph on the amount of the New Zealand debt; the only

allusion to Australia that I ever detected in the Wellington

_Independent_ was in a glance at the future of the colony, in which the

editor predicted the advent of a time when New Zealand would be a great

naval nation, and her fleet engaged in bombarding Melbourne, or levying

a contribution upon Sydney.

New Zealand, though a change for the better is at hand, has hitherto

been mainly an aristocratic country; New South Wales and Victoria mainly

democratic. Had Australia and New Zealand been close together, instead

of as far apart as Africa and South America, there could have been no

political connection between them so long as the traditions of their

first settlement endured.

Not only is the name “Australasia” politically meaningless, but

geographically incorrect, for New Zealand and Australia are as

completely separated from each other as Great Britain and Massachusetts.

No promontory of Australia runs out to within 1000 miles of any New

Zealand cape; the distance between Sydney and Wellington is 1400 miles;

from Sydney to Auckland about the same. The distance from the nearest

point of New Zealand of Tasman‘s peninsula, which itself projects

somewhat from Tasmania, is greater than that of London from Algiers:

from Wellington to Sydney, opposite ports, is as far as from Manchester

to Iceland, or from Africa to Brazil.

The sea that lies between the two great countries of the south is not,

like the Central or North Pacific, a sea bridged with islands, ruffled

with trade winds, favorable to sailing ships, or overspread with a calm

that permits the presence of light-draught paddle steamers. The seas

which separate Australia from New Zealand are cold, bottomless, without

islands, torn by Arctic currents, swept by polar gales, and traversed in

all weathers by a mountainous swell. After the gale of Christmas-day we

were blessed with a continuance of light breezes on our way to Sydney,

but never did we escape the long rolling hills of seas that seemed to

surge up from the Antarctic pole: our screw was as often out of as in

the water; and in a fast new ship we could scarcely average nine knots

an hour throughout the day. The ship which had brought the last

Australian mail to Wellington before we sailed was struck by a sea which

swept her from stem to stern, and filled her cabin two feet deep, and

this in December, which here is midsummer, and answers to our July. Not

only is the intervening ocean wide and cold, but New Zealand presents to

Australia a rugged coast guarded by reefs and bars, and backed by a

snowy range, while she turns toward Polynesia and America all her ports

and bays.

No two countries in the world are so wholly distinct as Australia and

New Zealand. The islands of New Zealand are inhabited by Polynesians,

the Australian continent by negroes. New Zealand is ethnologically

nearer to America, Australia to Africa, than New Zealand to Australia.

If we turn from ethnology to scenery and climate, the countries are

still more distinct. New Zealand is one of the groups of volcanic

islands that stud the Pacific throughout its whole extent; tremendous

cliffs surround it on almost every side; a great mountain chain runs

through both islands from north to south; hot springs abound, often

close to glaciers and eternal snows; earthquakes are common, and active

volcanoes not unknown. The New Zealand climate is damp and windy; the

land is covered in most parts with a tangled jungle of tree-ferns,

creepers, and parasitic plants; water never fails, and, though winter is

unknown, the summer heat is never great; the islands are always green.

Australia has for the most part flat, yellow, sun-burnt shores; the soil

may be rich, the country good for wheat and sheep, but to the eye it is

an arid plain; the winters are pleasant, but in the hot weather the

thermometer rises higher in the interior than it does in India, and dust

storms and hot winds sweep the land from end to end. It is impossible to

conceive countries more unlike each other than are our two great

dominions of the south. Their very fossils are as dissimilar as are

their flora and fauna of our time.

At the dawn of the first day of the new year, we sighted the rocks where

the _Duncan Dunbar_ was lost with all hands, and a few minutes afterward

were boarded by the crew engaged by the Sydney _Morning Herald_, who

had been lying at “The Heads” all night, to intercept and telegraph our

news into the city. The pilot and regular news-boat hailed us a little

later, when we had fired a gun. The contrast between this Australian

energy and the supineness of the New Zealanders was striking, but not

more so than that between my first view of Australia and my last view of

New Zealand. Six days earlier I had lost sight of the snowy peak of

Mount Egmont, graceful as the Cretan Iva, while we ran before a strong

breeze, in the bright English sunlight of the New Zealand afternoon; the

albatrosses screaming around our stern: to-day, as we steamed up Port

Jackson, toward Sydney Cove, in the dead stillness that follows a night

of oven-like heat, the sun rose flaming red in a lurid sky, and struck

down upon brown earth, yellow grass, and the thin shadeless foliage of

the Australian bush; while, as we anchored, the ceaseless chirping of

the crickets in the grass and trees struck harshly on the ear.

The harbor, commercially the finest in the world, is not without a

singular beauty if seen at the best time. By the “hot-wind sunrise,” as

I first saw it, the heat and glare destroy the feeling of repose which

the endless succession of deep, sheltered coves would otherwise convey;

but seen from shore in the afternoon, when the sea-breeze has sprung up,

turning the sky from red to blue, all is changed. From a neck of land

that leads out to the Government House, you catch a glimpse of an arm of

the bay on either side, rippled with the cool wind, intensely blue, and

dotted with white sails; the brightness of the colors that the

sea-breeze brings almost atones for the wind‘s unhealthiness.

In the upper portion of the town the scene is less picturesque; the

houses are of the commonplace English ugliness, worst of all possible

forms of architectural imbecility, and built, too, as though for English

fogs, instead of semi-tropical heat and sun. Water is not to be had, and

the streets are given up to clouds of dust, while not a single

shade-tree breaks the rays of the almost vertical sun.

The afternoon of New Year‘s day I spent at the “Midsummer Meeting” of

the Sydney Jockey Club, on the race-course near the city, and found a

vast crowd of holiday-makers assembled on the bare red earth that did

duty for “turf,” although there was a hot wind blowing, and the

thermometer stood at 103° in the shade. For my conveyance to the

race-course I trusted to one of the Australian hansom cabs, made with

open fixed Venetian blinds on either side, so as to allow a free draught

of air.

The ladies in the grand stand were scarcely to be distinguished from

Englishwomen in dress or countenance, but the crowd presented several

curious types. The fitness of the term “cornstalks,” applied to the

Australian-born boys, was made evident by a glance at their height and

slender build; they have plenty of activity and health, but are wanting

in power and weight. The girls, too, are slight and thin; delicate,

without being sickly. Grown men who have emigrated as lads and lived ten

or fifteen years in New Zealand, eating much meat, spending their days

in the open air, constantly in the saddle, are burly, bearded, strapping

fellows, physically the perfection of the English race, but wanting in

refinement and grace of mind, and this apparently constitutionally, not

through the accident of occupation or position. In Australia there is

promise of a more intellectual nation: the young Australians ride as

well, shoot as well, swim as well, as the New Zealanders, are as little

given to book-learning, but there is more shrewd intelligence, more wit

and quickness, in the sons of the larger continent. The Australians

boast that they possess the Grecian climate, and every young face in the

Sydney crowd showed me that their sky is not more like that of the

Peloponnesus than they are like the old Athenians. The eager burning

democracy that is springing up in the Australian great towns is as

widely different from the republicanism of the older States of the

American Union as it is from the good-natured conservatism of New

Zealand, and their high capacity for personal enjoyment would of itself

suffice to distinguish the Australians from both Americans and British.

