Advance Australasia: A Day-to-Day Record of a Recent Visit to Australasia. Second Edition.

Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/advanceaustralas00bulliala

Advance Australasia

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Previous Works By The Same Author

THE CRUISE OF THE _CACHALOT_ IDYLLS OF THE SEA THE LOG OF A SEA WAIF THE MEN OF THE MERCHANT SERVICE WITH CHRIST AT SEA A SACK OF SHAKINGS A WHALEMAN'S WIFE DEEP SEA PLUNDERINGS THE APOSTLES OF THE SOUTH-EAST SEA WRACK SEA PURITANS A SON OF THE SEA CREATURES OF THE SEA BACK TO SUNNY SEAS SEA SPRAY FRANK BROWN, SEA APPRENTICE OUR HERITAGE, THE SEA

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Advance Australasia

A Day-to-Day Record of a Recent Visit to Australasia

by

Frank T. Bullen, F.R.G.S.

Author of "The Cruise of the 'Cachalot'," "With Christ at Sea," etc.

Second Edition

Hodder and Stoughton London MCMVII

Preface

Upon revising the last sheet of this small book for press I could not help feeling that some little explanation was needed of its appearance at all. For assuredly, when I accepted the commission of the Editor of the London _Standard_ to write for him a series of articles giving my impressions of Australasia during my forthcoming lecturing tour, I had no idea or intention of subsequently publishing those articles in this form. The onerous nature of my lecture engagements and the rapidity of my passing from place to place precluded any idea of giving such careful attention to form, sequence, and detail that I believe a book demands.

But to my surprise and gratification, while the articles were appearing, always in a more or less abbreviated form according to the exigencies of space, the Editor wrote and informed me that there was a strong demand that the articles should be published in book form. I demurred on several grounds, but principally because they were the slightest journalistic impressions, that they necessarily contained many repetitions as the same features struck me obtaining in various places, &c. These objections, and others which I would rather not quote, were overruled, however, and so the book is here. And I send it out without any misgivings, because even if the critics do feel it their duty to go for me, they have in all my seventeen previous books been so uniformly kind, fair, and generous that a reversal of the treatment may perhaps have a bracing effect, though, like the nigger, "I dreads de process."

F. T. Bullen.

Melbourn, Cambridgeshire. 1907.

Contents

Page I. Then And Now! 1

II. The Young Giant 12

III. A Land Of Delight 24

IV. A Goodly Heritage 36

V. Sane Socialism 48

VI. Mighty Melbourne 58

VII. Some Fleeting Comparisons 71

VIII. On The Old Track 85

IX. The Queen City Of The South 98

X. Some Friendly Criticism 108

XI. The King Of New Zealand 118

XII. Towards Maoriland 129

XIII. The Paradise Of Labour 140

XIV. A Universal Shock 151

XV. Mutton, The Master 162

XVI. A Homelike Town 173

XVII. The Capital Of Wonderland 184

XVIII. A Natural Marvel 195

XIX. New Zealand Shipping 206

XX. Some Political Reflections 217

XXI. North Again 227

XXII. The Heart Of The North Island 237

XXIII. The Maori 247

XXIV. Australasian Journalism 258

I

Then And Now!

Thirty-four years ago, in a fine American ship chartered by Messrs. Anderson Anderson & Co., I paid my first visit to Australia, and the only one I ever made thither direct from the United Kingdom. Those were the palmy days of sailing ships to the Australasian Colonies, and a splendid fleet of regular liners, whose names were household words, made wonderful passages for equally wonderful freights with full cargoes each way for the great firms of Green, Wigram, Devitt & Moore, George Thompson, Anderson Anderson, and many others of less note, but of quite equal stability and repute. Passengers were carried, of course, in great numbers, and were, generally speaking, fairly comfortable, especially in the first class, or cuddy, although, of course, many of the necessities of ocean travel to-day were then its luxuries. It often happened, though, that through pressure of cargo or passengers, outside ships--that is, not owned by the regular lines--were chartered for a voyage, and passengers who had booked with a great firm upon the reputation of their ships for comfort and attention to the needs of the traveller, were sometimes badly disappointed. It was certainly so in the ship in which I paid my first visit. She was a splendid Boston-built vessel, but with very scanty accommodation for passengers. The captain was a very old Yankee, really past his work; but in one thing he was full of vigour, and that was in his hatred of and contempt for anything or anybody British; and he resented bitterly carrying British passengers in his saloon at all, telling them, as I well remember, upon an occasion when they approached him with a complaint, "I wish to have nothing to say to you. If I had been consulted, I would have paid big money rather than have carried you; but since you are here, make the best of it, and don't bring any complaints to me, for I won't hear you."

So, of course, they were none too comfortable, especially as they had to wait upon themselves entirely, and bribe the cook to prepare their food, which, as he was a perfect fraud of a cook--a most unusual thing in American ships--did not help them very much. And unfortunately, however smart the old skipper may have been in his prime--and I cannot imagine a Yankee skipper not being smart--he was now, as I have said, quite past his work, and consequently we made a very long passage for so fine a ship. We commenced badly. Although the weather was beautifully fine, we took a Channel pilot--an almost unheard-of thing for an outward-bounder to do--and when we got well down off Plymouth, the captain forbade him to stand in for the English shore so that he might get a chance to land. So we carried him, fretting terribly and exhausting his vocabulary of abuse, half-way across the Bay of Biscay, where, meeting a homeward-bound steamer, the captain condescended to signal, heave-to and release the unlawful prisoner. His farewell was copious, involved, and highly decorated with flowers of sea-speech, at which I did not wonder.

The weather all the way out was exceedingly favourable, but the time taken to Melbourne was 137 days, the average passage for such ships as she was being about 95. The only people who really enjoyed the passage, and, I believe, could have wished it longer, were the fellows forward who commenced broaching the valuable general cargo before the ship was out of the Channel, and lived always like the proverbial fighting-cocks, washing down their huge meals of various preserved foods, biscuits, &c., with copious draughts of all kinds of liquor from beer to champagne. The fact that to reach the spoil they often had to crawl amongst, over, and beneath a consignment of gun- and blasting-powder, amounting to over one hundred tons, and that with naked candles, never seemed to trouble them. Perhaps it is hardly necessary to add that they all deserted immediately upon the ship's arrival at Sandridge Pier, and, not to seem peculiar, I followed their example a day or two later.

The conditions obtaining on my present passage out present, I suppose, as complete a contrast to that long-ago journey as are possible at sea. The great steamship _Omrah_ of the Orient Royal Mail Line, with a crew and passenger list of over seven hundred, gliding away from her berth in Tilbury Docks in majestic silence, and an utter absence of fuss or bother, the schedule of times of arrival and departure from each port called at on her twelve-thousand-mile journey calculated to the nearest hour, the minute attention paid to the comfort of each individual passenger of whatever class, and the extreme order and regularity of the working of the huge intricate machine--all these are commonplaces of the regular ocean traveller to-day, who indeed has grown so to consider them as a part of the scheme of things that he or she, especially she, is prone to regard any irregularity, however caused, as an infringement of chartered right, and without any consideration of circumstances to resent it accordingly. So easily do we grow accustomed to what, only two or three decades ago, was looked upon as a series of miracles.

To me, however, this passage was of the highest interest, because in all my meanderings on many seas for so long a period I had never yet sampled the wonders of the Suez Canal, very inelegantly dubbed the "Ditch" by veteran Eastern travellers. I had heard fearsome stories of the iniquities of Port Said, of the discomfort of passing through that furrow in the desert of eighty-seven miles, and especially of the terrible heat of the Red Sea. Consequently I took little heed of Gib, of Marseilles, or of Naples, except to note that we left the latter port about midnight, the cone of Vesuvius glowing fiercely against a background of lowering sky, and wonder whether a similar fate to that of St. Pierre (which I visited in 1904) was imminent for the crowded villages of Torre del Greco, Torre dell' Annunziata and Ottignano. For the mountain looked furiously angry, and it has ever been noted that this warning is given before a grand exhibition of Plutonic power. Stromboli, which we passed close to, lay basking in the glorious sunshine, an innocent-looking halo of light vapour crowning his august head, and evincing not the slightest sympathy with his fiery brother in the north. Etna, which was passed later, looked, if possible, even more peaceful, in that his vast flanks were robed in purest white almost to the summit, which, like Stromboli, had just a light wreath of vapour hovering about its lofty crest.

And then away under the same pleasant, placid conditions to the land of Egypt, not a cloud in the sky, hardly a ripple on the sea, and the climatic conditions as regards temperature nearly perfect. We arrived at Port Said in the early dawn, the weather being quite cool enough for an overcoat, picked up our pilot and steamed sedately in to the buoys off the town amidst an extraordinary hush, only broken presently by the hubbub of the coaling Arabs, who worked with an almost fiendish energy to get the six huge lighters of good Welsh fuel into the body of the ship through the side ports, thus producing the minimum of dust. To any one accustomed to disciplined work, the ways of these Arabs are mysterious beyond comprehension. Everybody seems to be in command, and to issue orders in a high yell of which nobody appears to take the slightest notice. The most insignificant, ragged varlet, who has apparently been dozing upon the coal, will suddenly start up and rend the atmosphere with his raucous cries, taking command of the whole flotilla. But nothing happens, except that by and by all the barges are in position and the coal passing begins, every man, as he empties his basket into the shoot and descends the plank, making some mystic passes in front of his face with his left hand, and intoning a few weird words of Arabic, probably an invocation or thanksgiving to Allah.

