Greater Britain

The exact economical position that Victoria occupies is easily ascertained, for her statistics are the most perfect in the world; the arrangement is a piece of exquisite mosaic. The brilliant statistician who fills the post of registrar-general to the colony, had the immense advantage of starting clear of all tradition, unhampered and unclogged; and, as the governments of the other colonies have of the last few years taken Victoria for model, a gradual approach is being made to uniformity of system. It was not too soon, for British colonial statistics are apt to be confusing. I have seen a list of imposts, in which one class consisted of ale, aniseed, arsenic, assafœtida, and astronomical instruments; boots, bullion, and salt butter; capers, cards, caraway seed; gauze, gin, glue, and gloves; maps and manure; philosophical instruments and salt pork; sandal-wood, sarsaparilla, and smoked sausages. Alphabetical arrangement has charms for the official mind.

Statistics are generally considered dull enough, but the statistics of these young countries are figure-poems. Tables that in England contrast jute with hemp, or this man with that man, here compare the profits of manufactures with those of agriculture, or pit against each other, the powers of race and race.

Victoria is the only country in existence which possesses a statistical history from its earliest birth; but, after all, even Victoria falls short of Minnesota, where the settlers founded the “State Historical Society” a week before the foundation of the State.

Gold, wheat, sheep, are the three great staples of Victoria, and have each its party, political and commercial – diggers, agricultural settlers, and squatters – though of late the diggers and the landed democracy have made common cause against the squatters. Gold can now be studied best at Ballarat, and wheat at Clunes, or upon the Barrabool hills behind Geelong; but I started first for Echuca, the headquarters of the squatter interest, and metropolis of sheep, taking upon my way Kyneton, one of the richest agricultural districts of the colony, and also the once famous gold diggings of Bendigo Creek.

Between Melbourne and Kyneton, where I made my first halt, the railway runs through undulating lightly-timbered tracks, free from underwood, and well grassed. By letting my eyes persuade me that the burnt-up herbage was a ripening crop of wheat or oats, I found a likeness to the views in the weald of Sussex, though the foliage of the gums, or eucalypti, is thinner than that of the English oaks.

Riding from Kyneton to Carlsruhe, Pastoria, and the foot hills of the “Dividing Range,” I found the agricultural community busily engaged upon the harvest, and much excited upon the great thistle question. Women and tiny children were working in the fields, while the men were at Kyneton, trying in vain to hire the harvest hands from Melbourne at less than £2 10s. or £3 a week and board. The thistle question was not less serious; the “thistle inspectors,” elected under the “Thistle Prevention Act,” had commenced their labors, and although each man agreed with his friend that his neighbor‘s thistles were a nuisance, still he did not like being fined for not weeding out his own. The fault, they say, lies in the climate; it is too good, and the English seeds have thriven. Great as was the talk of thistles, the fields in the fertile Kyneton district were as clean as in a well-kept English farm, and showed the clearest signs of the small farmer‘s personal care.

Every one of the agricultural villages in Australia that I visited was a full-grown municipality. The colonial English, freed from the checks which are put by interested landlords to local government in Britain, have passed in all the settlements laws under which any village must be raised into a municipality on fifty of the villagers (the number varies in the different colonies) signing a requisition, unless within a given time a larger number sign a petition to the contrary effect.

After a short visit to the bustling digging town of Castlemaine, I pushed on by train to Sandhurst, a town of great pretensions, which occupies the site of the former digging camp at Bendigo. On a level part of the line between the two great towns, my train dashed through some closed gates, happily without hurt. The Melbourne Argus of the next day said that the crash had been the result of the signalman taking the fancy that the trains should wait on him, not he upon the trains, so he had “closed the gates, hoisted the danger signal, and adjourned to a neighboring store to drink.” On my return from Echuca, I could not find that he had been dismissed.

When hands are scarce, and lives valuable not to the possessor only, but to the whole community, care to avoid accidents might be expected; but there is a certain recklessness in all young countries, and not even in Kansas is it more observable than in Victoria and New South Wales.

