Treated in this way, it is not strange that the democratic ministers and

members stand much upon their dignity, and colonial Parliaments are in

fact not only as haughty as the parent assembly at Westminster, but

often assert their privileges by the most arbitrary of means. A few

weeks before I arrived in Melbourne, a member of the staff of the

_Argus_ newspaper was given up by the proprietors to soothe the

infuriated Assembly. Having got him, the great question of what to do

with him arose, and he was placed in a vault with a grated window,

originally built for prisoners of the House, but which had been

temporarily made use of as a coal-hole. Such a disturbance was provoked

by the alleged barbarity of this proceeding, that the prisoner was taken

to a capital room up stairs, where he gave dinner-parties every day. His

opponents said the great difficulty was to get rid of him, for he seemed

to be permanently located in the Parliament-house, and that, when they

ordered his liberation, his friends insisted that it should not take

place until he had been carried down to the coal-hole cell which he had

occupied the first day, and there photographed “through the dungeon

bars” as the “martyr of the Assembly.”

Though both Victoria and New South Wales are democratic, there is a

great difference between the two democracies. In New South Wales, I

found not a democratic so much as a mixed country, containing a large

and wealthy class with aristocratic prejudices, but governed by an

intensely democratic majority--a country not unlike the State of

Maryland. On the other hand, the interest which attaches to the

political condition of Victoria is extreme, since it probably presents

an accurate view, “in little,” of the state of society which will exist

in England, after many steps toward social democracy have been taken,

but before the nation as a whole has become completely democratic.

One of the best features of the colonial democracy is its earnestness

in the cause of education. In England it is one of our worst national

peculiarities that, whatever our station, we either are content with

giving children an “education” which is absolutely wanting in any real

training for the mind, or aid to the brain in its development, or else

we give them a schooling which is a mere preparation for the Bar or

Church, for it has always been considered with us that it is a far

greater matter to be a solicitor or a curate than to be wise or happy.

This is, of course, a consequence partly of the energy of the race, and

partly of our aristocratic form of society, which leads every member of

a class to be continually trying to get into the class immediately above

it in wealth or standing. In the colonies, as in the United States, the

democratic form which society has taken has carried with it the

continental habit of thought upon educational matters, so that it would

seem as though the form of society influenced this question much more

than the energy of the race, which is rather heightened than depressed

in these new countries. The English Englishman says, “If I send Dick to

a good school, and scrape up money enough to put him into a profession,

even if he don‘t make much, at least he‘ll be a gentleman.” The

Australian or democratic Englishman says, “Tom must have good schooling,

and must make the most of it; but I‘ll not have him knocking about in

broadcloth, and earning nothing; so no profession for him; but let him

make money like me, and mayhap get a few acres more land.”

Making allowance for the thinness of population in the bush, education

in Victoria is extremely general among the children, and is directed by

local committees with success, although the members of the boards are

often themselves destitute of all knowledge except that which tells them

that education will do their children good. Mr. Geary, an inspector of

schools, told the Commissioners that he had examined one school where

not a single member of the local committee could write; but these

immigrant fathers do their duty honestly toward the children for all

their ignorance, and there is every chance that the schools will grow

and grow until their influence on behalf of freedom becomes as marked in

Victoria as ever it has been in Massachusetts. Education has a great

advantage in countries where political rights are widely extended: in

the colonies, as in America, there is a spirit of political life astir

throughout the country, and newspapers and public meetings continue an

education throughout life which in England ceases at twelve, and gives

place to driving sheep to paddocks, and shouting at rooks in a

wheat-field.

There is nothing in the state of the Victorian schools to show what will

be the type of the next generation, but there are many reasons for

believing that the present disorganization of colonial society will only

cease with the attainment of complete democracy or absolute equality of

conditions, which must be produced by the already completely democratic

institutions in little more than a generation. The squatter class will

disappear as agriculture drives sheep-farming from the field, and, on

the other hand, the town democracy will adopt a tone of manly

independence instead of one of brag and bluster, when education makes

them that which at present they are not--the equals of the wealthy

farmers.

It has been justly pointed out that one of the worst dangers of

democracy is the crushing influence of public opinion upon

individuality, and many who have written upon America have assumed that

the tendency has already manifested itself there. I had during my stay

in the United States arrived at the contrary opinion, and come to

believe that in no country in the world is eccentricity, moral and

religious, so ripe as in America, in no country individuality more

strong; but, ascribing to intermixture of foreign blood this apparently

abnormal departure from the assumed democratic shape of society, I

looked forward to the prospect of seeing the overwhelming force of the

opinion of the majority exhibited in all its hideousness in the

democratic colonies. I was as far from discovering the monster as I had

been in America, for I soon found that, although there may be little

intellectual unrest in Australia, there is marvelous variety of manners.

There is in our colonies no trace of that multiplication of creeds which

characterizes America, and which is said to be everywhere the result of

the abolition of Establishments. In Victoria, eighty per cent. of the

whites belong to either Episcopalians, Catholics, or Presbyterians, and

almost all of the remainder to the well-known English Churches; nothing

is heard of such sects as the hundreds that have sprung up in New

England--Hopkinsians, Universalists, Osgoodites, Rogerenes, Come-Outers,

Non-Resistants, and the like. The Australian democrat likes to pray as

his father prayed before him, and is strongly conservative in his

ecclesiastical affairs. It may be the absence in Australia of

enthusiastic religion which accounts for the want among the country-folk

of the peculiar gentleness of manner which distinguishes the farmer in

America. Climate may have its effect upon the voice; the influence of

the Puritan and Quaker in the early history of the thirteen States, when

manners were moulded and the national life shaped for good or harm, may

have permanently affected the descendants of the early settlers; but

everywhere in America I noticed that the most perfect dignity and

repose of manner was found in districts where the passionate religious

systems had their strongest hold.

There is no trace in the colonies at present of that love for general

ideas which takes America away from England in philosophy, and sets her

with the Latin and Celtic races on the side of France. The tendency is

said to follow on democracy, but it would be better said that democracy

is itself one of these general ideas. Democracy in the colonies is at

present an accident, and nothing more; it rests upon no basis of

reasoning, but upon a fact. The first settlers were active, bustling men

of fairly even rank or wealth, none of whom could brook the leadership

of any other. The only way out of the difficulty was the adoption of the

rule “All of us to be equal, and the majority to govern;” but there is

no conception of the nature of democracy, as the unfortunate Chinese

have long since discovered. The colonial democrats understood

“democracy” as little as the party which takes the name in the United

States; but there is at present no such party in the colonies as the

great Republican party of America.

Democracy cannot always remain an accident in Australia: where once

planted, it never fails to fix its roots; but even in America its growth

has been extremely slow. There is at present in Victoria and New South

Wales a general admission among the men of the existence of equality of

conditions, together with a perpetual rebellion on the part of their

wives to defeat democracy, and to reintroduce the old “colonial court”

society, and resulting class divisions. The consequence of this

distinction is that the women are mostly engaged in elbowing their way;

while among their husbands there is no such thing as the pretending to a

style, a culture, or a wealth that the pretender does not possess, for

the reason that no male colonist admits the possibility of the existence

of a social superior. Like the American “democrat,” the Australian will

admit that there may be any number of grades below him, so long as you

allow that he is at the top; but no republican can be stauncher in the

matter of his own equality with the best.

There is no sign that in Australia any more than in America there will

spring up a center of opposition to the dominant majority; but there is

as little evidence that the majority will even unwittingly abuse its

power. It is the fashion to say that for a State to be intellectually

great and noble there must be within it a nucleus of opposition to the

dominant principles of the time and place, and that the best and noblest

minds, the intellects the most seminal, have invariably belonged to men

who formed part of such a group. It may be doubted whether this assumed

necessity for opposition to the public will is not characteristic of a

terribly imperfect state of society and government. It is chiefly

because the world has never had experience of a national life at once

throbbing with the pulse of the whole people, and completely tolerant

not only in law but in opinion of sentiments the most divergent from the

views of the majority--firm in the pursuit of truths already grasped,

but ready to seize with avidity upon new; gifted with a love of order,

yet ready to fit itself to shifting circumstances--that men continue to

look with complacency upon the enormous waste of intellectual power that

occurs when a germ of truth such as that contained in the doctrines of

the Puritans finds development and acceptance only after centuries have

passed.

Australia will start unclogged by slavery to try this experiment for the

world.

CHAPTER VI.

PROTECTION.

The greatest of all democratic stumbling-blocks is said to be

Protection.

“Encourage native industry!” the colonial shopkeepers write up; “Show

your patriotism, and buy colonial goods!” is painted in huge letters on

a shopfront at Castlemaine. In England, some unscrupulous traders, we

are told, write “From Paris” over their English goods, but such

dishonesty in Victoria takes another shape; there we have “Warranted

colonial made” placed over imported wares, for many will pay a higher

price for a colonial product confessedly not more than equal to the

foreign, such is the rage for Native Industry, and the hatred of the

“Antipodean doctrine of Free Trade.”

Many former colonists who live at home persuade themselves, and

unfortunately persuade also the public in England, that the

Protectionists are weak in the colonies. So far is this from being the

case in either Victoria or New South Wales, that in the former colony I

found that in the Lower House the Free Traders formed but

three-elevenths of the Assembly, and in New South Wales the pastoral

tenants of the crown may be said to stand alone in their support of Free

Trade. Some of the squatters go so far as to declare that none of the

public men of the colonies really believe in the advantages of

Protection, but that they dishonestly accept the principle, and

undertake to act upon it when in office, in order to secure the votes

of an ignorant majority of laborers, who are themselves convinced that

Protection means high wages.

It would seem as though we Free Traders had become nearly as bigoted in

favor of Free Trade as our former opponents were in favor of Protection.

Just as they used to say “We are right; why argue the question?” so now,

in face of the support of Protection by all the greatest minds in

America, all the first statesmen of the Australias, we tell the New

England and the Australian politicians that we will not discuss

Protection with them, because there can be no two minds about it among

men of intelligence and education. We will hear no defense of “national

lunacy,” we say.