Large as must be the amount of convict blood in New South Wales, there

was no trace of it in the faces of the persons present upon the

race-course. The inhabitants of colonies which have never received felon

immigrants often cry out that Sydney is a convict city, but the

prejudice is not borne out by the countenances of the inhabitants, nor

by the records of local crime. The black stain has not yet wholly

disappeared: the streets of Sydney are still a greater disgrace to

civilization than are even those of London; but, putting the lighter

immoralities aside, security for life and property is not more perfect

in England than in New South Wales. The last of the bushrangers were

taken while I was in Sydney.

The race-day was followed by a succession of hot winds, during which

only the excellence of the fruit-market made Sydney endurable. Not only

are the English fruits to be found, but plantains, guavas, oranges,

loquats, pomegranates, pine-apples from Brisbane, figs of every kind,

and the delicious passion-fruit; and if the gum-tree forests yield no

shady spots for picnics, they are not wanting among the rocks at Botany,

or in the luxuriant orange-groves of Paramatta.

A Christmas week of heat such as Sydney has seldom known was brought to

a close by one of the heaviest southerly storms on record. During the

stifling morning, the telegraph had announced the approach of a gale

from the far south, but in the early afternoon the heat was more

terrible than before, when suddenly the sky was dark with whirling

clouds, and a cold blast swept through the streets, carrying a fog of

sand, breaking roofs and windows, and dashing to pieces many boats. When

the gale ceased, some three hours later, the sand was so deep in houses

that here and there men‘s feet left footprints on the stairs.

Storms of this kind, differing only one from another in violence, are

common in the hot weather: they are known as “southerly bursters;” but

the earlier settlers called them “brickfielders,” in the belief that the

dust they brought was whirled up from the kilns and brickfields to the

south of Sydney. The fact is that the sand is carried along for one or

two hundred miles, from the plains in Dampier and Auckland counties; for

the Australian “burster” is one with the Punjaub dust-storm, and the

dirt-storm of Colorado.

CHAPTER II.

RIVAL COLONIES.

New South Wales, born in 1788, and Queensland in 1859, the oldest and

youngest of our Australian colonies, stand side by side upon the map,

and have a common frontier of 700 miles.

The New South Welsh look with some jealousy upon the more recently

founded States. Upon the brilliant prosperity of Victoria they look

doubtingly, and, ascribing it merely to the gold fields, talk of

“shoddy;” but of Queensland--an agricultural country, with larger tracts

of rich lands than they themselves possess--the Sydney folks are not

without reason envious.

A terrible depression is at present pervading trade and agriculture in

New South Wales. Much land near Sydney has gone out of cultivation;

labor is scarce, and the gold discoveries in the neighboring colonies,

by drawing off the surplus population, have made harvest labor

unattainable. Many properties have fallen to one-third their former

value, and the colony--a wheat-growing country--is now importing wheat

and flour to the value of half a million sterling every year.

The depressed condition of affairs is the result, partly of commercial

panics following a period of inflation, partly of bad seasons, now

bringing floods, now drought and rust, and partly of the discouragement

of immigration by the colonial democrats--a policy which, however

beneficial to Australia it may in the long run prove, is for the moment

ruinous to the sheep-farmers and to the merchants in the towns. On the

other hand, the laborers for their part assert that the arrivals of

strangers--at all events, of skilled artisans--are still excessive, and

that all the ills of the colony are due to over-immigration and free

trade.

To a stranger, the rush of population and outpour of capital from

Sydney, first toward Victoria, but now to Queensland and New Zealand,

appear to be the chief among the causes of the momentary decline of New

South Wales. Of immigrants there is at once an insufficient and an

over-great supply. Respectable servant-girls, carpenters, masons,

blacksmiths, plasterers, and the like, do well in the colonies, and are

always wanted; of clerks, governesses, iron-workers, and the skilled

hands of manufacturers, there is almost always an over-supply. By a

perverse fate, these latter are just the immigrants of whom thousands

seek the colonies every year, in spite of the daily publication in

England of dissuading letters.

As the rivalry of the neighbor-colonies lessens in the lapse of time,

the jealousy that exists between them will doubtless die away, but it

seems as though it will be replaced by a political divergence, and

consequent aversion, which will form a fruitful source of danger to the

Australian confederation.

[Illustration]

In Queensland the great tenants of crown lands, “squatters,” as they are

called, sheep-farmers holding vast tracts of inland country, are in

possession of the government, and administer the laws to their own

advantage. In New South Wales power is divided between the pastoral

tenants on the one hand, and the democracy of the towns upon the other.

In Victoria the democrats have beaten down the squatters, and in the

interests of the people put an end to their reign; but the

sheep-farmers of Queensland and of the interior districts of New South

Wales, ignoring wells, assert that the “up-country desert” or “unwatered

tracts” can never be made available for agriculture, while the democracy

of the coast point to the fact that the same statements were made only a

few years back of lands now bearing a prosperous population of

agricultural settlers.

The struggle between the great crown tenants and the agricultural

democracy in Victoria, already almost over, in New South Wales can be

decided only in one way, but in Queensland the character of the country

is not entirely the same: the coast and river tracts are tropical

bush-lands, in which sheep-farming is impossible, and in which sugar,

cotton, and spices alone can be made to pay. To the copper, gold, hides,

tallow, wool, which have hitherto formed the stereotyped list of

Australian exports, the Northern colony has already added ginger,

arrowroot, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton, cinnamon, and quinine.

The Queenslanders have not yet solved the problem of the settlement of a

tropical country by Englishmen, and of its cultivation by English hands.

The future, not of Queensland merely, but of Mexico, of Ceylon, of every

tropical country, of our race, of free government itself, are all at

stake; but the success of the experiment that has been tried between

Brisbane and Rockampton has not been great. The colony, indeed, has

prospered much, quadrupling its population and trebling its exports and

revenue in six years, but it is the Darling Downs, and other table-land

sheep countries, or, on the other hand, the Northern gold fields, which

are the main cause of the prosperity; and in the sugar and cotton

culture of the coast, colored labor is now almost exclusively employed,

with the usual effect of degrading field-work in the eyes of European

settlers, and of forcing upon the country a form of society of the

aristocratic type.

It is possible that just as New England has of late forbidden to

Louisiana the importation of Chinamen to work her sugar fields, just as

the Kansas radicals have declared that they will not recognize the

Bombay Hammal as a brother, just as the Victorians have refused to allow

the further reception of convicts by West Australia, separated from

their territories by 1000 miles of desert, so the New South Welsh and

Victorians combined may at least protest against the introduction of a

mixed multitude of Bengalees, Chinamen, South Sea Islanders, and Malays,

to cultivate the Queensland coast plantations. If, however, the other

colonies permit their Northern sister to continue in her course of

importing dark-skinned laborers, to form a peon population, a few years

will see her a wealthy cotton and sugar-growing country, with all the

vices of a slaveholding government, though without the name of slavery.

The planters of the coast and villages, united with the squatters of the

table-lands or “Downs,” will govern Queensland, and render union with

the free colonies impossible, unless great gold discoveries take place,

and save the country to Australia.