The police arrangements at Port Said appear to be well-nigh perfect. The boatmen do not pester for hire, because the fare is fixed at threepence per passenger during the daytime and sixpence at night, and it is paid into an office on shore--a penny of _backsheesh_ making the boatman quite happy. On shore it is warm undoubtedly, but other discomforts there are none. No almost savage importunities to buy or go here or there; and as for vice, the unparalleled viciousness for which Port Said has long been a byword--well, if it exists, which I very much doubt, at least to any great extent, it must be deliberately sought for, and that at considerable expense. Certainly as far as I have been able to ascertain, viciousness is not nearly as flagrant in Port Said _now_ as it is in any large city at home or on the Continent. No doubt it was, as a cosmopolitan acquaintance of mine put it, "a gay place once, but these infernal hypocrites of English have made it as tame as a London suburb on a Sunday afternoon." At midday we cast off from the buoys and entered the Canal, having, during our stay, shipped an extension of the rudder and a huge searchlight over the bows, the former because the slow rate of speed admissible in the Canal (about four knots) does not allow the vessel to answer her ordinary rudder quick enough, and the second to permit of the navigation of the Canal by night. At first the scene was quite impressive, especially the amazing contrast between the gigantic dredgers, which lie by the banks and scoop up the bed of the Canal, pouring it out through a huge tube on to the desert beyond, and the nuggars, or Nile boats, of a type dating back two thousand years or more, with their upward-flaring bows and their huge lateen sails. The wind was right aft, so that we were in an almost perfect calm; yet it was cool in the shade, and only over the desert, where an occasional mirage showed itself, did it appear to be hot. As evening came on, the desert scenes aroused strange memories, the unkempt encampments with their groups of couchant camels, the solitary figures engaged in prayer with their faces Mecca-wards, and then a sudden blaze of colour, a golden glory in the West, and the vivid day was done.

As in all such situations, night succeeds day with almost startling suddenness, but surely never did sweeter dark succeed glaring sunshine than now. There was no moon, and in the clear, deep violet of the heavens, from zenith to horizon, the stars glowed incandescently. The air was most invigoratingly cool--in fact, to the incautious ones coming up from the heated saloon after dinner in light evening dress, it was fraught with considerable danger. A solemn hush pervaded space--a silence which only seemed more profound for the gentle s-s-s-h of the returning water to the banks as we glided past--and the sense, hardly due to hearing, of the slow throb of the giant propellers below. Ahead the steep banks glowed white as snow from the touch of the 30,000 candle-power electric light at the bows; astern, a vast, dazzling eye showed where another ship was silently stealing along after us. Even the usual gay chat of passengers exchanging reminiscences was hushed as if by the mental burden of the countless centuries of history round about them. For slowly we were stealing through the world-old desert, almost every grain of whose sands could tell, if vocal, wondrous tales of immemorial civilisations; and it needed no great stretch of imagination to people those solemn breadths with legions of ghostly watchers, whose sphinx-like faces expressed neither anger nor surprise, envy nor contempt, but only deep-browed contemplation of the splendid insolence of the modern engineer who had thus invaded their secret solitudes. And I could not help projecting my mind forward a few thousands of years, passing as swiftly as the space between us and the Ancient Egypt, and wondering whether the ephemera of that day would not class us as contemporary with Sesostris or Assur-banipal, even as we are apt to lose our historical perspective, and to look upon all the early civilisations as practically coeval.

We emerged from the Canal into the Gulf of Suez on one of the most glorious mornings conceivable, a fresh breeze ruffling the dark blue of the Gulf into a myriad sparkling wavelets, the air sweet, cool, and heady as new wine, while the distant mountains lay enfolded in sombre purple. But all this beauty was lost upon our commander, who was loud in his objurgations against the abominable neglect, as he put it, of the authorities in allowing this roadstead at one end of the world's greatest highway to remain almost unnavigable for want of dredging, pointing, as he did so, to where our propellers were churning up the mud, and at the ship, which, by reason of her keel _smelling_ the ground, was almost refusing to answer her helm. However, his annoyances were soon at an end, and in the splendid freshness of the new day, we sped joyously down the Gulf towards the much-dreaded and deeply historical Red Sea.

II

The Young Giant

Of course the time of year--the middle of March--must be taken into account, otherwise I should ask, in utmost bewilderment, why all this wholesale vituperation of the Red Sea? I am quite prepared to believe also that we have been especially favoured this voyage, as we have never, since leaving London, had an unpleasant day at sea. But when all has been said I am perfectly certain that many other places of my acquaintance, notably the Spanish Main and the East African littoral, are quite equal, if not superior, to the Red Sea in its alleged bad eminence of torridity. No; it was not until we began to near Colombo that the heat waxed at all oppressive, and even then only so to people who persisted in worrying about it. In Colombo it was hot and coal-dusty, and generally unpleasant to the traveller eager for sight-seeing, yet fresh from the coolth of home and even the Suez Canal. But it was over soon, and the latter half of the day was also tempered by a few tremendous tropical rain-showers, heralded by a thunder-clap out of a blue sky which sounded like the crack of doom and brought seriousness to many faces. I thought it was the report of a big gun fired close at hand, and looked vainly about for the smoke-wreath.

Away again at midnight, passing through the narrow way between the ends of the two magnificent breakwaters at nearly full speed, so confidently are these modern twin-screw ships handled, and the long stretch across the Indian Ocean to Fremantle lay before us, the last lap of the ocean passage. So we settled down to quiet enjoyment again, marred only by the digestion of the news heard about the outbreak of Vesuvius, fully justifying my fears when I saw his angry glow on the night of leaving Naples. Swiftly we passed into the realm of the faithful South-east Trades, meeting the world-old swell from the southward and listening half-pityingly, half-contemptuously to the querulous complaints of passengers at the ship's motion, after their unstinted praises of her steadiness before. I reserved most of my pity, however, for the skipper, who had to meet these unwarranted aspersions upon the character of his fine ship, with explanations which his interlocutors did not understand, or, if they did, disbelieved, paid no heed to it, and went on grumbling.

At last, punctual to the appointed hour, in the perfect wharf of a pearly morning, we steamed into the snug harbour of Fremantle, and after a brief delay for turning the ship so that she should be ready to steam right out without delay, we gently glided alongside the wharf, arrived in Australia. It was my first visit to Western Australia, and from what I had heard of the Swan River I had pictured something very different indeed from a waterway, which, though narrow, was deep and secure as a dock, and lined with wharves alongside of which such a ship as the _Omrah_, drawing 26 feet of water and measuring nearly 9,000 tons, could be berthed with the greatest ease. As the light strengthened and it became possible to make out details, I was charmed at the finished look of everything, the absence of that squalor which, in American ports especially, seems inseparable from shipping quarters. There was nothing unkempt or untidy, and as the sun rose and the clear atmosphere shed its searching light upon every corner, this was most noticeable. One other point, too, about this most modern port was the use of the motor for harbour work, the lighters even being brought alongside by a motor-tug, while two or three others were gliding about the river with that uncanny air of sentience and absence of fuss which is extremely characteristic of the motor-boat, if not of the motor-car.

Having met the inevitable interviewer who did _not_ ask me how I liked Australia, but who did put me to considerable inconvenience by requesting (in about five minutes) my views on the result of the recent elections in Great Britain, and the consequences to the Empire of the sudden rise of the Labour Party, I entered the train at half-past eight and gat me unto Perth, about an hour's ride. We passed through many thriving-looking townships, glaringly new to all appearance in that all-revealing sun-glare, but still, to my delight, free from squalor. I saw no tumble-down hovels, neglected fences, weed-overgrown forecourts, unpainted houses with "don't care" posted in unmistakable characters all over them, such as may be seen in the suburban districts of Chicago, for instance, to say nothing of many less important American cities. And I take it that to the observant traveller there are few better criteria afforded of the character of a great city generally than the approaches to it by train, for by some strange series of coincidences a railway almost always runs through the worst part of a town or city's environs.

Therefore I was most pleasantly impressed by my journey to Perth--an impression which was deepened and confirmed upon leaving the train and entering the pretty little city itself, which I mentally compared with its ancient namesake in Bonnie Scotland. For its lovely surroundings old Perth can hardly be surpassed, but it is in itself a "dour auld toon," hard and grim, while new Perth, the capital of the young and strenuous giant, Western Australia, is bright and brisk and gay, humming with activity and yet solid and permanent-looking in its buildings, as if its citizens had faith in its capacity not merely to endure but to go on. To use an expressive if horrible Americanism, "there are no flies on" Perth. Its citizens are obviously full of go, and they have called to their aid all the most modern appliances for expediting communications either by road or rail. The electric trolley-car hums along the beautifully graded streets, alongside of which run a very forest of telegraph poles supporting a shimmering network of telegraph and telephone wires. I take off my hat metaphorically to those responsible for the roadways of Perth. To my mind nothing more fitly stamps the character of those in charge of a city than the condition of its streets, and I bear witness that the streets of Perth put to utter shame the roadways of many far more pretentious and incomparably older towns and cities that I could name both in the Motherland and in the United States.

My stay in Perth on this occasion being limited to about two and a half hours, I could not waste time, so made haste to present my credentials to the Premier, Mr. Rason, and a leading citizen, Dr. Hackett, proprietor of the _West Australian_, and a gentleman of whom I heard nothing but praise. By both of them I was received with the greatest cordiality, but of course there was no time for any hospitality or investigation, and as I hoped to make a stay of a week or so on my return it was quite unnecessary to do more than exchange a few compliments and retire. But I confess that one thought has worried me. To judge from the newspapers which I have been devouring since they came on board this morning, the rulers of this Colony are mainly men whose time is principally devoted to the vituperation of one another and the promulgation of schemes of socialism, the difference between the ins and the outs being, as far as I can see, that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. If, however, there be any truth in this, how is it that the evidences of good government and prosperity are so abundant, so unmistakable on every hand? It is a conundrum the answer to which I hope to learn later on.