If, putting aside our prejudices, we consent to argue with an Australian

or American Protectionist, we find ourselves in difficulties. All the

ordinary arguments against the compelling people by act of Parliament to

consume a dearer or inferior article are admitted as soon as they are

urged. If you attempt to prove that Protection is bolstered up by those

whose private interests it subserves, you are shown the shrewd

Australian diggers and the calculating Western farmers in America--men

whose pocket interest is wholly opposed to Protection, and who yet,

almost to a man, support it. A digger at Ballarat defended Protection to

me in this way: he said he knew that under a protective tariff he had to

pay dearer than would otherwise be the case for his jacket and his

moleskin trowsers, but that he preferred to do this, as by so doing he

aided in building up in the colony such trades as the making up of

clothes, in which his brother and other men physically too weak to be

diggers could gain an honest living. In short, the self-denying

Protection of the Australian diggers is of the character of that which

would be accorded to the glaziers of a town by the citizens, if they

broke their windows to find their fellow-townsmen work: “We know we

lose, but men must live,” they say. At the same time they deny that the

loss will be enduring. The digger tells you that he should not mind a

continuing pocket loss, but that, as a matter of fact, this, which in an

old country would be pocket loss, in a new country such as his only

comes to this--that it forms a check on immigration. Wages being 5_s._ a

day in Victoria and 3_s._ a day in England, workmen would naturally

flock into Victoria from England until wages in Melbourne fell to 3_s._

6_d._ or 4_s._. Here comes in prohibition, and by increasing the cost of

living in Victoria, and cutting into the Australian handicraftsman‘s

margin of luxuries, and reducing his wages to 4_s._, diminishes the

temptation to immigration, and consequently the influx itself.

The Western farmers in America, I have heard, defend Protection upon far

wider grounds: they admit that Free Trade would conduce to the most

rapid possible peopling of their country with foreign immigrants; but

this, they say, is an eminently undesirable conclusion. They prefer to

pay a heavy tax in the increased price of everything they consume, and

in the greater cost of labor, rather than see their country

denationalized by a rush of Irish or Germans, or their political

institutions endangered by a still further increase in the size and

power of New York. One old fellow said to me: “I don‘t want the

Americans in 1900 to be 200 millions, but I want them to be happy.”

The American Protectionists point to the danger that their countrymen

would run unless town kept pace with country population. Settlers would

pour off to the West, and drain the juices of the fertile land by

cropping it year after year without fallow, without manure, and then, as

the land became in a few years exhausted, would have nowhere whither to

turn to find the fertilizers which the soil would need. Were they to

depend upon agriculture alone, they would sweep in a wave across the

land, leaving behind them a worn-out, depopulated, jungle-covered soil,

open to future settlement, when its lands should have recovered their

fertility, by some other and more provident race. The coastlands of most

ancient countries are exhausted, densely bushed, and uninhabited. In

this fact lies the power of our sailor race: crossing the seas, we

occupy the coasts, and step by step work our way into the upper country,

where we should not have attempted to show ourselves had the ancient

population resisted us upon the shores. In India, in Ceylon, we met the

hardy race of the highlands and interior only after we had already fixed

ourselves upon the coast, with a safe basis for our supply. The fate

that these countries have met is that which colonists expect to be their

own, unless the protective system be carried out in its entirety. In

like manner the Americans point to the ruin of Virginia, and if you urge

“slavery,” answer, “slavery is but agriculture.”

Those who speak of the selfishness of the Protectionists as a whole, can

never have taken the trouble to examine into the arguments by which

Protection is supported in Australia and America. In these countries,

Protection is no mere national delusion; it is a system deliberately

adopted with open eyes as one conducive to the country‘s welfare, in

spite of objections known to all, in spite of pocket losses that come

home to all. If it be, as we in England believe, a folly, it is at all

events a sublime one, full of self-sacrifice, illustrative of a certain

nobility in the national heart. The Australian diggers and Western

farmers in America are setting a grand example to the world of

self-sacrifice for a national object; hundreds of thousands of rough men

are content to live--they and their families--upon less than they might

otherwise enjoy, in order that the condition of the mass of their

countrymen may continue raised above that of their brother toilers in

Old England. Their manufactures are beginning now to stand alone, but

hitherto, without Protection, the Americans would have had no cities but

seaports. By picturing to ourselves England dependent upon the City of

London, upon Liverpool, and Hull, and Bristol, we shall see the

necessity the Western men are now under of setting off Pittsburg against

New York and Philadelphia. In short, the tendency, according to the

Western farmers, of Free Trade, in the early stages of a country‘s

existence, is to promote universal centralization, to destroy local

centers and the commerce they create, to so tax the farmer with the cost

of transport to the distant centers, consequent upon the absence of

local markets, that he can grow but wheat and corn continuously, and

cannot but exhaust his soil. With markets so distant, the richest forest

lands are not worth clearing, and a wave of settlement sweeps over the

country, occupying the poorer lands, and then abandoning them once more.

Protection in the colonies and America is to a great degree a revolt

against steam. Steam is making the world all one; steam “corrects”

differences in the price of labor. When steam brings all races into

competition with each other, the cheaper races will extinguish the

dearer, till at last some one people will inhabit the whole earth. Coal

remains the only power, as it will probably always be cheaper to carry

the manufactured goods than to carry the coal.

Time after time I have heard the Western farmers draw imaginary pictures

of the state of America if Free Trade should gain the day, and asking of

what avail it is to say that Free Trade and free circulation of people

is profitable to the pocket, if it destroys the national existence of

America; what good to point out the gain of weight to their purses, in

the face of the destruction of their religion, their language, and their

Saxon institutions.

One of the greatest of the thinkers of America defended Protection to me

on the following grounds: That without Protection, America could at

present have but few and limited manufactures. That a nation cannot

properly be said to exist as such, unless she has manufactures of many

kinds; for men are born, some with a turn to agriculture, some with a

turn to mechanics; and if you force the mechanic by nature to become a

farmer, he will make a bad farmer, and the nation will lose the

advantage of all his power and invention. That the whole of the possible

employments of the human race are in a measure necessary

employments--necessary to the making up of a nation. That every

concession to Free Trade cuts out of all chance of action some of the

faculties of the American national mind, and, so doing, weakens and

debases it. That each and every class of workers is of such importance

to the country, that we must make any sacrifice necessary to maintain

them in full work. “The national mind is manifold,” he said; “and if you

do not keep up every branch of employment in every district, you waste

the national force. If we were to remain a purely agricultural people,

land would fall into fewer and fewer hands, and our people become more

and more brutalized as the years rolled on.”

It must not be supposed that Protection is entirely defended upon these

strange new grounds. “Save us from the pauper-labor of Europe,” is the

most recent as well as the oldest of Protectionist cries. The

Australians and Americans say, that by working women at 1_s._ a day in

the mines in Wales, and by generally degrading all laborers under the

rank of highly-skilled artisans, the British keep wages so low, that, in

spite of the cost of carriage, they can almost invariably undersell the

colonists and Americans in American and Australian markets. This state

of degradation and poverty nothing can force them to introduce into

their own countries, and, on the other hand, they consider the iron

manufacture necessary for the national purpose alluded to before. The

alternative is Protection.

The most unavoidable of all the difficulties of Protection--namely, that

no human government can ever be trusted to adjust protective taxation

without corruption--is no objection to the prohibitions which the

Western Protectionists demand. The New Englanders say--“Let us meet the

English on fair terms;” the Western men say that they will not meet them

at all. Some of the New York Protectionists declare that their object is

merely the fostering of American manufactures until they are able to

stand alone, the United States not having at present reached the point

which had been attained by other nations when they threw Protection to

the winds. Such halting Protectionists as these manufacturers find no

sympathy in Australia or the West, although the highest of all

Protectionists look forward to the distant time when, local centers

being everywhere established, customs will be abolished on all sides,

and mankind form one great family.

The chief thing to be borne in mind in discussing Protection with an

Australian or an American is that he never thinks of denying that under

Protection he pays a higher price for his goods than he would if he

bought them from us, and that he admits at once that he temporarily pays

a tax of 15 or 20 per cent. upon everything he buys in order to help set

his country on the road to national unity and ultimate wealth. Without

Protection, the American tells you, there will be commercial New York,

sugar-growing Louisiana, the corn-growing Northwest, but no America.

Protection alone can give him a united country. When we talk about

things being to the advantage or disadvantage of a country, the American

Protectionist asks what you mean. Admitting that all you say against

Protection may be true, he says that he had sooner see America

supporting a hundred millions independent of the remainder of the world

than two hundred millions dependent for clothes upon the British. “You,

on the other hand,” he says, “would prefer our custom. How can we

discuss the question? The difference between us is radical, and we have

no base on which to build.”

It is a common doctrine in the colonies of England that a nation cannot

be called “independent” if it has to cry out to another for supplies of

necessaries; that true national existence is first attained when the

country becomes capable of supplying to its own citizens those goods

without which they cannot exist in the state of comfort which they have

already reached. Political is apt to follow upon commercial dependency,

they say.

The question of Protection is bound up with the wider one of whether we

are to love our fellow-subjects, our race, or the world at large;

whether we are to pursue our country‘s good at the expense of other

nations? There is a growing belief in England that the noblest

philosophy is to deny the existence of the moral right to benefit

ourselves by harming others; that love of mankind must in time replace

love of race as that has in part replaced narrow patriotism and love of

self. It would seem that our Free Trade system lends itself better to

these wide modern sympathies than does Protection. On the other hand, it

may be argued that, if every State consults the good of its own

citizens, we shall, by the action of all nations, obtain the desired

happiness of the whole world, and that, with rapidity, from the reason

that every country understands its own interests better than it does

those of its neighbor. As a rule, the colonists hold that they should

not protect themselves against the sister-colonies, but only against the

outer world; and while I was in Melbourne an arrangement was made with

respect to the border customs between Victoria and New South Wales; but

this is at present the only step that has been taken toward

intercolonial Free Trade.

It is passing strange that Victoria should be noted for the eagerness

with which her people seek Protection. Possessed of little coal, they

appear to be attempting artificially to create an industry which, owing

to this sad lack of fuel, must languish from the moment that it is let

alone. Sydney coal sells in Melbourne at thirty shillings a ton; at the

pit‘s-mouth at Newcastle, New South Wales, it fetches only seven or

eight shillings. With regard, however, to the making-up of native

produce, the question in the case of Victoria is merely this: Is it

cheaper to carry the wool to the coal, and then the woolen goods back

again, than to carry the coal to the wool? and as long as Victoria can

continue to export wheat, so that the coal-ships may not want freight,

wool manufactures may probably prosper in Victoria.

The Victorians naturally deny that the cost of coal has much to do with

the question. The French manufacturers, they point out, with dearer

coal, but with cheaper labor, have in many branches of trade beaten the

English out of common markets, but then under Protection there is no

chance of cheap labor in Victoria.

Writing for the Englishmen of Old England, it is not necessary for me to

defend Free Trade by any arguments. As far as we in our island are

concerned, it is so manifestly to the pocket interest of almost all of

us, and at the same time, on account of the minuteness of our territory,

so little dangerous politically, that for Britain there can be no danger

of a deliberate relapse into Protection; although we have but little

right to talk about Free Trade so long as we continue our enormous

subsidies to the Cunard liners.

The American argument in favor of Prohibition is in the main, it will be

seen, political, the economical objections being admitted, but

outweighed. Our action in the matter of our postal contracts, as in the

case of the Factory acts, at all events shows that we are not ourselves

invariably averse to distinguish between the political and the

economical aspect of certain questions.