Were it not for the pride of race that everywhere shows itself in the

acts of English settlers, there might be a bright side to the political

future of Queensland colony. The colored laborers at present introduced,

industrious Tongans, and active Hill-coolies from Hindostan, laborious,

sober, and free from superstition, should not only be able to advance

the commercial fortunes of Queensland as they have those of the

Mauritius, but eventually to take an equal share in free government

with their white employers. To avoid the gigantic evil of the

degradation of hand labor, which has ruined morally as well as

economically the Southern States of the American republic, the Indian,

Malay, and Chinese laborers should be tempted to become members of

landholding associations. A large spice and sugar-growing population in

Northern Queensland would require a vast agricultural population in the

south to feed it, and the two colonies, hitherto rivals, might grow up

as sister countries, each depending upon the other for the supply of

half its needs. It is, however, worthy of notice that the agreements of

the Queensland planters with the imported dark-skinned field-hands

provide only for the payment of wages _in goods_, at the rates of 6_s._

to 10_s._ a month. The “goods” consist of pipes, tobacco, knives, and

beads. Judging from the experience of California and Ceylon, there can

be little hope of the general admission of colored men to equal rights

by English settlers, and the Pacific islands offer so tempting a field

to the kidnapping commanders of colonial “island schooners,” that there

is much fear that Queensland may come to show us not merely

semi-slavery, but peonage of that worst of kinds, in which it is cheaper

to work the laborer to death than to “breed” him.

Such is the present rapidity of the growth and rise to power of tropical

Queensland, such the apparent poverty of New South Wales, that were the

question merely one between the Sydney wheat-growers and the

cotton-planters of Brisbane and Rockampton, the subtropical settlers

would be as certain of the foremost position in any future confederation

as they were in America when the struggle lay only between the Carolinas

and New England. As it is, just as America was first saved by the coal

of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Australia will be saved by the coal of New

South Wales. Queensland possesses some small stores of coal, but the

vast preponderance of acreage of the great power of the future is on the

side of the free settlers of the cooler climate, at Newcastle, in New

South Wales.

On my return from a short voyage to the north, I visited the coal field

of New South Wales at Newcastle, on the Hunter. The beds are of vast

extent, they lie upon the banks of a navigable river, and so near to the

surface that the best qualities are raised, in a country of dear labor,

at 8_s._ or 9_s._ the ton, and delivered on board ship for 12_s._ For

manufacturing purposes the coal is perfect; for steamship use it is,

though somewhat “dirty,” a serviceable fuel; and copper and iron are

found in close proximity to the beds. The Newcastle and Port Jackson

fields open a singularly brilliant future to Sydney in these times, when

coal is king in a far higher degree than was ever cotton. To her black

beds the colony will owe not only manufactures, bringing wealth and

population, but that leisure which is begotten of wealth--leisure that

brings culture, and love of harmony and truth.

Manufactories are already springing up in the neighborhood of Sydney,

adding to the whirl and the bustle of the town, and adding, too, to its

enormous population, already disproportionate to that of the colony in

which it stands. As the depot for much of the trade of Queensland and

New Zealand, and as the metropolis of pleasure to which the wealthy

squatters pour from all parts of Australia, to spend, rapidly enough,

their hard-won money, Sydney would in any case have been a populous

city; but the barrenness of the country in which it stands has, until

the recent opening of the railroads, tended still further to increase

its size, by failing to tempt into country districts the European

immigrants. The Irish in Sydney form a third of the whole population,

yet hardly one of these men but meant to settle upon land when he left

his native island.

In France there is a tendency to migrate to Paris, in Austria a

continual drain toward Vienna, in England toward London. A corresponding

tendency is observable throughout Australia and America. Immigrants hang

about New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Sydney, Melbourne; and, finding

that they can scrape a living in these large cities with toil somewhat

less severe than that which would be needed to procure them a decent

livelihood in the bush, the unthrifty as well as the dissipated throng

together in densely-populated “bad quarters” in these cities, and render

the first quarter of New York and the so-called “Chinese” quarter of

Melbourne a danger to the colonies, and an insult to the civilization of

the world.

In the case of Australia this concentration of population is becoming

more remarkable day by day. Even under the system of free selection, by

which the legislature has attempted to encourage agricultural

settlement, the moment a free selector can make a little money he comes

to one of the capitals to spend it. Sydney is the city of pleasure, to

which the wealthy Queensland squatters resort to spend their money,

returning to the north for fresh supplies only when they cannot afford

another day of dissipation, while Melbourne receives the outpour of

Tasmania.

The rushing to great cities the moment there is money to be spent,

characteristic of the settlers in all these colonies, is much to be

regretted, and presents a sad contrast to the quiet stay-at-home habits

of American farmers. Everything here is fever and excitement;--as in

some systems of geometry, motion is the primary, rest the derived idea.

New South Welshmen tell you that this unquiet is peculiar to Victoria;

to a new-comer it seems as rife in Sydney as in Melbourne.

Judging from the colonial government reports, which immigrants are

conjured by the inspectors to procure and read, and which are printed in

a cheap form for the purpose, the New South Welsh can hardly wish to

lure settlers into “the bush,” for in one of these documents, published

while I was in Sydney, the curator of the museum reported that he never

went more than twelve miles from the city, but that within that circuit

he found seventeen distinct species of land snakes, two of sea snakes,

thirty of lizards, and sixteen of frogs--seventy-eight species of

reptiles rewarded him in all. The seventeen species of land snakes found

by him within the suburbs were named by the curator in a printed list;

it commenced with the pale-headed snake, and ended with the death-adder.

CHAPTER III.

VICTORIA.

The smallest of our southern colonies except Tasmania,--one-fourth the

size of New South Wales, one-eighth of Queensland, one-twelfth of West

Australia, one-fifteenth of South Australia,--Victoria is the wealthiest

of the Australian nations, and, India alone excepted, has the largest

trade of any of the dependencies of Great Britain.

When Mr. Fawkner‘s party landed in 1835 upon the Yarra banks, mooring

their boat to the forest trees, they formed a settlement upon a grassy

hill behind a marsh, and began to pasture sheep where Melbourne, the

capital, now stands. In twenty years, Melbourne became the largest city

but one in the southern hemisphere, having 150,000 people within her

limits or those of the suburban towns. Victoria has grander public

buildings in her capital, larger and more costly railroads, a greater

income, and a heavier debt than any other colony, and she pays to her

governor £10,000 a year, or one-fourth more than even New South Wales.

When looked into, all this success means gold. There is industry, there

is energy, there is talent, there is generosity and public spirit, but

they are the abilities and virtues that gold will bring, in bringing a

rush from all the world of dashing fellows in the prime of life. The

progress of Melbourne is that of San Francisco; it is the success of

Kokitika on a larger scale, and refined and steadied by having lasted

through some years--the triumph of a population which has hitherto

consisted chiefly of adult males.

Sydney people, in their jealousy of the Victorians, refuse to admit even

that the superior energy of the Melbourne men is a necessary consequence

of their having been the pride of the spirited youths of all the world,

brought together by the rush for gold. At the time of the first “find”

in 1851, all the resolute, able, physically strong do-noughts of Europe

and America flocked into Port Phillip, as Victoria was then called, and

such timid and weak men as came along with them being soon crowded out,

the men of energy and tough vital force alone remained.