Sandhurst, like Castlemaine, straggles over hill and dale for many miles, the diggers following the gold-leads, and building a suburb by each alluvial mine, rather than draw their supplies from the central spot. The extent of the worked-out gold field struck me as greater than the fields round Placerville, but then in California many of the old diggings are hidden by the vines.

In Sandhurst I could find none of the magnificent restaurants of Virginia City; none of the gambling saloons of Hokitika; and the only approach to gayety among the diggers was made in a drinking-hall, where some dozen red-shirted, bearded men were dancing by turns with four well-behaved and quiet-looking German girls, who were paid, the constable at the gate informed me, by the proprietor of the booth. My hotel – “The Shamrock” – kept by New York Irish, was a thoroughly American house; but, then, digger civilization is everywhere American – a fact owing, no doubt, to the American element having been predominant in the first-discovered diggings – those of California.

Digger revolts must have been feared when the Sandhurst Government Reserve was surrounded with a ditch strangely like a moat, and palings that bear an ominous resemblance to a Maori pah. In the morning I found my way through the obstructions, and discovered the police station, and in it the resident magistrate, to whom I had a letter. He knew nothing of “Gumption Dick,” Hank Monk‘s friend, but he introduced me to his intelligent Chinese clerk, and told me many things about the yellow diggers. The bad feeling between the English diggers and the Chinese has not in the least died out. Upon the worked-out fields of Castlemaine and Sandhurst, the latter have things their own way, and I saw hundreds of them washing quietly and quickly in the old Bendigo Creek, finding an ample living in the leavings of the whites. So successful have they been that a few Europeans have lately been taking to their plan, and an old Frenchman who died here lately, and who, from his working persistently in worn-out fields, had always been thought to be a harmless idiot, left behind him a fortune of twenty thousand pounds, obtained by washing in company with the Chinese.

The spirit that called into existence the Ballarat anti-Chinese mobs is not extinct in Queensland, as I found during my stay at Sydney. At the Crocodile Creek diggings in Northern Queensland, whither many of the Chinese from New South Wales have lately gone, terrible riots occurred the week after I landed in Australia. The English diggers announced their intention of “rolling up” the Chinese, and proceeded to “jump their claims” – that is, trespass on the mining plots, for in Queensland the Chinese have felt themselves strong enough to purchase claims. The Chinese bore the robbery for some days, but at last a digger who had sold them a claim for £50 one morning, hammered the pegs into the soft ground the same day, and then jumped the claim on the pretense that it was not “pegged out.” This was too much for the Chinese owner, who tomahawked the digger on the spot. The English at once fired the Chinese town, and even attacked the English driver of a coach for conveying Chinamen on his vehicle. Some diggers in North Queensland are said to have kept bloodhounds for the purpose of hunting Chinamen for sport, as the rowdies of the old country hunt cats with terriers.

On the older gold fields, such as those of Sandhurst and Castlemaine, the hatred of the English for the Chinese lies dormant, but it is not the less strong for being free from physical violence. The woman in a baker‘s shop near Sandhurst, into which I went to buy a roll for lunch, shuddered when she told me of one or two recent marriages between Irish “Biddies” and some of the wealthiest Chinese.

The man against whom all this hatred and suspicion is directed is no ill-conducted rogue or villain. The chief of the police at Sandhurst tells me that the Chinese are “the best of citizens;” a member of the Victorian Parliament, resident in the very edge of their quarter at Geelong, spoke of the yellow men to me as “well-behaved and frugal;” the registrar-general told me that there is less crime, great or small, among the Chinese, than among any equal number of English in the colony.

The Chinese are not denied civil rights in Victoria, as they have been in California. Their testimony is accepted in the courts against that of whites; they may become naturalized, and then can vote. Some twenty or thirty of them, out of 30,000, have been naturalized in Victoria up to the present time.

That the Chinese in Australia look upon their stay in the gold fields as merely temporary is clear from the character of their restaurants, which are singularly inferior to those of San Francisco. The best in the colonies is one near Castlemaine, but even this is small and poor. Shark‘s fin is an unheard-of luxury, and even puppy you would have to order. “Silk-worms fried in castor oil” is the colonial idea of a Chinese delicacy; yet the famous sea-slug is an inhabitant of Queensland waters, and the Gulf of Carpentaria.