My duty has been to chronicle what is said and thought upon the matter

in our various plantations. One thing at least is clear--that even if

the opinions I have recorded be as ridiculous when applied to Australia

or America as they would be when applied to England, they are not

supported by a selfish clique, but rest upon the generosity and

self-sacrifice of a majority of the population.

CHAPTER VII.

LABOR.

Side by side with the unselfish Protectionism of the diggers there

flourishes among the artisans of the Australias a self-interested desire

for non-intercourse with the outside world.

In America, the working men, themselves almost without exception

immigrants, though powerful in the various States from holding the

balance of parties, have never as yet been able to make their voices

heard in the Federal Congress. In the chief Australian colonies, on the

other hand, the artisans have, more than any other class, the possession

of political power. Throughout the world the grievance of the working

classes lies in the fact that, while trade and profits have increased

enormously within the last few years, true as distinguished from nominal

wages have not risen. It is even doubted whether the American or British

handicraftsman can now live in such comfort as he could make sure of a

few years back: it is certain that agricultural laborers in the south of

England are worse off than they were ten years ago, although the

depreciation of gold prevents us from accurately gauging their true

position. In Victoria and New South Wales, and in the States of

Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri, where the artisans possess some share

of power, they have set about the attempt to remedy by law the grievance

under which they suffer. In the American States, where the suppression

of immigration seems almost impossible, their interference takes the

shape of eight-hour bills, and exclusion of colored laborers. There is

no trades union in America which will admit to membership a Chinaman, or

even a mulatto. In Victoria and New South Wales, however, it is not

difficult quietly to put a check upon the importation of foreign labor.

The vast distance from Europe makes the unaided immigration of artisans

extremely rare, and since the democrats have been in power the funds for

assisted immigration have been withheld, and the Chinese influx all but

forbidden, while manifestoes against the ordinary European immigration

have repeatedly been published at Sydney by the Council of the

Associated Trades.

The Sydney operatives have always taken a leading part in opposition to

immigration, from the time when they founded the Anti-Transportation

Committee up to the present day. In 1847, a natural and proper wish to

prevent the artificial depression of wages was at the bottom of the

anti-transportation movement, although the arguments made use of in the

petition to the Queen were of the most general character, and Sydney

mechanics, many of them free immigrants themselves, say that there is no

difference of principle between the introduction of free or assisted

immigrants and that of convicts.

If we look merely to the temporary results of the policy of the

Australian artisans, we shall find it hard to deny that their acts are

calculated momentarily to increase their material prosperity; so far

they may be selfish, but they are not blind. Admitting that wages depend

on the ratio of capital to population, the Australians assert that, with

them, population increases faster than capital, and that hindering

immigration will restore the balance. Prudential checks on population

are useless, they say, in face of Irish immigration. At the same time,

it is clear that, from the discouragement of immigration and limitation

to eight hours of the daily toil, there results an exceptional scarcity

of labor, which cramps the development of the country, and causes a

depression in trade which must soon diminish the wage-fund, and react

upon the working men. It is unfortunately the fact, that colonial

artisans do not sufficiently bear in mind the distinction between real

and nominal wages, but are easily caught by the show of an extra few

shillings a week, even though the purchasing power of each shilling be

diminished by the change. When looked into, “higher wages” often mean

that the laborer, instead of starving upon ten shillings a week, is for

the future to starve upon twenty.

As regards the future, contrasted with the temporary condition of the

Australian laborer, there is no disguising the fact that mere exclusion

of immigration will not in the long run avail him. It might, of course,

be urged that immigration is, even in America, a small matter by the

side of the natural increase of the people, and that to shut out the

immigrant is but one of many checks to population; but in Australia the

natural increase is not so great as in a young country might be

expected. The men so largely outnumber the women in Australia, that even

early marriages and large families cannot make the birth-rate very high,

and fertile land being at present still to be obtained at first hand,

the new agricultural districts swallow up the natural increase of the

population. Still, important as is immigration at this moment,

ultimately through the influx of women--to which the democrats are not

opposed--or, more slowly, by the effort of nature to restore the balance

of the sexes, the rate of natural increase will become far greater in

Australia. Ultimately, there can be no doubt, if the Australian laborer

continues to retain his present standard of comfort, prudential checks

upon the birth of children will be requisite to maintain the present

ratio of capital to population.

Owing to the comparatively high prices fixed for agricultural land in

the three southeastern colonies of Australia, the abundance of

unoccupied tracts has not hitherto had that influence on wages in

Australia which it appears to have exercised in America, but under the

democratic amendments of the existing free selection system, wages will

probably again rise in the colonies, to be once more reduced by

immigration, or, if the democracy gains the day, more slowly lowered by

the natural increase of the population.

In places where competition has reduced the reward of labor to the

lowest amount consistent with the efficiency of the work, compulsory

restriction of the hours of toil must evidently be an unmixed benefit to

the laborer, until carried to the point at which it destroys the trade

in which he is engaged. In America and Australia, however, where the

laborer has a margin of luxuries which can be cut down, and where the

manufacturers are still to some extent competing with European rivals,

restriction of hours puts them at a disadvantage with the capitalists of

the old world, and, reducing their profits, tend also to diminish the

wage-fund, and ultimately to decrease the wages of their men. The

colonial action in this matter may, nevertheless, like all infringements

of general economic laws, be justified by proof of the existence of a

higher necessity for breaking than for adhering to the rule of freedom.

Our own Factory Acts, we should remember, were undoubtedly calculated to

diminish the production of the country.

Were the American and Australian handicraftsmen to become sufficiently

powerful to combine strict Protection, or prohibition of foreign

intercourse, with reduction of hours of toil, they would ultimately

drive capital out of their countries, and either lower wages, or else

diminish the population by checking both immigration and natural

increase. Here, as in the consideration of Protection, we come to that

bar to all discussion, the question, “What is a nation‘s good?” It is at

least doubtful whether in England we do not attach too great importance

to the continuance of nations in “the progressive state.” Unrestricted

immigration may destroy the literature, the traditions, the nationality

itself of the invaded country, and it is a question whether these ideas

are not worth preserving even at a cost of a few figures in the returns

of imports, exports, and population. A country in which Free Trade

principles have been carried to their utmost logical development must be

cosmopolitan and nationless, and for such a state of things to exist

universally without danger to civilization the world is not yet

prepared.

“Know-nothingism” in America, as what is now styled “native Americanism”

was once called--a form of the protest against the exaggeration of Free

Trade--was founded by handicraftsmen, and will in all probability find

its main support within their ranks whenever the time for its inevitable

resuscitation shall arrive. That there is honest pride of race at the

bottom of the agitation no one can doubt who knows the history of the

earlier Know-nothing movement; but class interest happens to point the

same way as does the instinct of the race. The refusal of political

privileges to immigrants will undoubtedly have some tendency to check

the flow of immigration; at all events, it will check the self-assertion

of the immigrants. That which does this leaves, too, the control of

wages more within the hands of actual laborers, and prevents the

European laborers of the eleventh hour coming in to share the heightened

wages for which the American hands have struck, and suffered misery and

want. No consistent republican can object to the making ten or twenty

years’ residence in the United States the condition for citizenship of

the land.

In the particular case of the Australian colonies, they are happily

separated from Ireland by seas so wide as to have a chance of preserving

a distinct nationality, such as America can scarcely hope for: only 1500

persons have come to New South Wales, unassisted, in the last five

years. The burden of proof lies upon those who propose to destroy the

rising nationality by assisting the importation of a mixed multitude of

negroes, Chinamen, Hill-coolies, Irish, and Germans, in order that the

imports and exports of Victoria and New South Wales may be increased,

and that there may be a larger number of so-called Victorians and New

South Welsh to live in misery.

Owing to the fostering of immigration by the aristocratic government,

the population of Queensland had, in 1866, quadrupled itself since 1860;

but, even were the other colonies inclined to follow the example of

their northern sister, they could not do so with success. New South

Wales and Tasmania might import colonists by the thousand, but they

would be no sooner landed than they would run to Queensland, or sail to

the New Zealand diggings, just as the “Canadian immigrants” flock into

the United States.

That phase of the labor question to which I have last alluded seems to

shape itself into the question, “Shall the laborer always and everywhere

be encouraged or permitted to carry his labor to the best market?” The

Australians answer that they are willing to admit that additional hands

in a new country mean additional wealth, but that there is but little

good in our preaching moral restraint to them if European immigration is

to be encouraged, Chinese allowed. The only effect, they say, that

self-control can have is that of giving such children as they do rear

Chinamen or Irishmen to struggle against instead of brothers. It is

hopeless to expect that the Australian workmen will retain their present

high standard of comfort if an influx of dark-skinned handicraftsmen is

permitted.

Some ten or even fewer years ago, we Free Traders of the Western world,

first then coming to know some little about the kingdoms of the further

East, paused a moment in our daily toil to lift to the skies our hands

in lamentation at the blind exclusiveness which we were told had for

ages past held sway within the council chambers of Pekin. No words were

too strong for our new-found laughing-stock; China became for us what we

are to Parisian journalists--a Bœotia redeemed only by a certain

eccentricity of folly. This vast hive swarming with two hundred million

working bees was said to find its interest in shutting out the world,

punishing alike with death the outgoing and incoming of the people.

“China for the Chinese” was the common war-cry of the rulers and the

ruled; “Self-contained has China been, and prospered; self-contained she

shall continue,” the favorite maxim of their teachers. Nothing could be

conceived nobler than the scorn which mingled with half-doubting

incredulity and with Pharisaic thanking of heaven that we were not as

they, when the blindness of these outer barbarians of “Gog and Magog

land” was drawn for us by skillful pens, and served out to us with all

the comments that self-complacency could suggest. A conversion in the

future was foretold, however; this Chinese infirmity of vision should

not last forever; the day, we were told, must come when Studentships in

Political Economy should be founded in Pekin, and Ricardo take the place

of Cou-fou-chow in Thibetian schools. A conversion has taken place of

late, but not that hoped for; or, if it be a conversion consistent with

the truths of Economic Science, it has taken a strange shape. The wise

men of Canton may be tempted, perhaps, to think that it is we who have

learnt the wisdom of the sages, and been brought back into the fold of

the great master. Chinese immigration is heavily taxed in California;

taxed to the point of prohibition in Victoria; and absolutely forbidden

under heavy penalties in Louisiana and the other ex-rebel States.

The Chinaman is pushing himself to the fore wherever his presence is not

prohibited. We find Chinese helmsmen and quartermasters in the service

of the Messageries and Oriental companies receiving twice the wages paid

to Indian Lascars. We hear of the importation of Chinese laborers into

India for railway and for drainage works. The Chinaman has great

vitality. Of the cheap races the Mongol seems the most pushing, the

likeliest to conquer in the fight. It would almost seem as though we

were wrong in our common scales of preference, far from right in our use

of the terms “superior” and “inferior” races.