Some of the New South Welsh, shutting their eyes to the facts connected

with the gold-rush, assert so loudly that the Victorians are the refuse

of California, or “Yankee scum,” that when I first landed in Melbourne

I expected to find street-cars, revolvers, big hotels, and fire-clubs,

euchre, caucusses, and mixed drinks. I could discover nothing American

about Melbourne except the grandeur of the public buildings and the

width of the streets, and its people are far more thoroughly British

than are the citizens of the rival capital. In many senses Melbourne is

the London, Sydney the Paris, of Australia.

About the surpassing vigor of the Victorians there can be no doubt; a

glance at the map shows the Victorian railways stretching to the Murray,

while those of New South Wales are still boggling at the Green Hills,

fifty miles from Sydney. Melbourne, the more distant port, has carried

off the Australian trade with the New Zealand gold fields from Sydney,

the nearer port. Melbourne imports Sydney shale, and makes from it

mineral oil, before the Sydney people have found out its value; and gas

in Melbourne is cheaper than in Sydney, though the Victorians are

bringing their coal five hundred miles, from a spot only fifty miles

from Sydney.

It is possible that the secret of the superior energy of the Victorians

may be, not in the fact that they are more American, but more English,

than the New South Welsh. The leading Sydney people are mainly the sons

or grandsons of original settlers, “cornstalks” reared in the

semi-tropical climate of the coast; the Victorians are full-blooded

English immigrants, bred in the more rugged climes of Tasmania, Canada,

or Great Britain, and brought only in their maturity to live in the

exhilarating air of Melbourne, the finest climate in the world for

healthy men: Melbourne is hotter than Sydney, but its climate is never

tropical. The squatters on the Queensland downs, mostly immigrants from

England, show the same strong vitality that the Melbourne men

possess; but their brother immigrants in Brisbane--the Queensland

capital, where the afternoon languid breeze resembles that of

Sydney--are as incapable of prolonged exertion as are the Sydney

“cornstalks.”

[Illustration: THE OLD AND THE NEW. BUSH SCENERY.]

[Illustration: COLLINS STREET EAST, MELBOURNE.--P. 24.]

Whatever may be the causes of the present triumph of Melbourne over

Sydney, the inhabitants of the latter city are far from accepting it as

likely to be permanent. They cannot but admit the present glory of what

they call the “Mushroom City.” The magnificent pile of the new

Post-office, the gigantic Treasury (which, when finished, will be larger

than our own in London), the University, the Parliament-house, the Union

and Melbourne Clubs, the City Hall, the Wool Exchange, the viaducts upon

the government railroad lines,--all are Cyclopean in their architecture,

all seem built as if to last forever; still, they say that there is a

certain want of permanence about the prosperity of Victoria. When the

gold discovery took place, in 1851, such trade sprang up that the

imports of the colony jumped from one million to twenty-five millions

sterling in three years; but, although she is now commencing to ship

breadstuffs to Great Britain, exports and imports alike show a steady

decrease. Considerably more than half of the hand-workers of the colony

are still engaged in gold-mining, and nearly half the population is

resident upon the gold fields; yet the yield shows, year by year, a

continual decline. Had it not been for the discoveries in New Zealand,

which have carried off the floating digger population, and for the wise

discouragement by the democrats of the monopolization of the land, there

would have been distress upon the gold fields during the last few years.

The Victorian population is already nearly stationary, and the squatters

call loudly for assisted immigration and free trade, but the stranger

sees nothing to astonish him in the temporary stagnation that attends a

decreasing gold production.

The exact economical position that Victoria occupies is easily

ascertained, for her statistics are the most perfect in the world; the

arrangement is a piece of exquisite mosaic. The brilliant statistician

who fills the post of registrar-general to the colony, had the immense

advantage of starting clear of all tradition, unhampered and unclogged;

and, as the governments of the other colonies have of the last few years

taken Victoria for model, a gradual approach is being made to uniformity

of system. It was not too soon, for British colonial statistics are apt

to be confusing. I have seen a list of imposts, in which one class

consisted of ale, aniseed, arsenic, assafœtida, and astronomical

instruments; boots, bullion, and salt butter; capers, cards, caraway

seed; gauze, gin, glue, and gloves; maps and manure; philosophical

instruments and salt pork; sandal-wood, sarsaparilla, and smoked

sausages. Alphabetical arrangement has charms for the official mind.

Statistics are generally considered dull enough, but the statistics of

these young countries are figure-poems. Tables that in England contrast

jute with hemp, or this man with that man, here compare the profits of

manufactures with those of agriculture, or pit against each other, the

powers of race and race.

Victoria is the only country in existence which possesses a statistical

history from its earliest birth; but, after all, even Victoria falls

short of Minnesota, where the settlers founded the “State Historical

Society” a week before the foundation of the State.

Gold, wheat, sheep, are the three great staples of Victoria, and have

each its party, political and commercial--diggers, agricultural

settlers, and squatters--though of late the diggers and the landed

democracy have made common cause against the squatters. Gold can now be

studied best at Ballarat, and wheat at Clunes, or upon the Barrabool

hills behind Geelong; but I started first for Echuca, the headquarters

of the squatter interest, and metropolis of sheep, taking upon my way

Kyneton, one of the richest agricultural districts of the colony, and

also the once famous gold diggings of Bendigo Creek.

Between Melbourne and Kyneton, where I made my first halt, the railway

runs through undulating lightly-timbered tracks, free from underwood,

and well grassed. By letting my eyes persuade me that the burnt-up

herbage was a ripening crop of wheat or oats, I found a likeness to the

views in the weald of Sussex, though the foliage of the gums, or

eucalypti, is thinner than that of the English oaks.

Riding from Kyneton to Carlsruhe, Pastoria, and the foot hills of the

“Dividing Range,” I found the agricultural community busily engaged upon

the harvest, and much excited upon the great thistle question. Women and

tiny children were working in the fields, while the men were at Kyneton,

trying in vain to hire the harvest hands from Melbourne at less than £2

10_s._ or £3 a week and board. The thistle question was not less

serious; the “thistle inspectors,” elected under the “Thistle Prevention

Act,” had commenced their labors, and although each man agreed with his

friend that his neighbor‘s thistles were a nuisance, still he did not

like being fined for not weeding out his own. The fault, they say, lies

in the climate; it is too good, and the English seeds have thriven.

Great as was the talk of thistles, the fields in the fertile Kyneton

district were as clean as in a well-kept English farm, and showed the

clearest signs of the small farmer‘s personal care.

Every one of the agricultural villages in Australia that I visited was a

full-grown municipality. The colonial English, freed from the checks

which are put by interested landlords to local government in Britain,

have passed in all the settlements laws under which any village must be

raised into a municipality on fifty of the villagers (the number varies

in the different colonies) signing a requisition, unless within a given

time a larger number sign a petition to the contrary effect.

After a short visit to the bustling digging town of Castlemaine, I

pushed on by train to Sandhurst, a town of great pretensions, which

occupies the site of the former digging camp at Bendigo. On a level part

of the line between the two great towns, my train dashed through some

closed gates, happily without hurt. The _Melbourne Argus_ of the next

day said that the crash had been the result of the signalman taking the

fancy that the trains should wait on him, not he upon the trains, so he

had “closed the gates, hoisted the danger signal, and adjourned to a

neighboring store to drink.” On my return from Echuca, I could not find

that he had been dismissed.