From Sandhurst northward, the country, known as Elysium Flats, becomes level, and is wooded in patches, like the “oak-opening” prairies of Wisconsin and Illinois. When within fifty miles of Echuca, the line comes out of the forest on to a vast prairie, across which I saw a marvelous mirage of water and trees on various step-like levels. From the other window of the compartment carriage (sadly hot and airless after the American cars), I saw the thin dry yellow grass on fire for a dozen miles. The smoke from these “bush-fires” sometimes extends for hundreds of miles to sea. In steaming down from Sydney to Wilson‘s Promontory on my way to Melbourne, we passed through a column of smoke about a mile in width when off Wolongong, near Botany Bay, and never lost sight of it, as it lay in a dense brown mass upon the sea, until we rounded Cape Howe, two hundred miles farther to the southward.

The fires on these great plains are caused by the dropping of fusees by travelers as they ride along smoking their pipes Australian fashion, or else by spreading of the fires from their camps. The most ingenious stories are invented by the colonists to prevent us from throwing doubt upon their carefulness, and I was told at Echuca that the late fires had been caused by the concentration of the sun‘s rays upon spots of grass owing to the accidental conversion into burning-glasses of beer-bottles that had been suffered to lie about. Whatever their cause, the fires, in conjunction with the heat, have made agricultural settlement upon the Murray a lottery. The week before my visit, some ripe oats at Echuca had been cut down to stubble by the hot wind, and farmers are said to count upon the success of only one harvest in every three seasons. On the other hand, the Victorian apricots, shriveled by the hot wind, are so many lumps of crystallized nectar when you pierce their thick outer coats.

Defying the sun, I started off to the banks of the Murray River, not without some regret at the absence of the continuous street verandas which in Melbourne form a first step toward the Italian piazza. One may be deceived by trifles when the character of an unknown region is at stake. Before reaching the country, I had read, “Steam-packet Hotel, Esplanade, Echuca;” and, though experiences on the Ohio had taught me to put no trust in “packets,” yet I had somehow come to the belief that the Murray must be a second Missouri at least, if not an Upper Mississippi. The “Esplanade” I found to be a myth, and the “fleet” of “steam-packets” were drawn up in a long line upon the mud, there being in this summer weather no water in which they could float. The Murray in February is a streamless ditch, which in America, if known and named at all, would rank as a tenth-rate river.

The St. Lawrence is 2200 miles in length, and its tributary, the Ottawa, 1000 miles in length, itself receives a tributary stream, the Gatineau, with a course of 420 miles. At 217 miles from its confluence with the Ottawa the Gatineau is still 1000 feet in width. At Albury, which even in winter is the head of navigation on the Murray, you are only some 600 or 700 miles by river from the open sea, or about the same distance as from Memphis in Tennessee to the mouth of the Mississippi.

During six months of the year, however, the Murray is for wool-carrying purposes an important river. The railway to Echuca has tapped the river system in the Victorians’ favor, and Melbourne has become the port of the back country of New South Wales, and even Queensland. “The Riverina is commercially annexed” to Victoria, said the premier of New South Wales while I was in that colony, and the “Riverina” means that portion of New South Wales which lies between the Lachlan, the Murrumbidgee, and the Murray, to the northward of Echuca.