Back again to the ship in a great hurry, and punctually at the time appointed we steam out around Rottnest Island, and head for Cape Leeuwin, the "Horn" of Australia, where for the first time the sedate _Omrah_ begins to manifest symptoms of levity, evoking plaintive protests from those passengers who, spoiled by the persistently calm and uneventful passage we have made from Britain, have grown to resent any additional movement of the ship as a breach of faith on the part of the Company or a lack of seamanship on the part of the captain. We have with us as passengers to Adelaide the members of an Interstate Commission on Shipping Freights--gentlemen who all bear the distinguishing badge of membership of a State Parliament, a gold emblem on the watch-chain entitling them to free transit throughout the Commonwealth. They form a select coterie, holding severely aloof from all meaner folk, sitting together at a table of their own, and not deigning to recognise the genial captain, whose withers are quite unwrung by the neglect. It is impossible to avoid hearing their conversation in the smoking-room, for it is naturally of the aggressive order, one gentleman especially having a voice like a foghorn, with which he endeavours to drown any utterances of his colleagues. Yet--for the reflection will thus intrude itself--these are the men to whom, with their like, the destinies of this mighty continent are entrusted, and, judging by what I have already observed, with no small measure of success. Is it, I wonder, another proof of the dictum that man is better than his creeds, and that whatever irresponsibility may utter, responsibility will curb?

Now one thought dominates others--that I must leave this happy home of mine and launch into the vortex of shore life. Mentally I contrast this feeling with the time when I almost always hated the ship that I was in, and in any case was anxious to get ashore. But inevitably as fate the big ship breasts the mighty south-east swell, accompanied by a graceful cohort of albatrosses and mollymauks, until at daylight on Easter Monday she glides through Investigator Straits into the calm waters of St. Vincent Gulf, and punctually to the appointed minute lets go her anchor in Largs Bay off Port Adelaide.

As far as memory will serve me, there is nothing new in the appearance of the Port from this distance since last I bade farewell to it twenty-six years ago as second mate of yonder fine sailing ship, the _Harbinger_, now under the Russian flag, which by a most strange coincidence is the first vessel to strike my eye on my return. That argues little, however, for the approach by sea to Adelaide is unimpressive to the last degree, the distant range of blue hills giving no promise of the beauties which lie between their slopes and the sandy levels of the sea-shore. And I cannot help being struck by the fact that here alone, of all the great ports of the Commonwealth, is it necessary for the mail steamer to lie out in a roadstead exposed to any weather which, indeed, might not mean any danger to herself but does often spell much misery and delay to outcoming and ingoing passengers. Not, I hasten to add, because there is no harbour for even such large ships as the _Omrah_, but because the snug berths up the Port River, as it is called, take up far too much valuable time in reaching and leaving. There should undoubtedly be an outer harbour or breakwater; and one was commenced, but the contractors failed, and it remains in that condition awaiting the time when the authorities can make up their mind to go on with it again. Fortunately the fates are kind to us to-day, the weather being beautifully fine, and we are soon in the tender steaming for the Semaphore Pier, where a scene awaits us (it being Bank Holiday), which reminds us vividly of home. The spacious sands are studded with holiday-makers behaving after the manner of trippers at Margate or Southend, but, methought, a trifle more sedately and of course far fewer in number, while the long pier is thronged with anglers, but to my amazement there are no more signs of any fish being caught than are apparent on the piers of the before-named English watering-places.

But now comes the always unpleasant business of Customs examination--unpleasant, that is, to most people, but fortunately in my own experience invariably modified by the courtesy of the officials in every port which I have yet visited, with one isolated exception, Syracuse, Sicily. Even the much-abused Customs searchers at New York have invariably treated me as if I bore indelible signs about me of inability to attempt fraud upon a confiding Customs officer, and refused to examine my baggage at all. So that I was not at all surprised when, despite what I had been told of the drastic scrutiny to which all personal belongings entering the Commonwealth was subjected, the most cursory glance into my baggage sufficed to enfranchise me. But then I never do smuggle anything, not considering it worth while, any more than it is worth while running the risk of detection involved in riding in a first-class carriage with a third-class ticket, to put the matter on no loftier plane. Then into the train, and away over the perfectly level country for Adelaide the beautiful. The same characteristics of neatness and apparent prosperity prevail here as on the road from Fremantle to Perth; but casting my memory back over the slight gap of twenty-six years, I am compelled to admit that I was unable to see very much development. Within a quarter of a century a dozen large cities of the size of Adelaide have been added to London, villages have grown into huge towns in this effete old land of ours, as it is contemptuously termed in America, but here in one of the fairest and richest countries under the sun the returning wanderer can note but little difference except in the erection of a few fine buildings in isolated spots. And I well remember that two of the finest of them, the Town Hall and Post Office, were in existence when I was here before.

Why is this? Has Australia deliberately chosen the motto, "Festina lente," and if so, is she in doing so wise or unwise? Far be it from me to offer an opinion upon so momentous a matter, or to say that the watchword of "Australia for the Australians" is wrong. Fortunately I am not called upon to pass judgment, but only to record impressions, although I confess my grave doubts as to whether rapid gigantic growth of cities or of nations makes for the best of all things in the best of all possible worlds. However, here we are at the fine, spacious, and splendidly built railway terminus, opposite to which is the hotel to which I am conducted, and with a sense of having most comfortably and auspiciously begun my tour I sink into a cosy chair surrounded by friends, luxuriously content.

III

A Land Of Delight

Hotel life, which for some people has a curious fascination, is to me a hateful necessity of travel, and few indeed are the hotels which I have sampled in my journeyings about the world where I have been able to feel even moderately comfortable, much less at home from home. The comfort of the old English inn, so fondly dwelt upon by Dickens, is a thing of the past, and the huge caravanserais of England, America, or the Continent, are places which to me are a positive nightmare. The extortion on every hand, the absolute lack of plain, homely cooked food which one can make a meal of, the almost unbearable and entirely uncomfortable magnificence on every side combine to make hotel life to me, and many others like-minded, a thing to be dreaded. Therefore I feel to-day that I am among the favoured ones of mankind in that I have "struck" a hotel which is my ideal of what a hotel should be. The attendants are delightfully civil without a trace of servility, the food is not merely as good as any that I have ever eaten but it is plainly, carefully dressed, and not smothered with vile concoctions of sauce to disguise its natural savours (in most places this is done as a sort of compensation for the lack of savour in the fish, flesh, or fowl dealt with), there are six or seven different kinds of vegetables, beautifully fresh and homelike, and cooked as if they were worth attention, with luncheon and dinner, there is abundance of most delicious fruit, baths are free and available all day, and the inclusive rate is ten shillings per day or three guineas a week. Also there are no niggling paltry extras for attendance, even the matutinal cup of tea and newspaper at 7 a.m., and the cup of afternoon tea being supplied free. I begin to wonder first whether there was ever before a hotel like this as I sit in my spacious, airy room, and secondly how, in the name of common experience, can it pay? I feel it almost an obvious duty to my kind to mention the name of this paragon among hotels, but may not because of the inevitable misconstruction which would be put upon my doing so.

Now I promise that there shall be little or no further mention of hotels in what I have to say. The next morning I awoke and stepped out upon the wide verandah into an air that was as heady as wine and almost too chilly for a sleeping suit. A perfect day, the golden sun flooding the world with light, the purple background of hills lying in slumberous shadow, and that sweet breeze pouring in upon the awakening city from the shimmering bay, just visible in patches from this elevation. Can this be Australia? My recollections of all her coasts from Townsville to Adelaide are very vivid, but they all include baking heat, scorching winds laden with sand, never at any time such a morning as this. But I must not stay indoors; it seems a sin, unless compelled. So as soon as possible I emerge, to be astounded by every person I meet saying, "Very cold this morning, isn't it?" Cold! I gasp with amazement, for to me the climate seems as nearly perfection as climate can be on this side of Paradise. As a matter of actual fact the shade temperature is 52° at 8 a.m.

A stroll round the bright, cheerful, clean, magnificently paved streets brings me to the inevitable conclusion that such changes as have taken place in the last twenty-six years are hardly noticeable by me. The most prominent edifices in the city, the Town Hall and Post Office, were then erected, but beyond that I feel certain that the city's growth has been so slow that its beauty remains absolutely unimpaired. I hope the citizens will not feel aggrieved at my saying this, especially as I fail entirely to see how the tremendously rapid growth of a London suburb, for instance, which in twenty years will add to its area of buildings and population two cities of the size of Adelaide, makes for that which we all profess most earnestly to desire--the greatest good of the greatest number. There is on this first walk of mine alone, and on observation bent, an utter absence of those great variations between blatant wealth and squalid poverty which are so painfully apparent at home and in America. And there is a generally diffused air of comfort prevailing among the people and in their dwellings that is to me most especially delightful to see. Even the ramshackle two-horse trams which hump along the road seem to say almost defiantly, "We're proud of being evidences of the absence of hustle. Our people can have the electric trolley-cars whenever they want them, but there is really not the least little bit of need for hurry in the world." And anyhow, all the roads in the city are just perfect to ride on either in buggy or motor, on a bicycle or to walk on, so splendidly graded and beautifully kept is the asphalt of which they are composed. It is an object-lesson patent to the most casual eye of the character of the people, this wonderful care of the roads.