A well-taught white man can outreason or can overreach a well-taught

Chinaman or negro. But under some climatic conditions, the negro can

outwork the white man; under almost all conditions, the Chinaman can

outwork him. Where this is the case, is it not the Chinaman or the negro

that should be called the better man? Call him what we may, will he not

prove his superiority by working the Englishman off the soil? In Florida

and Mississippi the black is certainly the better man.

Many Victorians, even those who respect and admire the Chinese, are in

favor of the imposition of a tax upon the yellow immigrants, in order to

prevent the destruction of the rising Australian nationality. They fear

that otherwise they will live to see the English element swamped in the

Asiatic throughout Australia. It is not certain that we may not some day

have to encounter a similar danger in Old England.

It will be seen from the account thus given of the state of the labor

question in Australia, that the colonial handicraftsmen stand toward

those of the world in much the same relative position as that held by

the members of a trade union toward the other workmen of the same trade.

The limitation of immigration there has much the same effects as the

limitation of apprentices in a single trade in England. It is easy to

say that the difference between fellow-countryman and foreigner is

important; that while it is an unfairness to all English workmen that

English hatters should limit apprentices, it is not unfair to English

hatters that Australian hatters should limit their apprentices. For my

own part, I am inclined to think that, fair or unfair--and we have no

international moral rule generally acknowledged to decide the

question--we might at least say to Australia that, while she throws upon

us the chief expenses of her defense, she is hardly in a position to

refuse to aid our emigrants.

Day by day the labor question in its older aspects becomes of less and

less importance. The relationship of master and servant is rapidly dying

the death; co-operative farming and industrial partnerships must

supersede it everywhere at no distant date. In these systems we shall

find the remedy against the decline of trade with which the

English-speaking countries of the earth are threatened.

The existing system of labor is anti-democratic; it is at once

productive of and founded on the existence of an aristocracy of capital

and a servitude of workmen; and our English democracies cannot afford

that half their citizens should be dependent laborers. If manufactures

are to be consistent with democracy, they must be carried on in shops in

which each man shall be at once capitalist and handicraftsman. Such

institutions are already in existence in Massachusetts, in Illinois, in

Pennsylvania, and in Sydney; while at Troy, in New York State, there is

a great iron foundery, owned from roof to floor by the men who work in

it. It is not enough that the workman should share in the profits. The

change which, continuing through the middle ages into the present

century, has at last everywhere converted the relation of lord and slave

into that of master and hireling, is already giving place to the silent

revolution which is steadily substituting for this relationship of

capital and labor that of a perfect marriage, in which the laborer and

the capitalist shall be one.

Under this system there can be no strikes, no petty trickery, no

jealousy, no waste of time. Each man‘s individual interest is coincident

with that of all. Where the labor is that of a brotherhood, the toil

becomes ennobled. Were industrial partnerships a new device, their

inventor would need no monument; his would be found in the future

history of the race. As it is, this latest advance of Western

civilization is but a return to the earliest and noblest form of labor;

the Arabs, the Don Cossacks, the Maori tribes are all co-operative

farmers; it is the mission of the English race to apply the ancient

principle to manufactures.

CHAPTER VIII.

WOMAN.

In one respect, Victoria stands at once sadly behind and strangely in

advance of other democratic countries. Women, or at least some women,

vote at the Lower House elections; but, on the other hand, the legal

position of the sex is almost as inferior to that of man as it is in

England or the East.

At an election held some few years ago, female ratepayers voted

everywhere throughout Victoria. Upon examination, it was found that a

new registration act had directed the rate-books to be used as a basis

for the preparation of the electoral lists, and that women householders

had been legally put on the register, although the intention of the

legislature was not expressed, and the question of female voting had not

been raised during the debates. Another instance, this, of the singular

way in which in truly British countries reforms are brought about by

accident, and, when once become facts, are allowed to stand. There is no

more sign of general adhesion in Australia than in England to the

doctrine which asserts that women, as well as men, being interested in

good government, should have a voice in the selection of that government

to which they are forced to submit themselves.

As far as concerns their social position, women are as badly off in

Australia as in England. Our theory of marriage--which has been tersely

explained thus: “the husband and wife are one, and _the husband is that

one_”--rules as absolutely at the antipodes as it does in Yorkshire. I

was daily forced to remember the men of Kansas and Missouri, and the

widely different view they take of these matters to that of the

Australians. As they used to tell me, they are impatient of seeing their

women ranked with “lunatics and idiots” in the catalogue of

incapacities. They are incapable of seeing that women are much better

represented by their male friends than were the Southern blacks by their

owners or overseers. They believe that the process of election would not

be more purified by female emancipation than would the character of the

Parliaments elected.

The Kansas people often say that if you were told that there existed in

some ideal country two great sections of a race, the members of the one

often gross, often vicious, often given to loud talking, to swearing, to

drinking, spitting, chewing, not infrequently corrupt; those of the

other branch, mild, kind, quiet, pure, devout, with none of the habitual

vices of the first-named sect,--if you were told that one of these

branches was alone to elect rulers and to govern, you would at once say,

“Tell us where this happy country is that basks in the rule of such a

godlike people.” “Stop a minute,” says your informant, “it is the

creatures I described first--the _men_--who rule; the others are only

women, poor silly fools--imperfect men, I assure you; nothing more.”

It is somewhat the fashion to say that the so-called “extravagancies” of

the Kansas folk and other American Western men arise from the

extraordinary position given to their women by the disproportion of the

sexes. Now in all the Australian colonies the men vastly outnumber the

women, yet the disproportion has none of those results which have been

attributed to it by some writers on America. In New South Wales, the

sexes are as 250,000 to 200,000, in Victoria 370,000 to 280,000, in New

Zealand 130,000 to 80,000, in Queensland 60,000 to 40,000, in Tasmania

50,000 to 40,000, in West Australia 14,000 to 8000, 90,000 to 80,000 in

South Australia. In all our Southern colonies together, there are a

million of men to only three-quarters of a million of women; yet with

all this disproportion, which far exceeds that in Western America, not

only have the women failed to acquire any great share of power,

political or social, but they are content to occupy a position not

relatively superior to that held by them at home.

The “Sewing Clubs” of the war-time are at the bottom of a good deal of

the “woman movement” in America. At the time of greatest need, the

ladies of the Northern States formed themselves into associations for

the supply of lint, of linen, and of comforts to the army: the women of

a district would meet together daily in some large room, and sew, and

chat while they were sewing.

The British section of the Teutonic race seems naturally inclined,

through the operation of its old interest-begotten prejudices, to rank

women where Plato placed them in the “Timæus,” along with horses and

draught cattle, or to think of them much as he did when he said that all

the brutes derived their origin from man by a series of successive

degradations, of which the first was from man to woman. There is,

however, one strong reason why the English should, in America, have laid

aside their prejudices upon this point, retaining them in Australia,

where the conditions are not the same. Among farming peoples, whose

women do not work regularly in the field, the woman to whom falls the

household and superior work is better off than she is among

town-dwelling peoples. The Americans are mainly a farming, the

Australians and British mainly a town-dwelling, people. The absence in

all sections of our race of regular woman labor in the field seems to be

a remnant of the high estimation in which women were held by our former

ancestry. In Britain we have, until the last few years, been steadily

retrograding upon this point.

It is a serious question how far the natural prejudice of the English

mind against the labor of what we call “inferior races” will be found to

extend to half the superior race itself. How will English laborers

receive the inevitable competition of women in many of their fields?

Woman is at present starved, if she works at all, and does not rest

content in dependence upon some man, by the terrible lowness of wages in

every employment open to her, and this low rate of wages is itself the

direct result of the fewness of the occupations which society allows

her. Where a man can see a thousand crafts in which he may engage, a

woman will perhaps be permitted to find ten. A hundred times as many

women as there is room for invade each of this small number of

employments. In the Australian labor-field the prospects of women are no

better than they are in Europe, and during my residence in Melbourne the

Council of the Associated Trades passed a resolution to the effect that

nothing could justify the employment of women in any kind of productive

labor.

CHAPTER IX.

VICTORIAN PORTS.

All allowance being made for the great number of wide roads for trade,

there is still a singular absence of traffic in the Melbourne streets.

Trade may be said to be transacted only upon paper in the city, while

the tallow, grain, and wool, which form the basis of Australian

commerce, do not pass through Melbourne, but skirt it, and go by railway

to Williamstown, Sandridge, and Geelong.

Geelong, once expected to rival Melbourne, and become the first port of

all Australia, I found grass-grown and half deserted, with but one

vessel lying at her wharf. At Williamstown a great fleet of first-class

ships was moored alongside the pier. When the gold-find at Ballarat took

place, Geelong rose fast as the digging port, but her citizens chose to

complete the railway line to Melbourne instead of first opening that to

Ballarat, and so lost all the up-country trade. Melbourne, having once

obtained the lead, soon managed to control the legislature, and grants

were made for the Echuca Railroad, which tapped the Murray, and brought

the trade of Upper Queensland and New South Wales down to Melbourne, in

the interest of the ports of Williamstown and Sandridge. Not content

with ruining Geelong, the Melbourne men have set themselves to ridicule

it. One of their stories goes that the Geelong streets bear such a fine

crop of grass, that a free selector has applied to have them surveyed

and sold to him, under the 42d clause of the New Land Act. Another

story tells how a Geelongee lately died, and went to heaven. Peter,

opening the door to his knock, asked, “Where from?” “Geelong.” “Where?”

said Peter. “Geelong.” “There‘s no such place,” replied the Apostle. “In

Victoria,” cried the colonist. “Fetch Ham‘s Australian Atlas,” called

Peter; and when the map was brought and the spot shown to him, he

replied, “Well, I beg your pardon, but I really never had any one here

from that place before.”

If Geelong be standing still, which in a colony is the same as rapid

decline would be with us, the famed wheat country around it seems as

inexhaustible as it ever was. The whole of the Barrabool range, from

Ceres to Mount Moriac, is one great golden waving sheet, save where it

is broken by the stunted claret-vineyards. Here and there I came upon a

group of the little daughters of the German vine-dressers, tending and

trenching the plants, with the round eyes, rosy cheeks, and shiny

pigtails of their native Rudesheim all flourishing beneath the Southern

Cross.

The colonial vines are excellent; better, indeed, than the growths of

California, which, however, they resemble in general character. The

wines are naturally all Burgundies, and colonial imitations of claret,

port, and sherry are detestable, and the hocks but little better. The

Albury hermitage is a better wine than can be bought in Europe at its

price, but in some places this wine is sold as Murray Burgundy, while

the dealers foist horrible stuff upon you under the name of hermitage.

Of the wines of New South Wales, White Dallwood is a fair Sauterne, and

White Cawarra a good Chablis, while for sweet wines the Chasselas is

singularly cheap; and the Tokay, the Shiraz, and the still Muscat are

remarkable.