Returning to the inn to escape the sun, I took up the Riverina Herald, published at Echuca; of its twenty-four columns, nineteen and a half are occupied by the eternal sheep in one shape or another. A representation of Jason‘s fleece stands at the head of the title; “wool” is the first word in the first line of the body of the paper. More than half of the advertisements are those of wool brokers, or else of the fortunate possessors of specifics that will cure the scab. One disinfectant compound is certified to by no less than seventeen inspectors; another is puffed by a notice informing flock-masters that, in cases of foot-rot, the advertiser goes upon the principle of “no cure, no pay.” One firm makes “liberal advances on the ensuing clip;” another is prepared to do the like upon “pastoral securities.” Sheep-chandlers, regardless of associations, advertise in one line their bread and foot-rot ointment, their biscuit and sheep-wash solution; and the last of the advertisements upon the front page is that of an “agent for the sale of fat.” The body of the paper contains complaints against the judges at a recent show of wool, and an account of the raising of a sawyer “120 feet in length and 33 feet in girth” by the new “snag-boat” working to clear out the river for the floating down of the next wool clip. Whole columns of small type are filled with “impounding” lists, containing brief descriptions of all the strayed cattle of each district. The technicalities of the distinctive marks are surprising. Who not to the manner born can make much of this: “Blue and white cow, cock horns, 22 off-rump, IL off-ribs?” or of this: “Strawberry stag, top off off-ear, J. C. over 4 off-rump, like H. G. conjoined near loin and rump?” This, again, is difficult: “Swallow tail, off-ear, [backwards-D] and illegible over F off-ribs, PT off-rump.” What is a “blue strawberry bull?” is a question which occurred to me. Again, what a phenomenon is this: “White cow, writing capital A off-shoulder?” A paragraph relates the burning of “£10,000 worth of country near Gambier,” and advertisements of Colt‘s revolvers and quack medicines complete the sheet. The paper shows that for the most part the colonists here, as in New Zealand, have had the wisdom to adopt the poetic native names of places, and even to use them for towns, streets, and ships. Of the Panama liners, the Rahaia and Maitoura bear the names of rivers, the Rechiné and the Kaikoura, names of mountain ranges; and the colonial boats have for the most part familiar Maori or Australian names; for instance, Rangitoto, “hill of hills,” and Rangitiri, “great and good.” The New Zealand colonists are better off than the Australian in this respect: Wongawonga, Yarrayarra, and Wooloomooloo are not inviting; and some of the Australian villages have still stranger names. Nindooinbah is a station in southern Queensland; Yallack-a-yallack, Borongorong, Bunduramongee, Jabbarabbara, Thuroroolong, Yalla-y-poora, Yanac-a-Yanac, Wuid Kerruick, Woolongu-woong-wrinan, Woori Yalloak, and Borhoneyghurk, are stations in Victoria. The only leader in the Herald is on the meat question, but there is in a letter an account of the Christmas festivities at Melbourne, which contains much merry-making at the expense of “unacclimatized new chums,” as fresh comers to the colonies are called. The writer speaks rapturously of the rush on Christmas-day from the hot, dry, dusty streets to the “golden fields of waving corn.” The “exposed nature of the Royal Park” prevented many excursionists from picnicking there, as they had intended; but we read on, and find that the exposure dreaded was not to cold, but to the terrible hot wind which swept from the plains of the northwest, and scorched up every blade of grass, every green thing, in the open spots. We hear of Christmas dinners eaten upon the grass at Richmond, in the sheltered shade of the gum-forest, but in the botanical gardens the “plants had been much affected by the trying heat.” However, “the weather on boxing-day was somewhat more favorable for open-air enjoyment,” as the thermometer was only 98° in the shade.

Will ever New Zealand or Australian bard spring up to write of the pale primroses that in September commence to peep out from under the melting snows, and to make men look forward to the blazing heat and the long December days? Strangely enough, the only English poem which an Australian lad can read without laughing at the old country conceit that connects frosts with January, and hot weather with July, is Thomson‘s “Seasons,” for in its long descriptions of the changes in England from spring to summer, from autumn to winter, a month is only once named: “rosy-footed May” cannot be said to “steal blushing on” in Australia, where May answers to our November.

In the afternoon, I ventured out again, and strolled into the gum-forest on the banks of the Campaspe River, not believing the reports of the ferocity of the Victorian bunyips and alligators which have lately scared the squatters who dwelt on creeks. The black trees, relieved upon a ground of white dust and yellow grass, were not inviting, and the scorching heat soon taught me to hate the shadeless boughs and ragged bark of the inevitable gum. It had not rained for nine weeks at the time of my visit, and the thermometer (in the wind) reached 116° in the shade, but there was nothing oppressive in the heat; it seemed only to dry up the juices of the frame, and dazzle you with intense brightness. I soon came to agree with a newly-landed Irish gardener, who told a friend of mine that Australia was a strange country, for he could not see that the thermometer had “the slightest effect upon the heat.” The blaze is healthy, and fevers are unknown in the Riverina, decay of noxious matter, animal or vegetable, being arrested during summer by the drought. This is a hot year, for on the 12th of January the thermometer, even at the Melbourne Observatory, registered 108° in the shade, and 123° in the shade was registered at Wentworth, near the confluence of the Murray and the Darling.