Of all the cities that I have ever seen Adelaide comes easily first in the perfect beauty of its situation and arrangement. Level it is certainly, yet not nearly so level as it appears from the hills, with a lavish width of roadway even in what would in other places be mean streets, and beyond all the magnificent belt of park-lands which environ it, set aside for the health and enjoyment of its citizens as long as it shall be a city by wise, far-seeing old Colonel Light, bitterly as he was reviled at the time for making such a selection of a site for the capital of the new Colony. But it is not until the visitor has been taken in hand by some hospitable citizen, and, seated in a motor-car, has been whirled away by winding roads through lovely scenery up the beautiful flanks of Mount Lofty, that he recognises what a wonderfully handsome and ideally situated city it is. And there is a quiet exultation about those same citizens as, mounting higher and higher, they again and again invite you to survey the panorama beneath you, that is most pleasant to witness. They do not brag, bid you--as they would if they were Yankees--burst into unstinted panegyric, but they wait confidently and quietly for the expression of your honest opinion. And I do not think they are ever disappointed.

Each suburb that is passed on the upward journey is well groomed, and, moreover--a characteristic feature of this favoured land--looks as if the inhabitants had come to stay. There is no "I'm but a stranger here" appearance about the snug houses and well-kept lots, while the fruit-trees suggest a veritable garden of the Lord. All the home fruits grow here in rich profusion side by side with oranges, lemons, and grapes, grapes, grapes, until you cease to wonder how it is that the Adelaide hawkers can afford to stand all day selling grapes that are simply perfection for size, flavour, and variety at a uniform rate of a penny a pound. But gladly as I always welcome the view of an orchard or a vineyard, I confess that my attention was always more quickly arrested by the fat, black level land in the valleys, whereon was growing in most lavish profusion all the vegetables that we love at home--peas and beans, onions and potatoes, parsnip and beet, side by side with luxuriant tomatoes, huge melons, and many other tasty agricultural products of sub-tropical countries. A gentle land, where frost is unknown, where temperate and sub-tropical fruits and vegetables grow side by side, and the only trouble is to find sufficient markets for the abounding crops garnered with the minimum of labour.

But what I think impresses all visitors to this favoured spot more than anything else are the vineyards, especially if he be conversant with Continental grape-growing districts. This strong, red soil, bearing evidences of abundance of iron on every hand, seems to be the natural home of the grape, and to be free, to an amazing degree, from those insect pests which have made the lot of the French and Italian vignerons such a weary one. Every variety of grape seems to flourish here in such wonderful luxuriance and fecundity, and withal in such healthfulness of foliage and fruit, that the eye wearies of admiring their prolific masses. Quite unintentionally it so happened that I was invited to go and visit one of the youngest of the vineyards and its "winery," as it is called, in company with two gentlemen, proprietor and editor of a great newspaper out here. And I must confess that I was amazed at everything I saw. The wagon-loads of tiny but rich-tasting, luscious grapes, coming in from the adjacent vineyards, where they were being picked by a merry troop of boys and girls, the ceaseless elevator upon whose revolving shelves a burly, silent man hurled huge fork-loads of grapes, the drum above, in which those same grapes were separated from their stalks and crushed at the same time, the juice flowing one way, the stalks another, and the crushed skins another. All the swift process was mightily interesting, especially as contrasted with the old crude methods of the Continent, with their maximum of dirt. I thought of Macaulay's

"This year the must shall foam 'Neath the white(?) feet of laughing girls,"

and felt that this method was infinitely preferable. Then down below to where the great square backs full of juice were bubbling and boiling in the throes of fermentation, and I elicited information about the hastening of that wonderful process by the addition of special cultures _à la_ Pasteur, for your Australian wine-grower is nothing if not scientific. Here is a flood of claret, here one from the Sauvignon grape, here the Muscat, here port, but all busy, and none allowed to waste an unnecessary moment in the preliminary processes, however long they may have to lie and mature afterwards. And I was especially interested in seeing how the tint of the grape was reproduced in the wine, so that a very slight acquaintance and a keen eye for colour would be sufficient to name the particular grape from which any given back-full had been crushed.

There was an air of absolute purity, of precise cleanliness everywhere which was exceedingly pleasant to notice, but there was also a curious solemnity, a brooding over everything, that was most impressive. Even on the top floor, where the machinery was in evidence, it made only a subdued hum, all being driven by an English-made petrol engine which I was proudly informed had run for four or five years, ever since it was put in, without any attention beyond an occasional wipe and the necessary feeding with petrol, and had never once given the slightest trouble. But as we descended into the vast cellars, amid vats and tuns of maturing wine varying in their contents from 500 to 2,500 gallons, the silence became positively oppressive, and I found myself involuntarily speaking in a whisper, as if in some stately fane. Again, anything more unlike the wine-cellars of the Old World that I have seen could not possibly be imagined. There, cobwebs, mildew, fungi, and a damp, earthy smell as of the tomb; here, not a spot of dirt or speck of dust to be seen anywhere, as if scores of busy housemaids were all over the place every morning, which of course could not be the case.

There were very few men about. Labour is costly here, and consequently every labour-saving appliance that can be devised is employed. But I was glad to learn that all the bottles I saw being filled were of Australian, not Belgian or German, make; that these people had too much patriotism to let a home industry be filched from them by free importers who would buy nothing in return. And certainly these hocks and clarets and ports looked very beautiful in their neat bottles with attractive labels, especially when I remembered having watched the whole process as far as the human eye could follow it, that they were all absolutely the pure juice of the grape without any extraneous admixture whatever, although for that I will not claim any special virtue on the part of the vigneron, only pointing out that the pure article is cheaper to make than any adulterated one would be.

We then went into the still-house, where from the must, the crushed grape-skins, an absolutely pure brandy was being distilled, and I remember vividly the outcry at home because it was said to be impossible to get pure brandy. I am assured, and I have no difficulty in believing, that it does not pay the Australian wine-grower to sophisticate his brandy. That it is infinitely superior to any foreign brandy on the market at double its price I can also well believe, and as far as a novice's taste may decide it certainly is more palatable than any French brandy I have ever tasted at any price. Why, then, is it not in its rightful place at home? Brandy is not a drunkard's drink; it is largely medicinal, and it is essential that it should be pure. And I believe that if the people who now pay large sums for inferior foreign brandy would only try the pure product of the Australian grape they would never purchase any other. The wine is said to be too strong, too alcoholic, and I can easily believe that to be the case, but as far as the brandy goes, it can only be described as the best obtainable because absolutely pure. I came away from the vineyard with a feeling of great pleasure, on the one hand that I had been privileged to witness so beautiful a process, and of intense sadness on the other that these splendid natural products of our own loyal kin should still be in the struggling stage, should still have to fight for a bare existence against far inferior Continental wines with nothing to recommend them but the prestige of the name. Fortunately the Australians are loyal to their wines, and drink them themselves; if they did not I am afraid these lovely vineyards would have to revert to wilderness, which would be a crime against civilisation.

IV

A Goodly Heritage

The soil which grows the grape, the orange, the lemon, the apple and pear and peach in such wonderful profusion, also grows the olive, and would, I feel sure, comparing it with the uplands of Costa Rica, grow a splendid grade of coffee. But who of us at home ever heard of Australian olive oil? We all know into what disrepute the Continental olive oil has fallen owing to its gross adulteration and its exceedingly unpleasant taste--due, I believe, to the methods of its preparation. Well, candidly, I was never able to eat olives until I came here, but these are so different to any that I have tasted before that I am now almost craving for them. And the oil is so creamy, so bland and mellow, that I look back in wonder at my dislike of the flavour of the oil that I have had poured over my salad in restaurants in London. And I do not at all understand why such an article of great utility and constant demand should not be in its rightful place in Britain, especially since, owing to the wonderful cheapness of ocean freights, the difference in its cost to the consumer from that of the very much inferior Italian oil would be practically nil.

Currants also grow in great profusion, but the difficulty of drying them in the sun is great, and I do not see how they are to compete with the produce of Greece. Still, I suppose they are prepared in sufficient quantity and quality to satisfy the local demands, which, after all, is one of the prime objects of every Australian citizen; and a very laudable object too, that we in England should entirely sympathise with, seeing how many things we could produce ourselves, and in so doing employ our own people, which now we import under such favourable conditions to the foreigner. I do wish that our so-called Free Traders could see how common-sense Protection works out here for themselves, instead of accepting the worn-out theories which, in defiance of all reason and the experience of all other countries, are thrust upon them by people who should know better.

The beauty of Adelaide is proverbial, but, curiously enough, it can only be realised from the landward side. The visitor who, on his passage hither from overseas, has been duly plied with glowing eulogy of the Queen of the South by faithful South Australians, is--must be--intensely disappointed as he nears the port and surveys the flat, sandy shores, the level only broken by an occasional chimney shaft or masts of ships lying up the invisible river as if they had been carried inland by some necromancy. But when, after an hour's run in a motor-car over superb roads and through perfectly lovely scenery, you reach the upper slopes of Mount Lofty, and are suddenly bidden to turn and look down upon Adelaide, which lies basking in the golden sunshine, edged by the glittering sea, you recognise that you are in the presence of one of the fairest scenes that earth can afford. Around you, nestling amidst the luxuriant vegetation, may be discerned many a picturesque little township, all alike noticeable for their lack of squalor or any other appearance of poverty which so painfully disfigures the fairest and most romantic of our villages at home. And scattered about between the townships lie the homes of the well-to-do Adelaide folks. I had almost said wealthy folks, but I fear to convey a wrong impression. They may be wealthy, but there is none of that tremendous ostentation and aggressive swagger about them that is so offensive in older countries. Comfort, yes, and even a certain amount of luxury, but the ostentatious note is entirely absent. Yet they are almost all self-made men, who are popularly supposed, at home at any rate, to be in their manners somewhat like the hero of one of Ouida's later books, "The Massarenes," who wipes his muddy boots upon a duchess's silk gown to show his authority over her.