When hands are scarce, and lives valuable not to the possessor only, but

to the whole community, care to avoid accidents might be expected; but

there is a certain recklessness in all young countries, and not even in

Kansas is it more observable than in Victoria and New South Wales.

Sandhurst, like Castlemaine, straggles over hill and dale for many

miles, the diggers following the gold-leads, and building a suburb by

each alluvial mine, rather than draw their supplies from the central

spot. The extent of the worked-out gold field struck me as greater than

the fields round Placerville, but then in California many of the old

diggings are hidden by the vines.

In Sandhurst I could find none of the magnificent restaurants of

Virginia City; none of the gambling saloons of Hokitika; and the only

approach to gayety among the diggers was made in a drinking-hall, where

some dozen red-shirted, bearded men were dancing by turns with four

well-behaved and quiet-looking German girls, who were paid, the

constable at the gate informed me, by the proprietor of the booth. My

hotel--“The Shamrock”--kept by New York Irish, was a thoroughly American

house; but, then, digger civilization is everywhere American--a fact

owing, no doubt, to the American element having been predominant in the

first-discovered diggings--those of California.

Digger revolts must have been feared when the Sandhurst Government

Reserve was surrounded with a ditch strangely like a moat, and palings

that bear an ominous resemblance to a Maori pah. In the morning I found

my way through the obstructions, and discovered the police station, and

in it the resident magistrate, to whom I had a letter. He knew nothing

of “Gumption Dick,” Hank Monk‘s friend, but he introduced me to his

intelligent Chinese clerk, and told me many things about the yellow

diggers. The bad feeling between the English diggers and the Chinese has

not in the least died out. Upon the worked-out fields of Castlemaine and

Sandhurst, the latter have things their own way, and I saw hundreds of

them washing quietly and quickly in the old Bendigo Creek, finding an

ample living in the leavings of the whites. So successful have they been

that a few Europeans have lately been taking to their plan, and an old

Frenchman who died here lately, and who, from his working persistently

in worn-out fields, had always been thought to be a harmless idiot, left

behind him a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, obtained by washing in

company with the Chinese.

The spirit that called into existence the Ballarat anti-Chinese mobs is

not extinct in Queensland, as I found during my stay at Sydney. At the

Crocodile Creek diggings in Northern Queensland, whither many of the

Chinese from New South Wales have lately gone, terrible riots occurred

the week after I landed in Australia. The English diggers announced

their intention of “rolling up” the Chinese, and proceeded to “jump

their claims”--that is, trespass on the mining plots, for in Queensland

the Chinese have felt themselves strong enough to purchase claims. The

Chinese bore the robbery for some days, but at last a digger who had

sold them a claim for £50 one morning, hammered the pegs into the soft

ground the same day, and then jumped the claim on the pretense that it

was not “pegged out.” This was too much for the Chinese owner, who

tomahawked the digger on the spot. The English at once fired the Chinese

town, and even attacked the English driver of a coach for conveying

Chinamen on his vehicle. Some diggers in North Queensland are said to

have kept bloodhounds for the purpose of hunting Chinamen for sport, as

the rowdies of the old country hunt cats with terriers.

On the older gold fields, such as those of Sandhurst and Castlemaine,

the hatred of the English for the Chinese lies dormant, but it is not

the less strong for being free from physical violence. The woman in a

baker‘s shop near Sandhurst, into which I went to buy a roll for lunch,

shuddered when she told me of one or two recent marriages between Irish

“Biddies” and some of the wealthiest Chinese.

The man against whom all this hatred and suspicion is directed is no

ill-conducted rogue or villain. The chief of the police at Sandhurst

tells me that the Chinese are “the best of citizens;” a member of the

Victorian Parliament, resident in the very edge of their quarter at

Geelong, spoke of the yellow men to me as “well-behaved and frugal;” the

registrar-general told me that there is less crime, great or small,

among the Chinese, than among any equal number of English in the colony.

The Chinese are not denied civil rights in Victoria, as they have been

in California. Their testimony is accepted in the courts against that of

whites; they may become naturalized, and then can vote. Some twenty or

thirty of them, out of 30,000, have been naturalized in Victoria up to

the present time.

That the Chinese in Australia look upon their stay in the gold fields as

merely temporary is clear from the character of their restaurants, which

are singularly inferior to those of San Francisco. The best in the

colonies is one near Castlemaine, but even this is small and poor.

Shark‘s fin is an unheard-of luxury, and even puppy you would have to

order. “Silk-worms fried in castor oil” is the colonial idea of a

Chinese delicacy; yet the famous sea-slug is an inhabitant of Queensland

waters, and the Gulf of Carpentaria.

From Sandhurst northward, the country, known as Elysium Flats, becomes

level, and is wooded in patches, like the “oak-opening” prairies of

Wisconsin and Illinois. When within fifty miles of Echuca, the line

comes out of the forest on to a vast prairie, across which I saw a

marvelous mirage of water and trees on various step-like levels. From

the other window of the compartment carriage (sadly hot and airless

after the American cars), I saw the thin dry yellow grass on fire for a

dozen miles. The smoke from these “bush-fires” sometimes extends for

hundreds of miles to sea. In steaming down from Sydney to Wilson‘s

Promontory on my way to Melbourne, we passed through a column of smoke

about a mile in width when off Wolongong, near Botany Bay, and never

lost sight of it, as it lay in a dense brown mass upon the sea, until we

rounded Cape Howe, two hundred miles farther to the southward.

The fires on these great plains are caused by the dropping of fusees by

travelers as they ride along smoking their pipes Australian fashion, or

else by spreading of the fires from their camps. The most ingenious

stories are invented by the colonists to prevent us from throwing doubt

upon their carefulness, and I was told at Echuca that the late fires had

been caused by the concentration of the sun‘s rays upon spots of grass

owing to the accidental conversion into burning-glasses of beer-bottles

that had been suffered to lie about. Whatever their cause, the fires, in

conjunction with the heat, have made agricultural settlement upon the

Murray a lottery. The week before my visit, some ripe oats at Echuca had

been cut down to stubble by the hot wind, and farmers are said to count

upon the success of only one harvest in every three seasons. On the

other hand, the Victorian apricots, shriveled by the hot wind, are so

many lumps of crystallized nectar when you pierce their thick outer

coats.

Defying the sun, I started off to the banks of the Murray River, not

without some regret at the absence of the continuous street verandas

which in Melbourne form a first step toward the Italian piazza. One may

be deceived by trifles when the character of an unknown region is at

stake. Before reaching the country, I had read, “Steam-packet Hotel,

Esplanade, Echuca;” and, though experiences on the Ohio had taught me to

put no trust in “packets,” yet I had somehow come to the belief that the

Murray must be a second Missouri at least, if not an Upper Mississippi.

The “Esplanade” I found to be a myth, and the “fleet” of “steam-packets”

were drawn up in a long line upon the mud, there being in this summer

weather no water in which they could float. The Murray in February is a

streamless ditch, which in America, if known and named at all, would

rank as a tenth-rate river.