As the afternoon drew on, and, if not the heat, at least the sun declined, the bell-birds ceased their tuneful chiming, and the forest was vocal only with the ceaseless chirp of the tree-cricket, whose note recalled the goatsucker of our English woods. The Australian landscapes show best by the red light of the hot weather sunsets, when the dark feathery foliage of the gum-trees comes out in exquisite relief upon the fiery fogs that form the sky, and the yellow earth gaining a tawny hue in the lurid glare, throws off a light resembling that which in winter is reflected from our English snows. At sunset there was a calm, but, as I turned to walk homeward, the hot wind sprang up, and died again, while the trees sighed themselves uneasily to sleep, as though fearful of to-morrow‘s blast.

A night of heavy heat was followed by a breathless dawn, and the scorching sun returned in all its redness to burn up once more the earth, not cooled from the glare of yesterday. Englishmen must be bribed by enormous gains before they will work with continuous toil in such a climate, however healthy.

CHAPTER IV.

SQUATTER ARISTOCRACY

“WHAT is a Colonial Conservative?” is a question that used to be daily put to a Victorian friend of mine when he was in London. His answer, he told me, was always, “A statesman who has got four of the ‘points’ of the People‘s Charter, and wants to conserve them,” but as used in Victoria, the term “Conservative” expresses the feeling less of a political party than of the whole of the people who have anything whatever to lose. Those who have something object to giving a share in the government to those who have nothing; those who have much, object to political equality with those who have less; and, not content with having won a tremendous victory in basing the Upper House upon a £5000 qualification and £100 freehold or £300 leasehold franchise, the plutocracy are meditating attacks upon the Legislative Assembly.

The democracy hold out undauntedly, refusing all monetary tests, though an intelligence basis for the franchise is by no means out of favor, except with the few who cannot read or write. One day, when I was driving from Melbourne to Sandridge, in company with a colonial merchant, he asked our car-driver: “Now, tell me fairly: do you think these rogues of fellows that hang about the shore here ought to have votes?” “No, I don‘t.” “Ah, you‘d like to see a 5s. fee on registration, wouldn‘t you?” The answer was sharp enough in its tone. “Five shillings would be nothing to you; it would be something to me, and it would be more than my brother could pay. What I‘d have done would be to say that those who couldn‘t read shouldn‘t vote, that‘s all. That would keep out the loafers.”

The plutocratic party is losing, not gaining, ground in Victoria; it is far more likely that the present generation will see the Upper House abolished than that it will witness the introduction of restrictions upon the manhood suffrage which exists for the Lower; but there is one branch of the plutocracy which actively carries on the fight in all the colonies, and which claims to control society, the pastoral tenants of crown lands, or Squatter Aristocracy.

The word “squatter” has undergone a remarkable change of meaning since the time when it denoted those who stole government land, and built their dwellings on it. As late as 1837, squatters were defined by the chief justice of New South Wales as people occupying lands without legal title, and who were subject to a fine on discovery. They were described as living by bartering rum with convicts for stolen goods, and as being themselves invariably convicts or “expirees.”

Escaping suddenly from these low associations, the word came to be applied to graziers who drove their flocks into the unsettled interior, and thence to those of them who received leases from the crown of pastoral lands.

The squatter is the nabob of Melbourne and Sydney, the inexhaustible mine of wealth. He patronizes balls, promenade concerts, flower-shows; he is the mainstay of the great clubs, the joy of the shopkeepers, the good angel of the hotels; without him the opera could not be kept up, and the jockey-clubs would die a natural death.