The most beautiful of all these country homes to which I have been fortunate enough to have the _entrée_ was one occupied by a very prominent K.C., Sir Josiah Symons. It occupies an ideal situation in the hills, and is, I should say, almost perfect in its surroundings and its climate. With most pardonable pride my host pointed out how it had grown up under his loving care from the smallest and most unpretentious beginnings until now it was what I saw it--a home as beautiful within and without as the heart of man could desire, a veritable abode of peace, and quiet, unostentatious luxury. This is an exceedingly pleasant feature of the life out here, the numbers of men who are now enjoying the fruits of a laborious life, and who look back upon their small beginnings with the greatest complacency and entire absence of that pomposity which at home, alas! so often marks the _nouveau riche_. These men, so far from being ashamed of the pit from which they were digged, evince the greatest delight in fighting their early battles over again. And they are mostly distinguished for their intense loyalty to the Motherland, while at the same time they are desperately jealous of their neighbours, and until you understand them you would imagine that they actually hated the other States who go to make up the great Australian Commonwealth. I have had to learn quite a new nomenclature since I have been here. I find that the use of the words Colonies and Colonial is steadily discouraged. They talk now of the States, the Interstate communications, not Colonial. Only a trifle perhaps to us, but to these strenuous Australians nothing of that kind is trifling.

But, indeed, there is a curious confusion rampant just now in Australian political matters which is to a visitor from Britain fairly conversant with the State and aims of parties at home almost if not entirely incomprehensible. The Commonwealth leaders and the State leaders are not seldom at loggerheads, if one may judge by their public utterances, and the differences between Labour men, Socialists, and Conservatives, are very difficult to define. It is a veritable hornet's nest for an outsider to interfere with, but there is one comfort at any rate to a Briton that loves the Empire, and that is the spirit of loyalty to the Crown which is manifested by all parties. It is a sort of common ground upon which all can meet, although a cynical observer would probably suggest that it had no real cohesive value. There is another thing, too, which I think gives hope for the future of this marvellous country, and that is the fact that all parties now seem to be fairly in accord upon the population question. They all seem to realise that it is nothing short of ridiculous to expect this vast country to hold its own with such a trifling population as it possesses. With an area much larger than that of the United States, and a population of only one-seventeenth roughly, of that of the great Republic, while the two great cities of Sydney and Melbourne between them absorb almost one-fourth of the entire population of Australasia, it must indeed be a hard task to avoid seeing what an enormous waste of opportunities for men to rise and hew out fortune and position is going on. It only remains for Australians to agree as to the method of peopling their country, to divert to themselves the streams of capable and energetic Anglo-Saxons who yearly flow into the United States. Very cordially do I endorse the determination of Australasian rulers to keep out wastrels, incapables, and work-shy men. There is already far too great a number of these loafing about in the big towns for the industrious population to support, and, obviously, to import more of these anæmic parasites would be to waste the resources of the Australian States in an ever-increasing ratio.

But I am straying too far from beautiful Adelaide, where I now am, into generalities. When riding about these lovely hills and valleys, where all the fruits of the earth that grow in temperate and sub-tropical zones flourish with incredible luxuriance, I have often asked the question whether this splendid fertility and wide extent of cultivable land was confined to the neighbourhood of the city and diminished in both quality and quantity up-country. And I have been repeatedly assured that it was not so, that Nature was amazingly lavish all over the southern portions of the great Central State, that farms could be had at tiny rentals, or at amounts of purchase-money which to us at home seem like a joke, but the difficulty was to find a market. So small a population of consumers is so very easily supplied. That was to me effectually demonstrated by the prices at which grapes of all kinds, the most splendid apples and pears and peaches, &c., among fruit and vegetables of all kinds, were sold, while all the necessities of life, such as bread, meat, tea, sugar, milk, &c., are equally cheap--so cheap that a mechanic or labourer can live well and be comfortably housed for the sum of 15s. per week; and to counterbalance this a journeyman mechanic's wages average 10s. a day of eight hours, while labourers' wages are 6s. per day. The case of the shop assistants and waiters, clerks, &c., is equally favourable, while certainly clothing and house-rent compare very favourably with prices obtaining in England for these necessities. Luxuries are undoubtedly more expensive than they are at home, especially spirits; wine, if the workman will drink the splendid produce of his own country, being marvellously cheap and good. But as with us, what eats the very heart out of the workman is so-called sport, and the inseparable gambling consequent thereupon. There is a great deal of leisure for enjoyment, which I feel sure is indulged in to the highest degree, and if it were not for the appalling waste of money in gambling would be of the highest benefit to the community at large.

What is so hard to understand about a country like this, where the working man is so strenuously in evidence in politics and shows such eager interest in what concerns himself politically, in the strongest possible contrast to our workers at home, who may be, and are, led astray by the veriest claptrap as far removed from truth as it is possible to be, is, how he does not see that this gambling mania of his has raised up a vast horde of parasites who do nothing for their kind but fleece them, who are the scourge and pest of society, and to whose interest it is that the man who _earns_ money shall part with it without value received. The old _tu quoque_ argument about the Stock Exchange and the poor man being debarred from the pleasures of the rich can only appeal to the wilfully blind, for if my neighbour, in the exercise of his freedom to do what he will with his own, chooses to cut off his fingers and reduce himself to a helpless cripple, surely that is no reason why I, equally free, should go and do likewise.

However, as the simile is somewhat stale, and the argument has been also used almost threadbare, it is not over-profitable to pursue it too far, but freely admit that with all these factors taken into consideration the prosperity of the country is undeniable, and that prosperity would be amazingly intensified if only there were more people. The one great drawback and danger to this magnificent country is its lack of population--a statement which cannot be too often repeated--and the parochial views of its politicians. Quite rightly, they look upon the comfort and well-being of their own folks as the primal consideration, before which all others fade into insignificance; but quite wrongly, and in purblind fashion, they fail to perceive that the maintenance of that comfort depends at present entirely upon the ability of Great Britain to protect them by her Navy. The total contribution of the Australasian States is at present £240,000 per annum, and it is voted grudgingly, as if the Old Country had no right to expect it. But no one in power seems to grasp the fact that the toiling millions in Britain are being taxed to maintain an expenditure of over forty millions upon the Navy, or an average of £1 per head of the population. If Australasia, whose need of protection from foreign aggression is just as great as ours, were taxed in the same proportion for the same purpose, its contribution to the upkeep of the Imperial Navy would be twenty times as much as it now is, or £4,000,000 per annum. And I dare say that it would not be any too great a price to pay for the security enjoyed. Australasia is building up a splendid Mercantile Marine of her own, she lays heavy burdens upon the Old Country shipowner as well as the foreigner who wishes to trade upon her coasts, for the benefit of her home-bred sailor-citizens; but as far as any ordinary eye can see she begrudges a penny for national insurance in case the Old Country gets her hands full at any time, as she may most easily do.

However, let us hope that Australasia will be wise in time and recognise the possibility of the Labour party in England taking the same sort of view as the regnant party in Australasia. For if they do, and in refusing to vote supplies for the upkeep of a Navy to protect people who do not want, apparently, to be protected, or who are unable to see the absolute helplessness of their country unaided in the face of a hostile attack by a great foreign Power, they take a leaf out of the Australian politician's book, there will be wigs upon the green at once.

I feel very strongly tempted to dip into statistics, which are available to anybody at home who cares to know, but must refrain except in the most casual way. But if ever figures were fascinating, surely they are here. South Australia, or, as it should more rightly be called, Central Australia, since it extends from South to North right across the vast continent, possesses an area of 578,361,600 acres, with a population less than that of the borough of Islington, or, at the census of December, 1902, 365,791. The average private wealth per head is about £250, the value of production between ten and twelve millions a year, and the debt per head (mostly, however, for productive works) is nearly £100. But this represents only a taxation of less than £2 per annum per head of the population. Best of all, as has been well said, the producer is king! The man who cultivates or mines, or breeds cattle and sheep, is the backbone of the community, and this, of course, in a new country, is as it should be. The manufacturer is daily growing in importance, his efforts carefully fostered so that the pauper labour of Europe shall not make those efforts nugatory, and the business man has a splendid field for his energies also.

Yes, it is a wonderful country, where Nature is ready to yield up to man's labour in most bounteous profusion her richest treasures, but where at present _men_ are wanting. The great need of the country is labour--intelligent, willing, healthy labour. It is a white man's country, and white it should be and may remain if only white men are allowed to come in and settle there, as it appears at last they are being invited to do. But it will need some time to elapse before the object-lessons given to our workmen at home by the short-sighted political action of Labour leaders out here has died out of intending emigrants' memories, and the public interest at home is partly transferred from Canada, the astutest of all the Colonies, to Australasia, by far the richest of them all.

V

Sane Socialism

Adelaide may well be described as a staid city where the religious and intellectual element is exceedingly prominent and there is a noticeable absence of haste and bustle. There are, for the size of the city and its environs, an enormous number of literary and musical societies which keep the younger members of the community together by providing them with centres of interest. I cannot honestly say that this tends to narrowness of mind or outlook either, because so many of the members of these societies, both male and female, have travelled, if not at Home--as I gratefully note the Motherland is still called--to India, to Japan, or throughout the Australasian States. In fact, extended travel prevails here to an extent which is amazing compared with that of people with the same incomes and of the same class at home. A very large amount of the money which at home would be spent upon utterly valueless society functions and entertaining people who go away and make invidious comparisons, is here invested in travel; and so you shall find the daughters of a man whose income is only just over four figures telling you in the most casual way of their visits to the Temple of Shion-in, of the marvels of the Inland Sea, of the Taj, of Fiji, or of dear, wonderful, incomprehensible London.