The St. Lawrence is 2200 miles in length, and its tributary, the Ottawa,

1000 miles in length, itself receives a tributary stream, the Gatineau,

with a course of 420 miles. At 217 miles from its confluence with the

Ottawa the Gatineau is still 1000 feet in width. At Albury, which even

in winter is the head of navigation on the Murray, you are only some 600

or 700 miles by river from the open sea, or about the same distance as

from Memphis in Tennessee to the mouth of the Mississippi.

During six months of the year, however, the Murray is for wool-carrying

purposes an important river. The railway to Echuca has tapped the river

system in the Victorians’ favor, and Melbourne has become the port of

the back country of New South Wales, and even Queensland. “The Riverina

is commercially annexed” to Victoria, said the premier of New South

Wales while I was in that colony, and the “Riverina” means that portion

of New South Wales which lies between the Lachlan, the Murrumbidgee, and

the Murray, to the northward of Echuca.

Returning to the inn to escape the sun, I took up the _Riverina Herald_,

published at Echuca; of its twenty-four columns, nineteen and a half

are occupied by the eternal sheep in one shape or another. A

representation of Jason‘s fleece stands at the head of the title; “wool”

is the first word in the first line of the body of the paper. More than

half of the advertisements are those of wool brokers, or else of the

fortunate possessors of specifics that will cure the scab. One

disinfectant compound is certified to by no less than seventeen

inspectors; another is puffed by a notice informing flock-masters that,

in cases of foot-rot, the advertiser goes upon the principle of “no

cure, no pay.” One firm makes “liberal advances on the ensuing clip;”

another is prepared to do the like upon “pastoral securities.”

Sheep-chandlers, regardless of associations, advertise in one line their

bread and foot-rot ointment, their biscuit and sheep-wash solution; and

the last of the advertisements upon the front page is that of an “agent

for the sale of fat.” The body of the paper contains complaints against

the judges at a recent show of wool, and an account of the raising of a

sawyer “120 feet in length and 33 feet in girth” by the new “snag-boat”

working to clear out the river for the floating down of the next wool

clip. Whole columns of small type are filled with “impounding” lists,

containing brief descriptions of all the strayed cattle of each

district. The technicalities of the distinctive marks are surprising.

Who not to the manner born can make much of this: “Blue and white cow,

cock horns, 22 off-rump, IL off-ribs?” or of this: “Strawberry stag, top

off off-ear, J. C. over 4 off-rump, like H. G. conjoined near loin and

rump?” This, again, is difficult: “Swallow tail, off-ear, [backwards-D]

and illegible over F off-ribs, PT off-rump.” What is a “blue strawberry

bull?” is a question which occurred to me. Again, what a phenomenon is

this: “White cow, writing capital A off-shoulder?” A paragraph relates

the burning of “£10,000 worth of country near Gambier,” and

advertisements of Colt‘s revolvers and quack medicines complete the

sheet. The paper shows that for the most part the colonists here, as in

New Zealand, have had the wisdom to adopt the poetic native names of

places, and even to use them for towns, streets, and ships. Of the

Panama liners, the _Rahaia_ and _Maitoura_ bear the names of rivers, the

_Rechiné_ and the _Kaikoura_, names of mountain ranges; and the colonial

boats have for the most part familiar Maori or Australian names; for

instance, _Rangitoto_, “hill of hills,” and _Rangitiri_, “great and

good.” The New Zealand colonists are better off than the Australian in

this respect: Wongawonga, Yarrayarra, and Wooloomooloo are not inviting;

and some of the Australian villages have still stranger names.

Nindooinbah is a station in southern Queensland; Yallack-a-yallack,

Borongorong, Bunduramongee, Jabbarabbara, Thuroroolong, Yalla-y-poora,

Yanac-a-Yanac, Wuid Kerruick, Woolongu-woong-wrinan, Woori Yalloak, and

Borhoneyghurk, are stations in Victoria. The only leader in the _Herald_

is on the meat question, but there is in a letter an account of the

Christmas festivities at Melbourne, which contains much merry-making at

the expense of “unacclimatized new chums,” as fresh comers to the

colonies are called. The writer speaks rapturously of the rush on

Christmas-day from the hot, dry, dusty streets to the “golden fields of

waving corn.” The “exposed nature of the Royal Park” prevented many

excursionists from picnicking there, as they had intended; but we read

on, and find that the exposure dreaded was not to cold, but to the

terrible hot wind which swept from the plains of the northwest, and

scorched up every blade of grass, every green thing, in the open spots.

We hear of Christmas dinners eaten upon the grass at Richmond, in the

sheltered shade of the gum-forest, but in the botanical gardens the

“plants had been much affected by the trying heat.” However, “the

weather on boxing-day was somewhat more favorable for open-air

enjoyment,” as the thermometer was only 98° in the shade.

Will ever New Zealand or Australian bard spring up to write of the pale

primroses that in September commence to peep out from under the melting

snows, and to make men look forward to the blazing heat and the long

December days? Strangely enough, the only English poem which an

Australian lad can read without laughing at the old country conceit that

connects frosts with January, and hot weather with July, is Thomson‘s

“Seasons,” for in its long descriptions of the changes in England from

spring to summer, from autumn to winter, a month is only once named:

“rosy-footed May” cannot be said to “steal blushing on” in Australia,

where May answers to our November.

In the afternoon, I ventured out again, and strolled into the gum-forest

on the banks of the Campaspe River, not believing the reports of the

ferocity of the Victorian bunyips and alligators which have lately

scared the squatters who dwelt on creeks. The black trees, relieved upon

a ground of white dust and yellow grass, were not inviting, and the

scorching heat soon taught me to hate the shadeless boughs and ragged

bark of the inevitable gum. It had not rained for nine weeks at the time

of my visit, and the thermometer (in the wind) reached 116° in the

shade, but there was nothing oppressive in the heat; it seemed only to

dry up the juices of the frame, and dazzle you with intense brightness.

I soon came to agree with a newly-landed Irish gardener, who told a

friend of mine that Australia was a strange country, for he could not

see that the thermometer had “the slightest effect upon the heat.” The

blaze is healthy, and fevers are unknown in the Riverina, decay of

noxious matter, animal or vegetable, being arrested during summer by the

drought. This is a hot year, for on the 12th of January the thermometer,

even at the Melbourne Observatory, registered 108° in the shade, and

123° in the shade was registered at Wentworth, near the confluence of

the Murray and the Darling.

As the afternoon drew on, and, if not the heat, at least the sun

declined, the bell-birds ceased their tuneful chiming, and the forest

was vocal only with the ceaseless chirp of the tree-cricket, whose note

recalled the goatsucker of our English woods. The Australian landscapes

show best by the red light of the hot weather sunsets, when the dark

feathery foliage of the gum-trees comes out in exquisite relief upon the

fiery fogs that form the sky, and the yellow earth gaining a tawny hue

in the lurid glare, throws off a light resembling that which in winter

is reflected from our English snows. At sunset there was a calm, but, as

I turned to walk homeward, the hot wind sprang up, and died again, while

the trees sighed themselves uneasily to sleep, as though fearful of

to-morrow‘s blast.