Northwest of Geelong, upon the summit of the foot-hills of the dividing

range, lies Ballarat, the headquarters of deep quartz mining, and now no

longer a diggers’ camp, but a graceful city, full of shady boulevards

and noble buildings, and with a stationary population of thirty

thousand. My first visit was made in the company of the prime ministers

of all the colonies, who were at Melbourne nominally for a conference,

but really to enjoy a holiday and the International Exhibition. With

that extraordinary generosity in the spending of other people‘s money

which distinguishes colonial cabinets, the Victorian government placed

special trains, horses, carriages, and hotels at our disposal, the

result of which was that, fêted everywhere, we saw nothing, and I had to

return to Ballarat in order even to go through the mines.

In visiting Lake Learmouth and Clunes, and the mining district on each

side of Ballarat, I found myself able to discover the date of settlement

by the names of places, as one finds the age of a London suburb by the

titles of its terraces. The dates run in a wave across the country. St.

Arnaud is a town between Ballarat and Castlemaine, and Alma lies near to

it, while Balaklava Hill is near Ballarat, where also are Raglan and

Sebastopol. Inkerman lies close to Castlemaine, and Mount Cathcart bears

the name of the general killed at the Two Gun battery, while the

Malakhoff diggings, discovered doubtless toward the end of the war, lie

to the northward, in the Wimmera.

Everywhere I found the interior far hotter than the coast, but free from

the sudden changes of temperature that occur in Melbourne twice or

thrice a week throughout the summer, and are dangerous to children and

to persons of weak health. After two or three days of the hot wind, then

comes a night, breathless, heavy, still. In the morning the sun rises,

once more fierce and red. After such a night and dawn, I have seen the

shade thermometer in the cool verandas of the Melbourne Club standing at

95° before ten o‘clock, when suddenly the sun and sky would change from

red and brown to gold and blue, and a merry breeze, dancing up from the

ice-packs of the South Pole and across the Antarctic seas, would lower

the temperature in an hour to 60° or 65°. After a few days of cold and

rain, a quiet English morning would be cut in half about eleven by a

sudden slamming of doors and whirling of dust from the north across the

town, while darkness came upon the streets. Then was heard the cry of

“Shut the windows; here‘s a hot wind,” and down would go every window,

barred and bolted, while the oldest colonists walked out to enjoy the

dry air and healthy heat. The thick walls of the clubs and private

houses will keep out the heat for about three days, but if, as sometimes

happens, the hot wind lasts longer, then the walls are heated through,

and the nights are hardly to be borne. Up country the settlers know

nothing of these changes. The regular irregularity is peculiar to the

Melbourne summer.

CHAPTER X.

TASMANIA.

After the parching heat of Australia, a visit to Tasmania was a grateful

change. Steaming along Port Dalrymple and up the Tamar in the soft

sunlight of an English afternoon, we were able to look upward, and enjoy

the charming views of wood and river, instead of having to stand with

downcast head, as in the blaze of the Victorian sun.

The beauty of the Tamar is of a quiet kind: its scenery like that of the

non-Alpine districts of the west coast of New Zealand, but softer and

more habitable than is that of even the least rude portions of these

islands. To one fresh from the baked Australian plains, there is

likeness between any green and humid land and the last unparched country

that he may have seen. Still, New Zealand cannot show fresher cheeks nor

homes more cosy than those of the Tamar valley. Somersetshire cannot

surpass the orchards of Tasmania, nor Devon match its flowers.

The natural resemblance of _Maria_ Van Dieman‘s Land (as Tasman called

it after his betrothed) to England seems to have struck the early

settlers. In sailing up the Tamar, we had on one bank the County of

Dorset, with its villages touchingly named after those at home,

according to their situations, from its Lulworth Cove, Corfe Castle, and

St. Alban‘s Head, round to Abbotsbury, and, on our right hand, Devon,

with its Sidmouth, Exeter, and Torquay.

Hurrying through Launceston--a pretty little town, of which the banks

and post-office are models of simple architecture--I passed at once

across the island southward to Hobarton, the capital. The scenery on the

great convict road is not impressive. The Tasmanian Mountains--detached

and rugged masses of basaltic rock, from four to five thousand feet in

height--are wanting in grandeur when seen from a distance, with a

foreground of flat corn-land. It is disheartening, too, in an English

colony, to see half the houses shut up and deserted, and acre upon acre

of old wheat-land abandoned to mimosa scrub. The people in these older

portions of the island have worked their lands to death, and even guano

seems but to galvanize them into a momentary life. Since leaving

Virginia, I had seen no such melancholy sight.

Nature is bountiful enough: in the world there is not a fairer climate;

the gum-trees grow to 350 feet, attesting the richness of the soil; and

the giant tree-ferns are never injured by heat, as in Australia, nor by

cold, as in New Zealand. All the fruits of Europe are in season at the

same time, and the Christmas dessert at Hobarton often consists of five

and twenty distinct fresh fruits. Even more than Britain, Tasmania may

be said to present on a small area an epitome of the globe: mountain and

plain, forest and rolling prairie land, rivers and grand capes, and the

noblest harbor in the world, all are contained in a country the size of

Ireland. It is unhappily not only in this sense that Tasmania is the

Ireland of the South.

Beautiful as is the view of Hobarton from Mount Wellington,--the spurs

in the foreground clothed with a crimson carpet by a heathlike plant;

the city nestled under the basaltic columns of the crags,--even here it

is difficult to avoid a certain gloom when the eye, sweeping over the

vast expanse of Storm Bay and D‘Entrecasteaux Sound, discovers only

three great ships in a harbor fitted to contain the navies of the world.

The scene first of the horrible deeds of early convict days at Macquarie

Harbor and Port Arthur, and later of the still more frightful massacres

of the aboriginal inhabitants of the isle, Van Dieman‘s Land has never

been a name of happy omen, and now the island, in changing its title,

seems not to have escaped from the former blight. The poetry of the

English village names met with throughout Tasmania vanishes before the

recollection of the circumstances under which the harsher native terms

came to be supplanted. Fifty years ago, our colonists found in Tasmania

a powerful and numerous though degraded native race. At this moment,

three old women and a lad who dwell on Gun-carriage Rock, in Bass‘s

Straits, are all who remain of the aboriginal population of the island.

We live in an age of mild humanity, we are often told, but, whatever the

polish of manner and of minds in the old country, in outlying portions

of the empire there is no lack of the old savagery of our race. Battues

of the natives were conducted by the military in Tasmania not more than

twenty years ago, and are not unknown even now among the Queensland

settlers. Let it not be thought that Englishmen go out to murder natives

unprovoked; they have that provocation for which even the Spaniards in

Mexico used to wait, which the Brazilians wait for now--the provocation

of robberies committed in the neighborhood by natives unknown. It is not

that there is no offense to punish, it is that the punishment is

indiscriminate, that even when it falls upon the guilty it visits men

who know no better. Where one wretched untaught native pilfers from a

sheep-station, on the Queensland Downs, a dozen will be shot by the

settlers, “as an example,” and the remainder of the tribe brought back

to the district to be fed and kept, until whisky, rum, and other devils’

missionaries have done their work.

Nothing will persuade the rougher class of Queensland settlers that the

“black-fellow” and his “jin” are human. They tell you freely that they

look upon the native Australian as an ingenious kind of monkey, and that

it is not for us to talk too much of the treatment of the “jins,” or

native women, while the “wrens” of the Curragh exist among ourselves. No

great distance appears to separate us from the days when the Spaniards

in the West Indies used to brand on the face and arms all the natives

they could catch, and gamble them away for wine.

Though not more than three or four million acres out of seventeen

million acres of land in Tasmania have as yet been alienated by the

crown, the population has increased only by 15,000 in the last ten

years. Such is the indolence of the settlers, that vast tracts of land

in the central plain, once fertile under irrigation, have been allowed

to fall back into a desert state from sheer neglect of the dams and

conduits. Though iron and coal are abundant, they are seldom if ever

worked, and one house in every thirty-two in the whole island is

licensed for the sale of spirits, of which the annual consumption

exceeds five gallons a head for every man, woman, and child in the

population. Tasmania reached her maximum of revenue in 1858, and her

maximum of trade in 1853.

[Illustration: GOVERNOR DAVEY‘S PROCLAMATION.--P. 86.]

The curse of the country is the indolence of its lotus-eating

population, who, like all dwellers in climates cool but winterless, are

content to dream away their lives in drowsiness to which the habits

of a hotter but less equable clime--Queensland, for example--are energy

itself. In addition, however, to this natural cause of decline, Van

Dieman‘s Land is not yet free from all traces of the convict blood, nor

from the evil effects of reliance on forced labor. It is, indeed, but a

few years since the island was one great jail, and in 1853 there were

still 20,000 actual convicts in the island. The old free settlers will

tell you that the deadly shade of slave labor has not blighted Jamaica

more thoroughly than that of convict labor has Van Dieman‘s Land.

Seventy miles northwest of Hobarton is a sheet of water called Macquarie

Harbor, the deeds wrought upon the shores of which are not to be

forgotten in a decade. In 1823, there were 228 prisoners at Macquarie

Harbor, to whom, in the year, 229 floggings and 9925 lashes were

ordered, 9100 lashes being actually inflicted. The cat was, by order of

the authorities, soaked in salt water and dried in the sun before being

used. There was at Macquarie Harbor one convict overseer who took a

delight in seeing his companions punished. A day seldom passed without

five or six being flogged on his reports. The convicts were at his

mercy. In a space of five years, during which the prisoners at Macquarie

Harbor averaged 250 in number, there were 835 floggings and 32,723

lashes administered. In the same five years, 112 convicts absconded from

this settlement, of whom 10 were killed and eaten by their companions,

75 perished in the bush with or without cannibalism, two were captured

with portions of human flesh in their possession, and died in hospital,

two were shot, 16 were hanged for murder and cannibalism, and seven are

reported to have made good their escape, though this is by no means

certain.

It has been stated by a Catholic missionary bishop in his evidence

before a Royal Commission, that when, after a meeting at one of the

stations, he read out to his men the names of thirty-one condemned to

death, they with one accord fell upon their knees, and solemnly thanked

God that they were to be delivered from that horrible place. Men were

known to commit murder that they might be sent away for trial,

preferring death to Macquarie Harbor.

The escapes were often made with the deliberate expectation of death,

the men perfectly knowing that they would have to draw lots for which

should be killed and eaten. Nothing has ever been sworn to in the

history of the world which, for revolting atrocity, can compare with the

conduct of the Pierce-Greenhill party during their attempted escape. The

testimony of Pierce is a revelation of the depths of degradation to

which man can descend. The most fearful thought, when we hear of these

Tasmanian horrors, is that probably many of those subjected to them were

originally guiltless. If only one in a thousand was an innocent man,

four human beings were consigned each year to hell on earth. We think,

too, that the age of transportation for mere political offenses has long

gone by, yet it is but eleven or twelve years since Mr. Frost received

his pardon, after serving for sixteen years amid the horrors of Port

Arthur.