And then so many of the young men were through the war in South Africa, with its wonderful effect upon the enlargement of their minds. And here comes a paradoxical state of affairs. Side by side with their utter contempt for most of the British officers as leaders of men blazes up their passionate love for the old land, and I have often wished that Messrs. C. B. & Co., with their foul "methods of barbarism" slanders and the like, could hear the opinion of alert young Australia upon them and their methods. Especially now, when there looms awfully before us, in the opinion of every one out here that I have had an opportunity of conversing with, the near prospect of another terrible South African war, directly due to the work of the present Government, aided by Messrs. Stead, Aked & Co. I say nothing upon hearing all this, for I feel ashamed that such men should be allowed to play ducks and drakes with a great nation's interest. There is, however, another side to this, to which I will allude later on.

For the present the main thought in my mind is that I am due to leave Adelaide for Melbourne. I must return again on my way home and say farewell to all these splendid folks, who have carried on the best traditions of our true hospitality at home to me. But this morning I have had a great treat. I met by invitation Mr. Watson, a great leader of the Labour party, who has been Prime Minister, and will, if I am any judge, soon be so again. He addressed a meeting last night in the Exhibition Building, at which it is estimated that some four thousand persons were present, for, as I have before said, in this land of adult suffrage, both male and female, people take their politics seriously, and the politician, professional though he be, must lead the strenuous life. This gentleman, who calls himself a Socialist, presents a curious contrast to the so-called Socialists at home of the Keir Hardie type. He is sane and gentlemanly, and from his public utterances, as well as his private conversation, I cannot imagine him lending himself to the despicable spoliation of the lower middle class that is the direct outcome of every Socialistic scheme of legislation at home. I find that Socialism here is of a very different type indeed to the brand that is presented to us in England. There are the usual cranks and Anarchists, who, bat-like, think that the remedy for all social ills is the disruption of society and the elevation of the noisy unfit to the position of equals to or masters of the quiet fit. But they are very small potatoes and few in the hill, and their meetings are farces which have to be protected by the police against the attacks of larrikins who regard them as fair game.

But then we have none of the conditions obtaining here which are so luridly described in Upton Sinclair's book upon Chicago, "The Jungle"--a book which should make the soul of every decent man everywhere to take fire, a book that shows the American magnate in his true colours, and in which the only gleam of hope is that he and his horrible class may be swept from the earth which they defile and destroy. I earnestly hope that this book may have an immense circulation in England, so that our people may really understand what is going on in the United States to-day. I have been accused of saying hard things about the United States, and with reason, but the worst I ever dreamed of after my personal acquaintance with the people is eulogy compared with this frightful catalogue of horrors of which every page contains a nightmare. It has made me look with a most benevolent eye upon the legislation here in this country, which is popularly supposed at home to be in the grip of the enemies of all human progress, but which is at any rate entirely free from the truly damnable methods of the Chicago plutocrat.

Once more, before I face the train journey, let me record the absolute perfection of the weather ever since I have been here to a visitor from home. The air has been so pure, so bracing, even keen at times, yet with none of that congealing bite in it which is the terror of weaklings both young and old at home. Of course the South Australian calls it cold, and greets me always with the remark that it is very cold to-day, with the result that I have no difficulty in finding a fruitful topic of conversation, since to me it is as nearly perfect as it can be. And with the spectacle daily before me of oranges, olives, lemons, grapes, and figs flourishing luxuriantly in the open air, the remark "very cold" seems sarcastic. But then there can be no question of the great heat here in summer, although there is no need to believe the careless dictum of men whom I occasionally meet, that 120° Fahr. in the shade is a common summer temperature here. That only shows the haziness of the average mind with regard to temperatures. With such heat as they do have here in summer, however, there is little wonder that the native-born or the acclimatised citizen does feel as very cold weather that which to us fresh from Britain is delightful beyond adjectives.

And now, at 4.30, I bid goodbye to beautiful Adelaide with its hospitable, genial citizens, and in a cosy compartment of the train watch the lovely landscape glide by as we ascend the hills on our way to Melbourne.

It is delightful travelling, especially as at stated stations there are refreshment-rooms where good and ample meals of well-cooked food are ready, and ample time is allowed for eating them. All prices in these restaurants are fixed by the Government, who own the railways and lease the catering to speculators under most stringent rules as to quality and prices. The result is the best railway meals that I have ever eaten in the world, and also by far the cheapest, indeed the prices are marvellous in their moderation as compared with Europe or America. The rate of travelling is not so rapid, but as the journey is mainly at night that matters little as long as the traveller reaches Melbourne in time to begin business as early as possible in the morning. We had, so I was informed, being personally entirely unconscious of it, a breakdown during the night which delayed us an hour in arriving at Ballarat, some three hours' journey from Melbourne. But we were there at 7.30, and found a hot and copious breakfast awaiting us, of all those things which are peculiarly associated with that meal; the charge was one shilling, or the impecunious could have a huge cup of coffee and a roll and butter for sixpence--a much dearer bite than the full breakfast of sausages, or fish, or ham and eggs, or chops or steaks, with potatoes and bread for double the money. But then it is a lavish land in the matter of food. There are no niggling extras here.

We had only twenty minutes here, so that any extended observation of the flourishing town of about forty thousand inhabitants which stretched away on the level plain on either side of the railway line was impossible, but I looked eagerly around on the well-built houses and wide streets of the town which for its size has probably produced more gold than any other spot in the world. I thought of the wild days of the rush when Port Philip was congested with ships denuded of their crews, when Melbourne was merely a place through which the panting, fiercely eager crowds toiled on their way to the new Eldorado, or returned flushed with success to waste in most hideous debauchery and riot what had cost them such terrible toil to win. All that frenzied fight for gold has gone now, except an occasional fit of madness on a Stock Exchange on the report of one of the companies having "struck it rich"--reports that I believe are sometimes engineered by interested parties for the purpose of unloading worthless shares upon that vast confiding amorphous body, the public.

No, the fat days of the individual gold miner have gone and the workers are now paid and employed in much the same way as they would be if the spoil they sought were coal or iron instead of gold. All the resources of science must be called in to make the business pay at the high price of labour, and the depths to which the burrowing men go in search of the thin veins of payable material is measured now by thousands of feet; and still they go deeper. But Ballarat and its sister gold-producing town, Bendigo, have long ago sowed their wild oats and are as quiet and church-going and generally respectable as any places in the Australian States. They look it too, and I have only to mention the fact that eleven o'clock is closing time for all public-houses (hotels the wise them call out here), and that the Sunday Closing Act is in full operation, to show that the purveyor of intoxicants has many hindrances placed upon his liberty to do as he likes. Gambling is rife, of course, but alas! where is it not in this country eating the heart out of all classes, but especially, as at home, out of those who are least able to afford it, the mechanics? However, as this is the subject I must refer to continually because of its tremendous prominence and effect upon the people, I will leave it now as we are speeding along towards Melbourne through immense areas of level, rich land studded with stumps and supporting flocks of scattered sheep. The approach to Melbourne by rail is so level that almost before you have realised that you are near the city the masts of the huge sailing ships lying in the Yarra Docks are visible, to my utter confusion of locality, because in my recollection the place where such ships lay was Sandridge, Geelong, or Williamstown, the first-named and nearest being about four miles from the city and situated, like the other two, on the shores of Hobson's Bay. But as we draw nearer, and I see the towering buildings apparently grouping themselves about the ships, it occurs to me that I have heard of the deepening of Melbourne's little river until ships of almost any tonnage can come right up into the city itself and lie there as they do in London.

Even with the most cursory glance I can see how great have been the changes that have taken place since I was here first, thirty-five years ago, which is tremendously apparent as compared with that observable in Adelaide. The train glides into the station, an interviewer confronts me, and telling me that it is only a couple of hundred yards to Menzies Hotel, and that my luggage needs no supervision from me, escorts me up a gently inclined street, putting one eager question after another, among which, however, I do _not_ hear, "How do you like Melbourne?" I have not time to notice more than one palatial building--not of the sky-scraper order, but conforming more to the quiet dignity of similar piles at home, the newly finished offices of an Australasian insurance company--when I find myself in the hotel, with my indefatigable reporter still plying me with eager questions, for he represents the only evening newspaper in this city of nearly half a million inhabitants, and wants a story for this afternoon's issue. Fancy a monopoly like that! But I don't know why he should make me say that I considered the _Herald_ to be the finest evening paper I had ever read in the world, since I did not know of its existence half an hour ago, and certainly have not yet read a line in it! But _que voulez vous_ from a reporter?

VI

Mighty Melbourne

From my bedroom window this morning I look down upon the little river Yarra, with the big ships lying snugly alongside of the substantial wharves, and realise what a vast change, in that aspect of Melbourne at any rate, has been wrought since my last visit, when where what is now a splendid area of water accommodation for ships of great size up to a draught of 24 feet, and a most up-to-date congeries of warehouses, wharves, bridges, embankments, and factories, was an apparently hopeless muddle of quaint huts and swampy land, out of which it seemed impossible that order could ever emerge. In those days almost every one spoke contemptuously of the Yarra as an insignificant creek which it was folly to waste money upon in the attempt to make it navigable for vessels of any size, and the pet project was a huge breakwater extending from Williamstown to Sandridge (now Port Melbourne) enclosing the whole of the bay between, including, of course, the embouchure of the Yarra. Around the whole of the coast of this bay was to run a line of deep-water wharfage, alongside of which ships of any tonnage might lie in perfect quiet as in a vast dock. This scheme was fully matured and presented in practical form to the existing Victorian Government by Sir John Coode, but its magnitude of conception, and, of course, its cost, staggered them. So they compromised on the Yarra improvements, with the result that the old piers are still used for the accommodation of the largest ships at Port Melbourne itself, and so they must lie at the piers in what is, owing to the great size of Hobson's Bay, quite an open and unprotected roadstead during certain winds.