A night of heavy heat was followed by a breathless dawn, and the

scorching sun returned in all its redness to burn up once more the

earth, not cooled from the glare of yesterday. Englishmen must be bribed

by enormous gains before they will work with continuous toil in such a

climate, however healthy.

CHAPTER IV.

SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY.

“What is a Colonial Conservative?” is a question that used to be daily

put to a Victorian friend of mine when he was in London. His answer, he

told me, was always, “A statesman who has got four of the ‘points’ of

the People‘s Charter, and wants to conserve them,” but as used in

Victoria, the term “Conservative” expresses the feeling less of a

political party than of the whole of the people who have anything

whatever to lose. Those who have something object to giving a share in

the government to those who have nothing; those who have much, object to

political equality with those who have less; and, not content with

having won a tremendous victory in basing the Upper House upon a £5000

qualification and £100 freehold or £300 leasehold franchise, the

plutocracy are meditating attacks upon the Legislative Assembly.

The democracy hold out undauntedly, refusing all monetary tests, though

an intelligence basis for the franchise is by no means out of favor,

except with the few who cannot read or write. One day, when I was

driving from Melbourne to Sandridge, in company with a colonial

merchant, he asked our car-driver: “Now, tell me fairly: do you think

these rogues of fellows that hang about the shore here ought to have

votes?” “No, I don‘t.” “Ah, you‘d like to see a 5_s._ fee on

registration, wouldn‘t you?” The answer was sharp enough in its tone.

“Five shillings would be nothing to you; it would be something to me,

and it would be more than my brother could pay. What I‘d have done would

be to say that those who couldn‘t read shouldn‘t vote, that‘s all. That

would keep out the loafers.”

The plutocratic party is losing, not gaining, ground in Victoria; it is

far more likely that the present generation will see the Upper House

abolished than that it will witness the introduction of restrictions

upon the manhood suffrage which exists for the Lower; but there is one

branch of the plutocracy which actively carries on the fight in all the

colonies, and which claims to control society, the pastoral tenants of

crown lands, or Squatter Aristocracy.

The word “squatter” has undergone a remarkable change of meaning since

the time when it denoted those who stole government land, and built

their dwellings on it. As late as 1837, squatters were defined by the

chief justice of New South Wales as people occupying lands without legal

title, and who were subject to a fine on discovery. They were described

as living by bartering rum with convicts for stolen goods, and as being

themselves invariably convicts or “expirees.”

Escaping suddenly from these low associations, the word came to be

applied to graziers who drove their flocks into the unsettled interior,

and thence to those of them who received leases from the crown of

pastoral lands.

The squatter is the nabob of Melbourne and Sydney, the inexhaustible

mine of wealth. He patronizes balls, promenade concerts, flower-shows;

he is the mainstay of the great clubs, the joy of the shopkeepers, the

good angel of the hotels; without him the opera could not be kept up,

and the jockey-clubs would die a natural death.

Neither squatters nor townsfolk will admit that this view of the

former‘s position is exactly correct. The Victorian squatters tell you

that they have been ruined by confiscation, but that their neighbors in

New South Wales, who have leases, are more prosperous; in New South

Wales they tell you of the destruction of the squatters by “free

selection,” of which there is none in Queensland, “the squatter‘s

paradise;” but in Queensland the squatters protest that they have never

made wages for their personal work, far less interest upon their

capital. “Not one of us in ten is solvent,” they say.

As sweeping assertions are made by the townsfolk upon the other side.

The squatters, they sometimes say, may well set up to be a great landed

aristocracy, for they have every fault of a dominant caste except its

generous vices. They are accused of piling up vast hoards of wealth

while living a most penurious life, and contributing less than would so

many mechanics to the revenue of the country, in order that they may

return in later life to England, there to spend what they have wrung

from the soil of Victoria or New South Wales.

The occupation of the whole of the crown lands by squatters has

prevented the making of railways to be paid for in land on the American

system; but the chief of all the evils connected with squatting is the

tendency to the accumulation in a few hands of all the land and all the

pastoral wealth of the country, an extreme danger in the face of

democratic institutions, such as those of Victoria and New South Wales.

Remembering that manufactures are few, the swelling of the cities shows

how the people have been kept from the land; considerably more than

half of the population of Victoria lives within the corporate towns.

A few years back, a thousand men held between them, on nominal rents,

forty million acres out of the forty-three and a half million--mountain

and swamp excluded--of which Victoria consists. It is true that the

amount so held has now decreased to thirty million, but on the other

hand the squatters have bought vast tracts which were formerly within

their “runs,” with the capital acquired in squatting, and, knowing the

country better than others could possibly know it, have naturally

selected all the most valuable land.

The colonial democracy in 1860 and the succeeding years rose to a sense

of its danger from the land monopoly, and began to search about for

means to put it down, and to destroy at the same time the system of

holding from the crown, for it is singular that while in England there

seems to be springing up a popular movement in favor of the

nationalization of the land, in the most democratic of the Australian

colonies the tendency is from crown land tenure to individual freehold

ownership of the soil rather than the other way. Yet here in Victoria

there was a free field to start upon, for the land already belonged to

the State--the first of the principles included under the phrase,

nationalized land. In America, again, we see that, with the similar

advantage of State possession of territories which are still fourteen

times the size of the French Empire, there is little or no tendency

toward agitation for the continuance of State ownership. In short,

freehold ownership, the Saxon institution, seems dear to the Anglo-Saxon

race. The national land plan would commend itself rather to the Celtic

races: to the Highlander, who remembers clan-ship, to the Irishman, who

regrets the Sept.

Since the Radicals have been in power, both here and in New South Wales,

they have carried act after act to encourage agricultural settlers on

freehold tenure, at the expense of the pastoral squatters. The “free

selection” plan, now in operation in New South Wales, allows the

agricultural settler to buy, but at a fixed price, the freehold of a

patch of land, provided it be over forty acres and less than 320,

anywhere he pleases--even in the middle of a squatter‘s “run,” if he

enters at once, and commences to cultivate; and the Land Act of 1862

provides that the squatting license system shall entirely end with the

year 1869. Forgetting that in every lease the government reserved the

power of terminating the agreement for the purpose of the sale of land,

the squatters complain that free selection is but confiscation, and that

they are at the mercy of a pack of cattle-stealers and horse-thieves,

who roam through the country haunting their “runs” like “ghosts,” taking

up the best land on their “runs,” “picking the eyes out of the land,”

turning to graze anywhere, on the richest grass, the sheep and cattle

they have stolen on their way. The best of them, they say, are but

“cockatoo farmers,” living from hand to mouth on what they manage to

grub and grow. On the other hand, the “free selection” principle “up

country” is tempered by the power of the wealthy squatter to impound the

cattle of the poor little freeholder whenever he pleases to say that

they stray on to his “run;” indeed, “Pound them off, or if you can‘t,

buy them off,” has become a much used phrase. The squatter, too, is

protected in Victoria by such provisions as that “improvements” by him,

if over £40 on forty acres, cover an acre of land for each £1. The

squatters are themselves buying largely of land, and thus profiting by

the free selection. To a stranger it seems as though the interests of

the squatter have been at least sufficiently cared for, remembering the

vital necessity for immediate action. In 1865, Victoria, small as she

is, had not sold a tenth of her land.