Tasmania has never been able to rid herself of the convict population in

any great degree, for the free colonies have always kept a jealous watch

upon her emigrants. Even at the time of the great gold-rush to Victoria,

almost every “Tasmanian bolter” and many a suspected but innocent man

was seized upon his landing, and thrown into Pentridge Jail, to toil

within its twenty-foot walls till death should come to his relief. Even

now, men of wealth and station in Victoria are sometimes discovered to

have been “bolters” in the digging times, and are at the mercy of their

neighbors and the police, unless the governor can be wheedled into

granting pardons for their former deeds. A wealthy Victorian was

arrested as a “Tasmanian bolter” while I was in the colony.

The passport system is still in force in the free colonies with regard

to passengers arriving from penal settlements, and there is a penalty of

£100 inflicted upon captains of ships bringing convicts into Melbourne.

The conditional pardons granted to prisoners in West Australia and in

Tasmania generally contain words permitting the convict to visit any

portion of the world except the British Isles, but the clause is a mere

dead letter, for none of our free colonies will receive even our

pardoned convicts.

It is hard to quarrel with the course the colonies have taken in this

matter, for to them the transportation system appears in the light of

moral vitriol-throwing; still, there is a wide distinction to be drawn

between the action of the New South Welsh and that of the New Yorkers,

when they declared to a British government of the last century, that

nothing should induce them to accept the labor of “white English

slaves:” the Sydney people have enjoyed the advantages of the system

they now blame. Even the Victorians and South Australians, who have

never had convicts in their land, can be met by argument. The Australian

colonies, it might be urged, were planted for the sole purpose of

affording a suitable soil for the reception of British criminals: in

face of this fact, the remonstrances of the free colonists read somewhat

oddly, for it would seem as though men who quitted, with open eyes,

Great Britain to make their home in the spots which their government

had chosen as its giant prisons have little right to pretend to rouse

themselves on a sudden, and cry out that England is pouring the scum of

her soil on to a free land, and that they must rise and defend

themselves against the grievous wrong. Weighing, however, calmly the

good and evil, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the Victorians have

much reason to object to a system which sends to another country a man

who is too bad for his own, just as Jersey rogues are transported to

Southampton. The Victorian proposition of selecting the most ruffianly

of the colonial expirees, and shipping them to England in exchange for

the convicts that we might send to Australia, was but a plagiarism on

the conduct of the Virginians in a similar case, who quietly began to

freight a ship with snakes.

The only cure for Tasmania, unless one is to be found in the mere lapse

of years, lies in annexation to Victoria; a measure strongly wished for

by a considerable party in each of the colonies concerned. No two

countries in the world are more manifestly destined by nature to be

complementary to each other.

Owing to the small size of the country, and the great moral influence of

the landed gentry, Tasmanian politics are singularly peaceful. For the

Lower House elections the suffrage rests upon a household, not a manhood

basis, as in Victoria and New South Wales; and for the Upper House it is

placed at £500 in any property, or £50 a year in freehold land.

Tasmanian society is cast in a more aristocratic shape than is that of

Queensland, with this exception the most oligarchical of all our

colonies; but even here, as in the other colonies and the United States,

the ballot is supported by the Conservatives. Unlike what generally

happens in America, the vote in the great majority of cases is here

kept secret, bribery is unknown, and, the public “nomination” of

candidates having been abolished, elections pass off in perfect quiet.

In the course of a dozen conversations in Tasmania, I met with one man

who attacked the ballot. He was the first person, aristocrat or

democrat, conservative or liberal, male or female, silly or wise, by

whom I had found the ballot opposed since I left home.

The method in which the ballot is conducted is simple enough. The

returning officer sits in an outer room, beyond which is an inner

chamber with only one door, but with a desk. The voter gives his name to

the returning officer, and receives a white ticket bearing his number on

the register. On the ticket the names of the candidates are printed

alphabetically, and the voter, taking the paper into the other room,

makes a cross opposite to the name of each candidate for whom he votes,

and then brings the paper folded to the returning officer, who puts it

in the box. In New South Wales and Victoria, he runs his pen through all

the names excepting those for which he wishes to vote, and himself

deposits the ticket in the box, the returning officer watching him, to

see that he does not carry out his ticket to show it to his bribers, and

then send it in again by a man on his own side. One scrutineer for each

candidate watches the opening of the box. In New South Wales, the voting

papers, after having been sealed up, are kept for five years, in order

to allow of the verification of the number of votes said to have been

cast; but in Tasmania they are destroyed immediately after the

declaration of the poll.

Escaping from the capital and its Lilliputian politics, I sailed up the

Derwent to New Norfolk. The river reminds the traveler sometimes of the

Meuse, but oftener of the Dart, and unites the beauties of both

streams. The scenery is exquisitely set in a framework of hops; for not

only are all the flats covered with luxuriant bines, but the hills

between which you survey the views have also each its “garden,” the

bines being trained upon a wire trellis.

A lovely ride was that from New Norfolk to the Panshanger salmon-ponds,

where the acclimatization of the English fish has lately been attempted.

The track, now cut along the river cliff, now lost in the mimosa scrub,

offers a succession of prospects, each more lovely than the one before

it; and that from the ponds themselves is a repetition of the view along

the vale of the Towy, from Steele‘s house near Caermarthen. Trout of a

foot long, and salmon of an inch, rewarded us (in the spirit) for our

ride, but we were called on to express our belief in the statement, that

salmon “returned from the sea” have lately been seen in the river.

Father ----, the Catholic parish priest, “that saw ’em,” is the hero of

the day, and his past experiences upon the Shannon are quoted as

testimonies to his infallibility in fish questions. My hosts of New

Norfolk had their fears lest the reverend gentleman should be lynched,

if it were finally proved that he had been mistaken.

The salmon madness will at least have two results: the catalogue of

indigenous birds will be reduced to a blank sheet, for every wretched

Tasmanian bird that never saw a salmon egg in all its life is shot down

and nailed to a post for fear it should eat the ova; and the British

wasp will be acclimatized in the southern hemisphere. One is known to

have arrived in the last box of ova, and to have survived with apparent

cheerfulness his one hundred days in ice. Happy fellow, to cross the

line in so cool a fashion!

The chief drawbacks to Tasmanian picnics and excursions are the snakes,

which are as numerous throughout the island as they are round Sydney.

One of the convicts in a letter home once wrote: “Parrots is as thick as

crows, and snakes is very bad, fourteen to sixteen feet long;” but in

sober truth the snakes are chiefly small.

The wonderful “snake stories” that in the colonial papers take the place

of the English “triple birth” and “gigantic gooseberry” are all written

in vacation time by the students at Melbourne University, but a true one

that I heard in Hobarton is too good to be lost. The chief justice of

the island, who, in his leisure time, is an amateur naturalist, and

collects specimens for European collections in his walks, told me that

it was his practice, after killing a snake, to carry it into Hobarton

tied to a stick by a double lashing. A few days before my visit, on

entering his hall, where an hour before he had hung his stick with a

rare snake in readiness for the government naturalist, he found to his

horror that the viper had been only scotched, and that he had made use

of his regained life to free himself from the string which confined his

head and neck. He was still tied by the tail, so he was swinging to and

fro, or “squirming around,” as some Americans would say, with open mouth

and protruded tongue. When lassoing with a piece of twine had been tried

in vain, my friend fetched a gun, and succeeded in killing the snake and

much damaging the stone-work of his vestibule.

After a week‘s sojourn in the neighborhood of Hobarton I again crossed

the island, but this time by a night of piercing moonlight such as can

be witnessed only in the dry air of the far south. High in the heavens,

and opposite the moon, was the solemn constellation of the Southern

Cross, sharply relieved upon the pitchy background of the Magellanic

clouds, while the weird-tinted stars which vary the night-sky of the

southern hemisphere stood out from the blue firmament elsewhere. The

next day I was again in Melbourne.

CHAPTER XI.

CONFEDERATION.

Melbourne is unusually gay, for at a shapely palace in the center of the

city the second great Intercolonial Exhibition is being held, and, as

its last days are drawing to their close, fifty thousand people--a great

number for the colonies--visit the building every week. There are

exhibitors from each of our seven southern colonies, and from French New

Caledonia, Netherlandish India, and the Mauritius. It is strange to

remember now that in the colonization both of New Zealand and of

Australia, we were the successful rivals of the French only after having

been behind them in awakening to the advisability of an occupation of

these countries. In the case of New Zealand, the French fleet was

anticipated there several times by the forethought and decision of our

naval officers on the station; and in the case of Australia, the whole

south coast was actually named “La Terre Napoléon,” and surveyed for

colonization by Captain Baudin in 1800. New Caledonia, on the other

hand, was named and occupied by ourselves, and afterward abandoned to

the French.

The present remarkable exhibition of the products of the Australias,

coming just at the time when the border customs between Victoria and New

South Wales have been abolished by agreement, and when all seems to

point to the formation of a customs union between the colonies, leads

men to look still further forward, and to expect confederation. It is

worthy of notice at this conjuncture that the Australian Protectionists,

as a rule, refuse to be protected against their immediate neighbors,

just as those of America protect the manufactures of the Union rather

than of single States. They tell us that they can point, with regard to

Europe, to pauper labor, but that they have no case as against the

sister colonies; they wish, they say, to obtain a wide market for the

sale of the produce of each colony; the nationality they would create is

to be Australian, not provincial.

Already there is postal union, and a partial customs union, and

confederation itself, however distant in fact, has been very lately

brought about in the spirit by the efforts of the London press, one

well-known paper having three times in a single article called the

governor of New South Wales by the sounding title of “Governor-General

of the Australasian colonies,” to which he has, of course, not the

faintest claim.

There are many difficulties in the way of confederation. The leading

merchants and squatters of Victoria are in favor of it; but not so those

of the poorer or less populous colonies, where there is much fear of

being swamped. The costliness of the federal government of New Zealand

is a warning against over-hasty confederation. Victoria, too, would

probably insist upon the exclusion of West Australia, on account of her

convict population. The continental theory is undreamt of by

Australians, owing to their having always been inhabitants of

comparatively small States, and not, like dwellers in the organized

territories of America, potentially citizens of a vast and homogeneous

empire.

The choice of capital will, here as in Canada, be a matter of peculiar

difficulty. It is to be hoped by all lovers of freedom that some

hitherto unknown village will be selected. There is in all great cities

a strong tendency to Imperialism. Bad pavement, much noise, narrow

lanes, blockaded streets, all these things are ill dealt with by free

government, we are told. Englishmen who have been in Paris, Americans

who know St. Petersburg, forgetting that without the Emperor the Préfet

is impossible, cry out that London, that New York, in their turn need a

Haussman. In this tendency lies a terrible danger to free States--a

danger avoided, however, or greatly lessened, by the seat of the

legislature being placed, as in Canada and the United States, far away

from the great cities. Were Melbourne to become the seat of government,

nothing could prevent the distant colonies from increasing the already

gigantic power of that city by choosing her merchants as their

representatives.