But though Hobson's Bay is so noble in area it is not too well off in the matter of depth, and ships drawing over 25 feet have to be most carefully navigated within its limits. More than that, the great ships of the White Star Line which trade here from England around the Cape are terribly handicapped by the fact that if they were loaded to their full paying capacity they could not get out of Hobson's Bay at all, owing to the want of depth at Port Phillip Heads. Strange, is it not, that at two such important points of ocean traffic as Suez and Port Phillip want of water should so long be allowed to hinder development, especially when it is remembered that there are no real engineering difficulties in the way? But of course it must never be forgotten that all really great public works in this country are heavily handicapped by the artificial restraints placed upon development by the restriction of population and consequently of revenue. All great schemes mean great expenditure, and with a population in the whole of this vast country of less than five millions this is impossible. Moreover, at present we have the grave spectacle of a declining birth-rate and an increasing emigration rate, a state of things which, in a country so full of natural wealth as this, is almost inexplicable. At present almost all politicians are agreed that the future of the country depends entirely upon her getting more population, but I do not see anything being done that will really tempt desirable immigrants who have no capital.

This, however, is a question which confronts the visitor at every turn, and so must be dealt with in small doses lest it become monotonous. At present I am anxious to get out and see Melbourne itself, wondering whether I shall notice as great a change in the city as I do in the development of the Yarra. As I step out into the noble width of Bourke Street, in full enjoyment of the glorious crisp morning (for the weather is still perfect), the hotel porter greets me with, "Very cold this morning, sir," to which I only mumble unintelligibly in reply, for I really cannot say anything uncomplimentary to this lovely climate. A double tramcar without seats on top comes swiftly up the hill from the river-bank, and I jump on, noticing as I do that it is a cable-car. The pace is good, the road splendidly wide and straight, giving a view, when you are at its highest point, clear from one end to the other, a distance of about two miles. But I get a shock when I have to pay threepence for a ride of about half a mile; for there are no sections, as in most other places. Within certain limits of what may be called the metropolitan area the price is threepence any distance; but you may purchase eight tickets for a shilling, each of which will frank you for a threepenny ride.

I do not think, however, that the average man saves much in this way, since it is a very common form of hospitality, when acquaintances meet on a car, to say, as hands go groping in pockets, "Oh, all right, I've got tickets!" and hand the conductor two. Outside the city limits these tickets are not available, but the fare remains the same. These very swift and comfortable cars are in the hands of private companies, who, I should think, must make a fine dividend, although it must be remembered that the wages are high and the service exceedingly good, commencing at 5.30 or 6 in the morning, and running most frequently until midnight. And as the city is built on the American square plan, with all the principal streets crossing one another at right angles, locomotion is very easy within the city limits.

My first trip was down Bourke Street, which I remembered thirty-five years ago as the principal, the finest street in Melbourne; and I confess that I was somewhat disappointed with its unequal appearance and the dearth of fine buildings, for I had expected, from what I had heard, much greater development. The Post Office is a fine building, but not so favourably situated as that at Adelaide, so that, notwithstanding its fine tower and _façade_, it will not look imposing. Moreover, it is obviously much too small for the requirements of Melbourne, for there is a mean-looking shed devoted to telephone work; and for parcel-post delivery of _poste restante_ letters and money-order business the customer must go a considerable distance round into little Bourke Street of unsavoury fame. Before leaving this part of the question, let me say that nothing, I should think, would strike the British new chum more forcibly than the immense congeries of telegraphic, telephone, and other wires carried on posts at the sides of all the principal streets of the Australian cities, in emulation of the way these things are done in the United States. In Perth and Fremantle there are, in addition to the other cobwebby arrangements overhead, electric-car wires, and I could not help wondering what would be the result if one of these enormously high-tension car wires were to get broken and flung into the midst of a lot of telegraph and telephone wires by its side, especially on a night when the streets were crowded, as they often are, with people.

Adelaide is, as I have said before, still in the thrall of the mediæval horse-car, wherein, if she did but know it, she is behind the smallest provincial town in England and some of the districts of London, so that at present she has nought to fear from so dire a catastrophe. Melbourne is served, as I have also said, with cable-cars, and for the life of me I cannot see why she should want anything better, especially as there is no question of linking up. I have been told that the cost of the upkeep of the cables is much greater than that of electrical power, but when I humbly inquire what the cost of conversion will be I am met with vague generalities. A little bird has whispered to me that when I get to Sydney I shall know the reason, which is that Sydney has converted her cable-cars into trolley electrics, and Melbourne, feeling a back number on this question, is of course furious, and must ante-up. You remember in the "Naulahka" how cheerfully, whole-heartedly, and venomously the two rival cities, Rustler and Topaz, hated one another? Even so do the rival cities in Australia in like manner disobey the greatest commandment of all, and, remembering the misdirected affections of Liverpool and Manchester, I cannot throw any stones.

Let me return to a subject that I can unreservedly praise Melbourne for--the magnificent paving and grading of her main streets. It is, to my mind, a most effectual mark of high civilisation when the roads of a city are well laid and well cleansed, especially when, as in Melbourne, they are such noble thoroughfares. There is an immense traffic both on side-walks and in the roadway in Melbourne, but the condition of both _trottoir_ and road is above reproach, even better than in Paris, which is to those who know, high praise. It would amuse our keen urchins who, in the City of London, dart about in the midst of the complications of the wheels and the clattering of hoofs with their exaggerated dustpans and hard brooms collecting the dung, to see their opposite numbers in Melbourne with a slightly bigger pan mounted on a pair of wheels and having a handle attached, doing the same work in a much more leisurely but effectual fashion. They would, however, say as I said, "That kind of contraption wouldn't work at all opposite the Mansion House." And, of course, they would deride the effort to make things easier, as men and boys always do.

I have, however, arrived at Elizabeth Street, which runs at right angles to Bourke Street and only stops at the Yarra Bank or Flinders Street, and I am at once convinced of the growth and splendour of Melbourne. The shops are superb, the buildings are beautifully and splendidly built, and the crowds of people are immense. But--there is always a but, somehow--I am saddened to see outside the numerous drink-shops or hotels a disfigurement of hurriedly printed telegrams from the racecourses, of the day's racing, the odds, and the results of all that infernal literature that saps the very soul of a nation. Tattersall's is a name apparently to conjure with, every foul-mouthed dirty-handed filcher of other men's earnings calls himself a Tattersall's saloon or a Tattersall's bar, until I wonder what old Tatt, who was, I believe, a gentleman anyhow, would have said had he seen to what base uses his honoured name would be put. Forgive me for referring to this so frequently, but it is so thrust down your throat at every turn that it is impossible to avoid saying something about it, and sorrowing over its effect upon the people all around you.

I turned down Elizabeth Street toward the river, and was staggered at the density of the crowds. It was 11 a.m., and the people were thick as bees swarming; not loafing about, either, but moving as if they had business somewhere. And the shops, those sure indications of prosperity, were quite comparable with any that I have seen anywhere, especially those devoted to jewellery, photography, drapery, and books! This must be a reading community indeed, for I do not remember having seen anything anywhere like Cole's Book Arcade or the Straider Libraries, where people go to buy books, not to borrow them. But I thought pitifully of authors' royalties, which at home are 1s. 3d. or 1s. 6d. on a book which is sold for 4s. 6d., and out here are threepence or fourpence on the same book sold at 2s. 6d. or 3s. 6d. This, however, being a matter only concerning those who write books, will not interest the general public, who appear to imagine that the author is fed and clothed and housed miraculously and ought not to expect payment for writing, but ought rather to carry about a ton or so of his books for glad distribution to every one that asks for them.

Yes, Elizabeth Street was an eye-opener to me, who remember it in the days of long thirty-five years ago. It is of course unequal, quite small and unpretentious buildings cheek by jowl with mighty erections, but no more so than Oxford Street, which indeed it much resembles at the river end, except for the permanent shelters over the wide pavements so that people shopping on foot are protected from the sun or the rain, and for the never-ending flight of the cable-cars. It is true that there are no emporia comparable to Marshall & Snelgrove's, D. H. Evans & Co., Waring's, or John Lewis's, but that is not to be expected, remembering that we are in a city with about the population of Islington. But turning the corner of Elizabeth Street into Collins Street you get a vista of commercial buildings that for solidity, beauty, and also architectural effect may safely challenge comparison with any town or city in the old country, with the added advantage of having a splendidly wide and straight street of a couple of miles in length to show them off in. The only city at home that can compare advantageously with Melbourne as far as Collins, Elizabeth, and Swanston Streets are concerned, is Glasgow, and of course Glasgow has an immense advantage in point of size. On the other hand, Melbourne scores heavily in the matter of atmosphere and cleanliness. Yet, I do not know how it is, the great public buildings of Melbourne, with the exception of the Parliament Buildings, suffer greatly from their sites, which do not allow them to be seen as they should be. But there again we in London can say little, for some of our finest buildings have been hidden away so that they may hardly be seen to any advantage at all. And this, of course, is also the case in most of our great cities except in certain favoured spots, such as the view of the Houses of Parliament from the river, the Government offices of St. James's Park, St. George's Hall and its surroundings in Liverpool, &c., &c.