Neither squatters nor townsfolk will admit that this view of the former‘s position is exactly correct. The Victorian squatters tell you that they have been ruined by confiscation, but that their neighbors in New South Wales, who have leases, are more prosperous; in New South Wales they tell you of the destruction of the squatters by “free selection,” of which there is none in Queensland, “the squatter‘s paradise;” but in Queensland the squatters protest that they have never made wages for their personal work, far less interest upon their capital. “Not one of us in ten is solvent,” they say.

As sweeping assertions are made by the townsfolk upon the other side. The squatters, they sometimes say, may well set up to be a great landed aristocracy, for they have every fault of a dominant caste except its generous vices. They are accused of piling up vast hoards of wealth while living a most penurious life, and contributing less than would so many mechanics to the revenue of the country, in order that they may return in later life to England, there to spend what they have wrung from the soil of Victoria or New South Wales.

The occupation of the whole of the crown lands by squatters has prevented the making of railways to be paid for in land on the American system; but the chief of all the evils connected with squatting is the tendency to the accumulation in a few hands of all the land and all the pastoral wealth of the country, an extreme danger in the face of democratic institutions, such as those of Victoria and New South Wales. Remembering that manufactures are few, the swelling of the cities shows how the people have been kept from the land; considerably more than half of the population of Victoria lives within the corporate towns.

A few years back, a thousand men held between them, on nominal rents, forty million acres out of the forty-three and a half million – mountain and swamp excluded – of which Victoria consists. It is true that the amount so held has now decreased to thirty million, but on the other hand the squatters have bought vast tracts which were formerly within their “runs,” with the capital acquired in squatting, and, knowing the country better than others could possibly know it, have naturally selected all the most valuable land.

The colonial democracy in 1860 and the succeeding years rose to a sense of its danger from the land monopoly, and began to search about for means to put it down, and to destroy at the same time the system of holding from the crown, for it is singular that while in England there seems to be springing up a popular movement in favor of the nationalization of the land, in the most democratic of the Australian colonies the tendency is from crown land tenure to individual freehold ownership of the soil rather than the other way. Yet here in Victoria there was a free field to start upon, for the land already belonged to the State – the first of the principles included under the phrase, nationalized land. In America, again, we see that, with the similar advantage of State possession of territories which are still fourteen times the size of the French Empire, there is little or no tendency toward agitation for the continuance of State ownership. In short, freehold ownership, the Saxon institution, seems dear to the Anglo-Saxon race. The national land plan would commend itself rather to the Celtic races: to the Highlander, who remembers clan-ship, to the Irishman, who regrets the Sept.

Since the Radicals have been in power, both here and in New South Wales, they have carried act after act to encourage agricultural settlers on freehold tenure, at the expense of the pastoral squatters. The “free selection” plan, now in operation in New South Wales, allows the agricultural settler to buy, but at a fixed price, the freehold of a patch of land, provided it be over forty acres and less than 320, anywhere he pleases – even in the middle of a squatter‘s “run,” if he enters at once, and commences to cultivate; and the Land Act of 1862 provides that the squatting license system shall entirely end with the year 1869. Forgetting that in every lease the government reserved the power of terminating the agreement for the purpose of the sale of land, the squatters complain that free selection is but confiscation, and that they are at the mercy of a pack of cattle-stealers and horse-thieves, who roam through the country haunting their “runs” like “ghosts,” taking up the best land on their “runs,” “picking the eyes out of the land,” turning to graze anywhere, on the richest grass, the sheep and cattle they have stolen on their way. The best of them, they say, are but “cockatoo farmers,” living from hand to mouth on what they manage to grub and grow. On the other hand, the “free selection” principle “up country” is tempered by the power of the wealthy squatter to impound the cattle of the poor little freeholder whenever he pleases to say that they stray on to his “run;” indeed, “Pound them off, or if you can‘t, buy them off,” has become a much used phrase. The squatter, too, is protected in Victoria by such provisions as that “improvements” by him, if over £40 on forty acres, cover an acre of land for each £1. The squatters are themselves buying largely of land, and thus profiting by the free selection. To a stranger it seems as though the interests of the squatter have been at least sufficiently cared for, remembering the vital necessity for immediate action. In 1865, Victoria, small as she is, had not sold a tenth of her land.