The bearing of confederation upon Imperial interests is a more simple

matter. Although union will tend to the earlier independence of the

colonies, yet, if federated, they are more likely to be a valuable ally

than they could be if remaining so many separate countries. They would

also be a stronger enemy; but distance will make all their wars naval,

and a strong fleet would be more valuable to us as a friend than

dangerous as an enemy, unless in the case of a coalition against us, in

which it would probably not be the interest of Australia to join.

From the colonial point of view, federation would tend to secure to the

Australians better general and local government than they possess at

present. It is absurd to expect that colonial governors should be upon

good terms with their charges when we shift men every four years--say

from Demerara to New South Wales, or from Jamaica to Victoria. The

unhappy governor loses half a year in moving to his post, and a couple

of years in coming to understand the circumstances of his new province,

and then settles down to be successful in the ruling of educated whites

under democratic institutions only if he can entirely throw aside the

whole of his experience, derived as it will probably have been from the

despotic sway over blacks. We never can have a set of colonial governors

fit for Australia until the Australian governments are made a separate

service, and entirely separated from the West Indies, Africa, and Hong

Kong.

Besides improving the government, confederation would lend to every

colonist the dignity derived from citizenship of a great country--a

point the importance of which will not be contested by any one who has

been in America since the war.

It is not easy to resist the conclusion that confederation is in every

way desirable. If it leads to independence, we must say to the

Australians what Houmai ta Whiti said in his great speech to the

progenitors of the Maori race when they were quitting Hawaiki: “Depart,

and dwell in peace; let there be no quarreling among you, but build up a

great people.”

CHAPTER XII.

ADELAIDE.

The capital of South Australia is reputed the hottest of all the cities

that are chiefly inhabited by the English race, and as I neared it

through the Backstairs Passage into the Gulf of St. Vincent, past

Kangaroo Island, and still more upon landing at Glenelg, I came to the

conclusion that its reputation was deserved. The extreme heat which

characterizes South Australia is to some extent a consequence of its

lying as far north as New South Wales and Queensland, and so far inland

as to escape the breeze by which their coasts are visited; for although

by “South Australia” we should, in the southern hemisphere, naturally

understand that portion of Australia which was farthest from the

tropics, yet it is a curious fact that the whole colony of Victoria lies

to the south of Adelaide, that neither of the great southern peninsulas

of Australia are in, but that nearly all the northernmost points of the

continent now lie within, the country misnamed “South Australia.”

The immense northern territory, being supposed to be valueless, has

generously been made a present of to South Australia, which thus becomes

the largest British colony, and nearly as large as British Hindostan. If

the great expenditure which is going on succeeds in causing the

discovery of any good land at the north, it will of course at once be

made into a separate colony. The only important result that seems

likely to follow from this annexation to South Australia of the northern

territory is that schoolboys’ geography will suffer; indeed, I should

say that a total destruction of all principle in the next generation

would be the inevitable result of so rude a blow to confidence in books

and masters as the assurance from a teacher‘s lips that the two most

remote countries of Australia from each other are united under one

colonial government, and that the northernmost points of the whole

continent are situated in South Australia. Boys will probably conclude

that across the line south becomes north and north south, and that in

Australia the sun rises in the west.

Instead of gold, wheat, sheep, as in Victoria, the staples here are

wheat, sheep, copper, and my introduction to South Australia was

characteristic of the colony, for I found in Port Adelaide, where I

first set foot, not only every store filled to overflowing, but piles of

wheat-sacks in the roadways, and lines of wheat-cars on the sidings of

railways, without even a tarpaulin to cover the grain.

Of all the mysteries of commerce, those that concern the wheat and flour

trade are, perhaps, the strangest to the uninitiated. Breadstuffs are

still sent from California and Chili to Victoria, yet from Adelaide,

close at hand, wheat is being sent to England and flour to New York!

There can be no doubt that ultimately Victoria and Tasmania will at

least succeed in feeding themselves. It is probable that neither New

Zealand nor Queensland will find it to their interest to do the like.

Wool-growing in the former and cotton and wool in the latter will

continue to pay better than wheat in the greater portion of their lands.

Their granary, and that possibly of the City of Sydney itself, will be

found in South Australia, especially if land capable of carrying wheat

be discovered to the westward of the settlements about Adelaide. That

the Australias, Chili, California, Oregon, and other Pacific States can

ever export largely of wheat to Europe is now more than doubtful. If

manufactures spring up on this side the world, these countries, whatever

their fertility, will have at least enough to do to feed themselves.

As I entered the streets of the “farinaceous village,” as Adelaide is

called by conceited Victorians, I was struck with the amount of

character they exhibit both in the way of buildings, of faces, and of

dress. The South Australians have far more idea of adapting their houses

and clothes to their climate than have the people of the other colonies,

and their faces adapt themselves. The verandas to the shops are

sufficiently contiguous to form a perfect piazza; the people rise early,

and water the sidewalk in front of their houses; and you never meet a

man who does not make some sacrifice to the heat, in the shape of

puggree, silk coat, or sun-helmet; but the women are nearly as unwise

here as in the other colonies, and persist in going about in shawls and

colored dresses. Might they but see a few of the Richmond or Baltimore

ladies in their pure white muslin frocks, and die of envy, for the dress

most convenient in a hot dry climate is also the most beautiful under

its bright sun.

The German element is strong in South Australia, and there are whole

villages in the wheat-country where English is never spoken; for here,

as in America, there has been no mingling of the races, and the whole

divergence from the British types is traceable to climatic influences,

and especially dry heat. The men born here are thin, and fine-featured,

somewhat like the Pitcairn Islanders, while the women are all

alike--small, pretty, and bright, but with a burnt-up look. The haggard

eye might, perhaps, be ascribed to the dreaded presence of my old friend

of the Rocky Mountains, the brulot sand-fly.

The inhabitants of all hot dry countries speak from the head, and not

the chest, and the English in Australia are acquiring this habit; you

seldom find a “cornstalk” who speaks well from the chest.

The air is crisp and hot--crisper and hotter even than that of

Melbourne. The shaded thermometer upon the Victorian coast seldom

reaches 110°, but in the town of Adelaide 117° has been recorded by the

government astronomer. Such is the figure of the Australian continent

that Adelaide, although a seaport town, lies far up as it were inland.

Catching the heated gales from three of the cardinal points, Adelaide

has a summer six months long, and is exposed to a fearful continuance of

hot winds; nevertheless, 105° at Adelaide is easier borne than 95° in

the shade at Sydney.

Nothing can be prettier than the outskirts of the capital. In laying out

Adelaide, its founders have reserved a park about a quarter of a mile in

width all round the city. This gives a charming drive nine miles long,

outside which again are the olive-yards and villas of the citizens.

Hedges of the yellow cactus, or of the graceful Kangaroo Island acacia,

bound the gardens, and the pomegranate, magnolia, fig, and aloe grow

upon every lawn. Five miles to the eastward are the cool wooded hills of

the Mount Lofty Range, on the tops of which are grown the English fruits

for which the plains afford no shade or moisture.

Crossing the Adelaide plains, for fifty miles by railway, to Kapunda, I

beheld one great wheat-field without a break. The country was finer than

any stretch of equal extent in California or Victoria, and looked as

though the crops were “standing”--which in one sense they were, though

the grain was long since “in.” The fact is that they use the Ridley

machines, by which the ears are thrashed out without any cutting of the

straw, which continues to stand, and which is finally plowed in at the

farmer‘s leisure, except in the neighborhood of Adelaide. There would be

a golden age of partridge-shooting in Old England did the climate and

the price of straw allow of the adoption of the Ridley reaper. Under

this system, South Australia grows on the average six times as much

wheat as she can use, whereas, if reaping had to be paid for, she could

only grow from one and a half to twice as much as would meet the home

demand.

In this country, as in America, “bad farming” is found to pay, for with

cheap land, the Ridley reaper, and good markets, light crops without

labor, save the peasant-proprietor‘s own toil, pay well when heavy crops

obtained by the use of hired labor would not reimburse the capitalist.

The amount of land under cultivation has been trebled in the last seven

years, and half a million acres are now under wheat. South Australia has

this year produced seven times as much grain as she can consume, and

twelve acres are under wheat for every adult male of the population of

the colony.

A committee has been lately sitting in New South Wales “to consider the

state of the colony.” To judge from the evidence taken before it, the

members seemed to have conceived that their task was to inquire why

South Australia prospered above New South Wales. Frugality of the

people, especially of the Germans, and fertility of the soil were the

reasons which they gave for the result, but it is impossible not to see

that the success of South Australia is but another instance of the

triumph of small proprietors, of whom there are now some seven or eight

thousand in the colony, and these were brought here by the adoption of

the Wakefield land system.

In the early days of the colony, land was sold at a good price in

130-acre sections, with one acre of townland to each agricultural

section. Now, under rules made at home, but confirmed after the

introduction of self-government, land is sold by auction, with a

reserved price of £1 an acre, but when once a block has passed the

hammer, it can forever be taken up at £1 the acre without further

competition. The Land Fund is kept separate from the other revenue, and

a few permanent charges, such as that for the aborigines, being paid out

of it, the remainder is divided into three portions, of which two are

destined for public works, and one for immigration.

There is a marvelous contrast to be drawn between the success which has

attended the Wakefield system in South Australia and the total failure,

in the neighboring colony of West Australia, of the old system, under

which vast tracts of land being alienated for small prices to the crown,

there remains no fund for introducing that abundant supply of labor

without which the land is useless.

Adelaide is so distant from Europe that no immigrants come of

themselves, and, in the assisted importation of both men and women, the

relative proportions of English, Scotch, and Irish that exist at home

are carefully preserved, by which simple precaution the colony is saved

from an organic change of type, such as that which threatens all

America, although it would, of course, be idle to deny that the

restriction is aimed against the Irish.

The greatest difficulty of young countries lies in the want of women:

not only is this a bar to the natural increase of population; it is a

deficiency preventive of permanency, destructive of religion; where

woman is not there can be no home, no country.

How to obtain a supply of marriageable girls is a question which Canada,

Tasmania, South Australia, New South Wales, have each in their turn

attempted to solve by the artificial introduction of Irish work-house

girls. The difficulty apparently got rid of, we begin to find that it is

not so much as fairly seen; we have yet to look it squarely in the face.

The point of the matter is that we should find not girls, but honest

girls,--not women merely, but women fit to bear families in a free

State.