In her free selectors, Victoria will gain a class of citizens whose

political views will contrast sharply with the strong anti-popular

sentiments of the squatters, and who, instead of spending their lives as

absentees, will stay, they and their children, upon the land, and spend

all they make within the colony, while their sons add to its laboring

arms.

Since land has been, even to a limited extent, thrown open, Victoria has

suddenly ceased to be a wheat-importing, and become a wheat-exporting

country, and flourishing agricultural communities, such as those of

Ceres, Clunes, Kyneton, are springing up on every side, growing wheat

instead of wool, while the wide extension which has in Victoria been

given to the principle of local self-government in the shape of

shire-councils, road-boards, and village-municipalities allows of the

junction in a happy country of the whole of the advantages of small and

great farming, under the unequaled system of small holdings, and

co-operation for improvements among the holders.

CHAPTER V.

COLONIAL DEMOCRACY.

Payment of members by the State was the great question under debate in

the Lower House during much of the time I spent in Melbourne, and, in

spite of all the efforts of the Victorian democracy, the bill was lost.

The objection taken at home, that payment degrades the House in the eyes

of the people, could never arise in a new country, where a practical

nation looks at the salaries as payment for work done, and obstinately

refuses to believe in the work being done without payment in some shape

or other. In these colonies, the reasons in favor of payment are far

stronger than they are in Canada or America, for while their country or

town share equally the difficulties of finding representatives who will

consent to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to Ottawa or

Washington, in the Australias Parliament sits in towns which contain

from one-sixth to one-fourth of the whole population, and under a

non-payment system power is thrown entirely into the hands of Melbourne,

Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Hobarton. Not only do these

cities return none but their own citizens, but the country districts,

often unable to find within their limits men who have the time and money

to make them able to attend throughout the sessions at the capital,

elect the city traders to represent them.

Payment of members was met by a proposition on the part of the leader

of the squatter party in the Upper House to carry it through that

assembly if the Lower House would introduce the principle of personal

representation; but it was objected that under such a system the

Catholics, who form a fifth of the population, might, if they chose,

return a fifth of the members. That they ought to be able to do so never

seemed to strike friend or foe. The Catholics, who had a long turn of

power under the O‘Shaughnessey government, were finally driven out for

appointing none but Irishmen to the police. “I always said this ministry

would go out on the back of a policeman,” was the comment of the

Opposition wit. The present ministry, which is Scotch in tone, was

hoisted into office by a great coalition against the Irish Catholics, of

whom there are only a handful in the House.

The subject of national education, which was before the colony during my

visit, also brought the Catholics prominently forward, for an episcopal

pastoral was read in all their churches threatening to visit

ecclesiastical censure upon Catholic teachers in the common schools, and

upon the parents of the children who attend them. “Godless education” is

as little popular here as it used to be at home, and the Anglican and

Catholic clergymen insist that it is proposed to make their people pay

heavily for an education in which it would be contrary to their

conscience to share; but the laymen seem less distressed than their

pastors. It has been said that the reason why the Catholic bishop

declined to be examined upon the Education Commission was that he was

afraid of this question: “Are you aware that half the Catholic children

in the country are attending schools which you condemn?”

The most singular, perhaps, of the spectacles presented by colonial

politics during my visit was that of the Victorian Upper House going

deliberately into committee to consider its own constitution, with the

view of introducing a bill for its own reform, or to meditate, its

enemies said, upon self-destruction. Whether the blow comes from within

or without, there is every probability that the Upper House will shortly

disappear, and the advice of Milton and Franklin be followed in having

but a single chamber. It is not unlikely that this step will be followed

by the demand of the Victorians to be allowed to choose their own

governor, subject to his approval by the queen, with a view to making it

impossible that needy men should be sent out to suck the colony, as they

sometimes have been in the past. The Australians look upon the liberal

expenditure of a governor as their own liberality, but upon meanness on

his part as a robbery from themselves.

The Victorian have a singular advantage over the American democrats as

being unhampered by a constitution of antiquity and renown.

Constitution-tinkering is here continual; the new society is continually

reshaping its political institutions to keep pace with the latest

developments of the national mind; in America, the party of liberty, at

this moment engaged in remoulding the worn-out constitution in favor of

freedom, dares not even yet proclaim that the national good is its aim,

but keeps to the old watchwords, and professes to be treading in the

footsteps of George Washington.

The tone of Victorian democracy is not American. There is the defiant

way of taking care of themselves and ignoring their neighbors,

characteristic of the founders of English plantations in all parts of

the world; the spirit which prompted the passing, in 1852, of the act

prohibiting the admission to the colony of convicts for three years

after they had received their pardons; but the English race here is not

Latinized as it is in America. If it were, Australian democracy would

not be so “shocking” to the squatters. Democracy, like Mormonism, would

be nothing if found among Frenchmen or people with black faces, but it

is at first sight very terrible, when it smiles on you from between a

pair of rosy Yorkshire cheeks.

The political are not greater than the social differences between

Australia and America. Australian society resembles English middle-class

society; the people have, in matters of literature and religion, tastes

and feelings similar to those which pervade such communities as those of

Birmingham or Manchester. On the other hand, the vices of America are

those of aristocracies; her virtues, those of a landed republic. Shop

and factory are still in the second rank; wheat and corn still the

prevailing powers. In all the Australian colonies land is coming to the

front for the second time under a system of small holdings, except in

Queensland, where it has never ceased to rule, and that under an

oligarchic form of society and government; but it is doubtful whether,

looking to the size of Melbourne, the landed democracy will ever outvote

the townfolk in Victoria.

That men of ability and character are proscribed has been one of the

charges brought against colonial democracy. For my part, I found

gathered in Melbourne, at the University, at the Observatory, at the

Botanical Garden, and at the government offices, men of the highest

scientific attainments, drawn from all parts of the world, and tempted

to Australia by large salaries voted by the democracy. The statesmen of

all the colonies are well worthy of the posts they hold. Mr. Macalister,

in Queensland, and Mr. Martin, at Sydney, are excellent debaters. Mr.

Parkes, whose biography would be the typical history of a successful

colonist, and who has fought his way up from the position of a

Birmingham artisan free-emigrant to that of Colonial Secretary of New

South Wales, is an extremely able writer and deep thinker. The business

powers of the present Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales are

remarkable; and Mr. Higinbotham, the Attorney-General of Victoria,

possesses a fund of experience and a power of foresight which it would

be hard to equal at home. Many of the ministers in all the colonies are

men who have worked themselves up from the ranks, and it is amusing to

notice the affected horror with which their antecedents have been

recalled by those who have brought out a pedigree from the old country.

A government clerk in one of the colonies told me that the three last

ministers at the head of his department had been “so low in the social

scale, that my wife could not visit theirs.”

Class animosity and political feud runs much higher, and drives its

roots far deeper into private life in Victoria than in any other

English-speaking country I have seen. Political men of distinction are

shunned by their opponents in the streets and clubs; and, instead of its

being possible to differ on politics and yet continue friends, as in the

old country, I have seen men in Victoria refuse to sit down to dinner

with a statesman from whose views on land questions they happened to

dissent. A man once warned me solemnly against dining with a quiet grave

old gentleman, on the ground that he was “a most dangerous radical--a

perfect firebrand.”