In her free selectors, Victoria will gain a class of citizens whose political views will contrast sharply with the strong anti-popular sentiments of the squatters, and who, instead of spending their lives as absentees, will stay, they and their children, upon the land, and spend all they make within the colony, while their sons add to its laboring arms.

Since land has been, even to a limited extent, thrown open, Victoria has suddenly ceased to be a wheat-importing, and become a wheat-exporting country, and flourishing agricultural communities, such as those of Ceres, Clunes, Kyneton, are springing up on every side, growing wheat instead of wool, while the wide extension which has in Victoria been given to the principle of local self-government in the shape of shire-councils, road-boards, and village-municipalities allows of the junction in a happy country of the whole of the advantages of small and great farming, under the unequaled system of small holdings, and co-operation for improvements among the holders.

CHAPTER V.

COLONIAL DEMOCRACY

PAYMENT of members by the State was the great question under debate in the Lower House during much of the time I spent in Melbourne, and, in spite of all the efforts of the Victorian democracy, the bill was lost. The objection taken at home, that payment degrades the House in the eyes of the people, could never arise in a new country, where a practical nation looks at the salaries as payment for work done, and obstinately refuses to believe in the work being done without payment in some shape or other. In these colonies, the reasons in favor of payment are far stronger than they are in Canada or America, for while their country or town share equally the difficulties of finding representatives who will consent to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to Ottawa or Washington, in the Australias Parliament sits in towns which contain from one-sixth to one-fourth of the whole population, and under a non-payment system power is thrown entirely into the hands of Melbourne, Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Hobarton. Not only do these cities return none but their own citizens, but the country districts, often unable to find within their limits men who have the time and money to make them able to attend throughout the sessions at the capital, elect the city traders to represent them.

Payment of members was met by a proposition on the part of the leader of the squatter party in the Upper House to carry it through that assembly if the Lower House would introduce the principle of personal representation; but it was objected that under such a system the Catholics, who form a fifth of the population, might, if they chose, return a fifth of the members. That they ought to be able to do so never seemed to strike friend or foe. The Catholics, who had a long turn of power under the O‘Shaughnessey government, were finally driven out for appointing none but Irishmen to the police. “I always said this ministry would go out on the back of a policeman,” was the comment of the Opposition wit. The present ministry, which is Scotch in tone, was hoisted into office by a great coalition against the Irish Catholics, of whom there are only a handful in the House.

The subject of national education, which was before the colony during my visit, also brought the Catholics prominently forward, for an episcopal pastoral was read in all their churches threatening to visit ecclesiastical censure upon Catholic teachers in the common schools, and upon the parents of the children who attend them. “Godless education” is as little popular here as it used to be at home, and the Anglican and Catholic clergymen insist that it is proposed to make their people pay heavily for an education in which it would be contrary to their conscience to share; but the laymen seem less distressed than their pastors. It has been said that the reason why the Catholic bishop declined to be examined upon the Education Commission was that he was afraid of this question: “Are you aware that half the Catholic children in the country are attending schools which you condemn?”

The most singular, perhaps, of the spectacles presented by colonial politics during my visit was that of the Victorian Upper House going deliberately into committee to consider its own constitution, with the view of introducing a bill for its own reform, or to meditate, its enemies said, upon self-destruction. Whether the blow comes from within or without, there is every probability that the Upper House will shortly disappear, and the advice of Milton and Franklin be followed in having but a single chamber. It is not unlikely that this step will be followed by the demand of the Victorians to be allowed to choose their own governor, subject to his approval by the queen, with a view to making it impossible that needy men should be sent out to suck the colony, as they sometimes have been in the past. The Australians look upon the liberal expenditure of a governor as their own liberality, but upon meanness on his part as a robbery from themselves.

The Victorian have a singular advantage over the American democrats as being unhampered by a constitution of antiquity and renown. Constitution-tinkering is here continual; the new society is continually reshaping its political institutions to keep pace with the latest developments of the national mind; in America, the party of liberty, at this moment engaged in remoulding the worn-out constitution in favor of freedom, dares not even yet proclaim that the national good is its aim, but keeps to the old watchwords, and professes to be treading in the footsteps of George Washington.