One of the colonial superintendents, writing of a lately-received batch

of Irish work-house girls, has said that, if these are the

“well-conducted girls, he should be anxious to see a few of the

evil-disposed.” While in South Australia, I read the details of the

landing of a similar party of women from Limerick work-house one Sunday

afternoon at Point Levi, the Lambeth of Quebec. Although supplied by the

city authorities with meat and drink, and ordered to leave for Montreal

at early morning, nothing could be more abominable than their conduct in

the mean while. They sold baggage, bonnets, combs, cloaks, and scarfs,

keeping on nothing but their crinolines and senseless finery. With the

pence they thus collected they bought corn-whisky, and in a few hours

were yelling, fighting, swearing, wallowing in beastly drunkenness; and

by the time the authorities came down to pack them off by train, they

were as fiends, mad with rum and wisky. At five in the morning, they

reached the Catholic Home at Montreal, where the pious nuns were

shocked and horrified at their grossness of conduct and lewd speech;

nothing should force them, they declared, ever again to take into their

peaceable asylum the Irish work-house girls. This was no exceptional

case: the reports from South Australia, from Tasmania, can show as bad;

and in Canada such conduct on the part of the freshly-landed girls is

common. A Tasmanian magistrate has stated in evidence before a

Parliamentary Committee that once when his wife was in ill health he

went to one of the immigration offices, and applied for a decent woman

to attend on a sick lady. The woman was duly sent down, and found next

day in her room lying on the bed in a state best pictured in her own

words: “Here I am with my yard of clay, blowing a cloud, you say.”

It is evident that a batch of thoroughly bad girls cost a colony from

first to last, in the way of prisons, hospitals, and public morals, ten

times as much as the free passages across the seas of an equal number of

worthy Irish women, free from the work-house taint. Of one of these

gangs which landed in Quebec not many years ago, it has been asserted by

the immigration superintendents that the traces are visible to this day,

for wherever the women went, “sin, and shame, and death were in their

track.” The Irish unions have no desire in the matter beyond that of

getting rid of their most abandoned girls; their interests and those of

the colonies they supply are diametrically opposed. No inspection, no

agreements, no supervision can be effective in the face of facts like

these. The class that the unions can afford to send, Canada and Tasmania

cannot afford to keep. Women are sent out with babies in their arms; no

one will take them into service because the children are in the way, and

in a few weeks they fall chargeable on one of the colonial benevolent

societies, to be kept till the children grow up or the mothers die. Even

when the girls are not so wholly vicious as to be useless in service,

they are utterly ignorant of everything they ought to know. Of neither

domestic nor farm-work have they a grain of knowledge. Of thirteen who

were lately sent to an up-country town, but one knew how to cook, or

wash, or milk, or iron, while three of them had agreed to refuse

employment unless they were engaged to serve together. The agents are at

their wits’ ends; either the girls are so notoriously infamous in their

ways of life that no one will hire them, or else they are so extravagant

in their new-found “independence” that they on their side will not be

hired. Meanwhile the Irish authorities lay every evil upon the long sea

voyage. They say that they select the best of girls, but a few days at

sea suffice to demoralize them.

The colonies could not do better than combine for the establishment of a

new and more efficient emigration agency in Ireland. To avoid the evil,

by as far as possible refusing to meet it face to face at all, South

Australia has put restrictions on her Irish immigration; for here as in

America it is found that the Scotch and Germans are the best of

immigrants. The Scotch are not more successful in Adelaide than

everywhere in the known world. Half the most prominent among the

statesmen of the Canadian Confederation, of Victoria, and of Queensland,

are born Scots, and all the great merchants of India are of the same

nation. Whether it be that the Scotch emigrants are for the most part

men of better education than those of other nations, of whose citizens

only the poorest and most ignorant are known to emigrate, or whether the

Scotchman owes his uniform success in every climate to his perseverance

or his shrewdness, the fact remains, that wherever abroad you come

across a Scotchman, you invariably find him prosperous and respected.

The Scotch emigrant is a man who leaves Scotland because he wishes to

rise faster and higher than he can at home, whereas the emigrant

Irishman quits Galway or County Cork only because there is no longer

food or shelter for him there. The Scotchman crosses the seas in

calculating contentment; the Irishman in sorrow and despair.

At the Burra Burra and Kapunda copper-mines there is not much to see, so

my last days in South Australia were given to the politics of the

colony, which present one singular feature. For the elections to the

Council or Upper House, for which the franchise is a freehold worth £50

or a leasehold of £20 a year, the whole country forms but a single

district, and the majority elect their men. In a country where party

feeling runs high, such a system, were it possible, would evidently

unite almost all the evils conceivable in a plan of representation, but

in a peaceful colony it undoubtedly works well. Having absolute power in

their hands, the majority here, as in the selection of a governor for an

American State, use their position with great prudence, and make choice

of the best men that the country can produce. The franchise for the

Lower House, for the elections to which the colony is “districted,” is

the simple one of six months’ residence, which with the ballot works

irreproachably.

The day that I left Adelaide was also that upon which Captain Cadell,

the opener of the Murray to trade, sailed with his naval expedition to

fix upon a capital for the Northern territory; that coast of tropical

Australia which faces the Moluccas. As Governor Gilpin had pressed me to

stay, he pressed me to go with him, making as an inducement a promise to

name after me either “a city” or a headland. He said he should advise

me to select the headland, because that would remain, whereas the city

probably would not. When I pleaded that he had no authority to carry

passengers, he offered to take me as his surgeon. Hitherto the

expeditions have discovered nothing but natives, mangroves, alligators,

and sea-slugs, and the whole of the money received from capitalists at

home, for 300,000 acres of land to be surveyed and handed over to them

in North Australia, being now exhausted, the government are seriously

thinking of reimbursing the investors and giving up the search for land.

It would be as cheap to colonize equatorial Africa from Adelaide, as

tropical Australia. If the Northern territory is ever to be rendered

habitable, it must be by Queensland that the work is done.

It is not certain that North Australia may not be found to yield gold in

plenty. In a little known manuscript of the seventeenth century, the

northwest of Australia is called “The land of gold;” and we are told

that the fishermen of Solor, driven on to this land of gold by stress of

weather, picked up in a few hours their boat full of gold nuggets, and

returned in safety. They never dared repeat their voyage, on account of

their dread of the unknown seas; but Manoel Godinho de Eredia was

commissioned by the Portuguese Lord Admiral of India to explore this

gold land, and enrich the crown of Portugal by the capture of the

treasures it contained. It would be strange enough if gold came to be

discovered on the northwest coast, in the spot from which the Portuguese

reported their discovery.

By dawn, after one of the most stifling of Australian nights, I left

Port Adelaide for King George‘s Sound. A long narrow belt of a clear

red-yellow light lay glowing along the horizon to the east, portending

heat and drought; elsewhere the skies were of a deep blue-black. As we

steamed past Kangaroo Island, and through Investigator Straits, the sun

shot up from the tawny plains, and the hot wind from the northern

desert, rising on a sudden after the stillness of the night, whirled

clouds of sand over the surface of the bay.

CHAPTER XIII.

TRANSPORTATION.

After five days’ steady steaming across the great Australian bight,

north of which lies the true “Terra Australia incognita,” I reached King

George‘s Sound--“Le Port du Roi Georges en Australie,” as I saw it

written on a letter in the jail. At the shore end of a great land-locked

harbor, the little houses of bright white stone that make up the town of

Albany peep out from among geranium-covered rocks. The climate, unlike

that of the greater portion of Australia is damp and tropical, and the

dense scrub is a mass of flowering bushes, with bright blue and scarlet

blooms and curiously-cut leaves.

The contrast between the scenery and the people of West Australia is

great indeed. The aboriginal inhabitants of Albany were represented by a

tribe of filthy natives--tall, half starved, their heads bedaubed with

red ochre, and their faces smeared with yellow clay; the “colonists” by

a gang of fiend-faced convicts working in chains upon the esplanade,

and a group of scowling expirees hunting a monkey with bull-dogs on the

pier, while the native women, half clothed in tattered kangaroo-skins,

came slouching past with an aspect of defiant wretchedness. Work is

never done in West Australia unless under the compulsion of the lash,

for a similar degradation of labor is produced by the use of convicts as

by that of slaves.

Settled at an earlier date than was South Australia, West Australia,

then called Swan River, although one of the oldest of the colonies, was

so soon ruined by the free gift to the first settlers of vast

territories useless without labor, that in 1849 she petitioned to be

made a penal settlement, and though at the instance of Victoria

transportation to the Australias has now all but ceased, Freemantle

Prison is still the most considerable convict establishment we possess

across the seas.

At the time of my visit there were 10,000 convicts or emancipists within

the “colony,” of whom 1500 were in prison, 1500 in private service on

tickets-of-leave, while 1500 had served out their time, and over 5000

had been released upon conditional pardons: 600 of the convicts had

arrived from England in 1865. Out of a total population, free and

convict, of 20,000, the offenders in the year had numbered nearly 3500,

or more than one-sixth of the people, counting women and children.

If twenty years of convict labor seem to have done but little for the

settlement, they have at least enabled us to draw the moral, that

transportation and free emigration cannot exist side by side: the one

element must overbear and destroy the other. In Western Australia, the

convicts and their keepers form two-thirds of the whole population, and

the district is a great English prison, not a colony, and exports but a

little wool, a little sandal-wood, and a little cotton.

Western Australia is as unpopular with the convicts as with free

settlers: fifty or sixty convicts have successfully escaped from the

settlement within the last few years. From twenty to thirty escapes take

place annually, but the men are usually recaptured within a month or

two, although sheltered by the people, the vast majority of whom are

ticket-of-leave men or ex-convicts. Absconders receive a hundred lashes

and one year in the chain-gang, yet from sixty to seventy unsuccessful

attempts at escape are reported every year.

On the road between Albany and Hamilton I saw a man at work in ponderous

irons. The sun was striking down on him in a way that none can fancy who

have no experience of Western Australia or Bengal, and his labor was of

the heaviest; now he had to prise up huge rocks with a crow-bar, now to

handle pick and shovel, now to use the rammer, under the eye of an armed

warder, who idled in the shade by the roadside. This was an

“escape-man,” thus treated with a view to cause him to cease his

continual endeavors to get away from Albany. No wonder that the

“chain-gang” system is a failure, and the number both of attempts and

actual escapes heavier under it than before the introduction of this

tremendous punishment.

Many of the “escapes” are made with no other view than to obtain a

momentary change of scene. On the last return trip of the ship in which

I sailed from Adelaide to King George‘s Sound, a convict coal-man was

found built up in the coal-heap on deck: he and his mates at Albany had

drawn lots to settle which of them should be thus packed off by the help

of the others “for a change.” Of ultimate escape there could be no

chance; the coal on deck could not fail to be exhausted within a day or

two after leaving port, and this they knew. When he emerged, black, half

smothered, and nearly starved, from his hiding-place, he allowed himself

to be quietly ironed, and so kept till the ship reached Adelaide, when

he was given up to the authorities, and sent back to Albany for

punishment. Acts of this class are common enough to have received a

name. The offenders are called “bolters for a change.”