Yet when we get down to bed-rock facts it is perfectly certain that Collins Street, Melbourne, is a thoroughfare that no city even of ten times Melbourne's age need be ashamed of, and it is marvellous how with so small a population in the rest of the State it has been built and is kept bustling. The site of the city is not beautiful, nor has it any lovely setting such as Adelaide possesses, but from the point of view of traffic it is splendid, as there are no hills anywhere to be negotiated, and consequently the railways and tramways can be most economically laid. In fact, so low is the whole plain upon which Melbourne and its great network of suburbs stand that I found myself asking several people if they ever had any trouble with abnormally high tides, if the Yarra never misbehaved itself. But they all said no, since the embankments have been built there does not appear to have been any trouble with floods. I can remember very well when much of what is now covered with beautiful houses and gardens was a barren waste of sand, to walk upon which in summer was torment. Indeed, I noticed even now that in the principal streets of some of the most prosperous suburbs around the bay there was an abundance of sea-sand, which certainly had not blown there. Of course, there is the comforting reflection that Melbourne is not on the sea, and that any great oceanic disturbance on the coast must spend itself against the protecting barrier of the Heads of Hobson's Bay, so that, failing any abnormal upheaval within the great bay itself, there is not much likelihood of any disastrous flood, in spite of the low level of the ground. Of which I am heartily glad, for it is a noble city--a worthy monument to the energy and enterprise of our fellows across the sea.

VII

Some Fleeting Comparisons

This is a paradoxical country in many ways. For instance, while wages are high in the cities and the cost of living is amazingly cheap, the prices of certain articles jump up and metaphorically knock you down. For instance, I was the other day admiring some magnificent lobsters (crawfish) in a fishmonger's window, freshly boiled and steaming, ticketed 1s. 6d. each. Such crustacea of equal size in London certainly could not be purchased for 5s. each, while for quality, flavour, and tenderness the English lobster is not within sight of the Australian variety. The prices of fruit and vegetables I have already alluded to in their phenomenal lowness, while the standard price of tea, the national beverage far more than with us, is 1s. 3d. per pound. If you wish for something very special you pay 1s. 6d., but few do. But walking away from those lobsters and the announcement that a _table-d'hote_ dinner of three courses might be purchased for sixpence, the price which has not varied apparently since I was here thirty-five years ago in respectable eating-houses, I bethought me that I needed a button-hook. And since I am exceedingly gifted at losing such small articles, I sought for a cheap one. I soon found one of the shops which are very common out here, a sort of variety store where you can purchase almost anything in the way of small non-perishable articles, and proffered my request. The attendant immediately produced one such as are sold on cards at home for six a penny. I took it and said it would do exactly. How much? "Sixpence," he responded promptly; whereupon I gasped, and then laughed heartily. He inquired rather anxiously what I was laughing at, and when I told him he was angry, and said he hadn't asked for my custom. Whereupon we parted.

On another occasion I went to one of the beautiful bays close to the Heads and hired a boat to go fishing. I was out for four hours by myself, and when I returned and asked what I had to pay I was told two shillings. Which I naturally compared with the two and sixpence an hour charge at our watering-places at home and wondered at consumedly.

There is a good deal of poverty, undoubtedly, of a certain kind, and must be more than I have had any opportunity of ascertaining within the working-class localities. But I do not think there is any hunger, provisions being so very plentiful and cheap. It is curious, however, to see the rough, unkempt, hard-bitten men and women who mix with the busy throng in the principal thoroughfares, and look wistfully around them as if seeking sympathy and companionship. They have fled from the loneliness of the back country, and in the great, bustling city have found a greater solitude than ever. Now and then may be met in Collins, Elizabeth, or Swanston Streets, a swagman, usually old and grey, with his ragged bluey or blanket-wrapped bundle slung at his back, and his battered, soot-encrusted billy (tin tea-can) in his hand; just as much out of place in that busy, bustling throng, as any unit of it would be in the great solitudes whose message of mystery seems to peer out of his eyes. Occasionally one of these men will camp in some doorway, and on being arrested will plead, with an air of innocent wonder, that he was not aware of wrongdoing, seeing that for the whole of his life he had lived and slept in the open, and had never been arrested for it before. But I should say that the majority of the swagmen now, those at any rate who are found in the vicinity of the towns, are blood brothers of the hobo in the United States and the tramp in our country, nomads whose one characteristic is an utter aversion to work and whose one virtue is a love of the open. The old days when the honest splitter or shearer or farm-hand, the bushman of any kind, had perforce to hump his bluey and pad off on the wallaby track in search of work when his job was done, or he got tired of it, are practically gone except in the remote districts of this vast continent, whose denizens rarely see civilisation at all.

Neither in Adelaide or here in Melbourne have I seen any begging except by a couple of blind men, although there are a good many ragged, barefooted urchins running about in the vicinity of the railway stations selling evening newspapers. There is, however, an obvious overcrowding of the folks who ought to be in the country into the towns; and really it is not to be wondered at, seeing how many of those who come out here are entirely unused to and unfitted for a country life, and especially life in a new country. Which, of course, accounts for the lack of development of this amazing continent. The converse of this equally accounts for the advance of Canada, in that she welcomes those who have never known anything but the hard and grinding life necessary for wresting from wild nature the wealth that she holds in trust for the children of men, and who learn with a surprise that it takes much time to mitigate, that their earnings will not be snatched from them by force and fraud--who have looked, indeed, for nothing else but just the barest means of existence as the result of their incessant, terrible labours. Australia will have none of these, and as a consequence that mighty land is as yet barely scratched. Of what use can it be to advertise for farmers with capital to come to Australia and take up rich lands at a low price, if the labour to till and develop those lands is not to be had except at a price that precludes any idea of profit?

I make these remarks in no carping spirit, but when I see that there is a general tendency in the Press to grumble at the fishing being in the hands of Italians, and gardening in the grip of the Chinese, while at the same time talking of the wondrous wealth of the country awaiting development, I am filled with wonder at the curious turn of mind that imagines that you can keep a vast continent in the hands of a few people and yet exploit its resources--a process which they know can only be accomplished by much manual labour. The results which have already been achieved by the few are a sufficient proof of the amazing richness of the country, but with a sufficiency of the white labour which is craving for work and bread in the old countries what a mighty uprising of this great Commonwealth we should see! The cry now is all for population, but no provision is made for the obtaining of the proper kind of population--people that are willing to work, and are all unused to or demoralised by city life, but lack the means of crossing the immense distance which separates them from the starvation of the old land and the plenty of the new.

Moreover, this question of the white immigration is the only one of any importance before the Australasian politicians just now. The answer to it, free passages hither for white men willing to work on the land, British preferably, but white anyhow, is the only one that will satisfactorily meet the demand, never lost sight of, for a white Australia. A most desirable, an intensely reasonable demand, but one impossible of attainment unless white men of no means but their strong bodies can be assisted to get here as they are to Canada. No one wants to see a yellow Australia, but unless something is done speedily it will not be possible to avoid having a large part of Australia yellow within a very few years. Indeed I have great and grave doubts whether it will be possible to avoid it at all; because there is not the slightest use in blinking the fact that an immense area of the extreme north of Australia is not a white man's country. He may own it, but he cannot work it; and of what use is land without labour? It is the whole question of the Transvaal and Rhodesia over again, but in a more acute and decided form. Those regions are of incalculable wealth, but they must have men to work them who can stand the climate.

Those men, the very men for the business, are clamouring to be allowed to come in, and it is a most serious question how much longer will the Commonwealth Government be able to keep them out. They are quite within reason in pointing out as they do that even the vast southern half or three-quarters of the continent where white men can both live and work, is practically unoccupied except in a few isolated spots, and to keep them out of land which they do not wish to possess but only to have the privilege of earning a living upon, is most dog-in-the-manger like. It may sound like an exaggeration to speak of Australia as being practically unoccupied save in a few isolated spots, but it is quite true. When we remember that Australia alone is immensely larger than the United States, and that the whole of her population is not much more than that of the City of New York, we feel inclined to stand aghast at such a state of affairs.

What, however, has driven this home to me more than anything else has been the visit to Melbourne just now of the Japanese training squadron of three gunboats or third-class cruisers, the _Hashidate_, _Matsushima_, and _Itsushima_, under the command of Admiral Shimamura, who was Admiral Togo's chief of staff. Now it is entirely unnecessary for me to refer to the splendid behaviour of these men, who always win golden opinions wherever they go, or of the general courtesy of the officers, as you have had a visiting squadron at home at the same time. But I confess I was not prepared to find, as I did, so exceedingly hearty and spontaneous a welcome here extended to our allies as I have seen. At home it was impossible for it to be otherwise, remembering with what intense eagerness we had followed the fortunes of the Japanese, and how one and all felt interested in their success against the men who had committed the unatoned-for outrage of the Dogger Bank. Probably we have never had an alliance which has aroused such genuine, heartfelt enthusiasm as this with the Japanese, nor have ever felt such deep admiration for people apparently possessed of all the old-fashioned virtues of fidelity, courage, patriotism, and indifference to death. Beyond all this the Japanese are not our near neighbours, and we have no room in England to tempt them if they were. And so we are hardly in a position to judge of the general feeling towards them in Australia, which lives in constant dread of having a flood of Asiatic labour poured into it, and knows full well what that would mean. This feeling of dread finds malignant expression in certain organs which have a very large sale. There the Japanese are invariably spoken of as monkeys and caricatured in most unlovely fashion. And knowing all this, I wondered much what sort of a reception the Japanese would have when they came here in their warships as official guests. Well, the city just went wild over them. They compelled admiration by their behaviour, as indeed they always do, and they practically monopolised public attention in the most favourable way. They went everywhere and saw everything, every hospitality that the city could show, both official and private, being showered upon them. I was literally amazed at the show of enthusiasm manifested by the people, which perhaps reached its acme when some hundreds of the men, accompanied by a large detachment of our own bluejackets from the _Psyche_ and _Cerberus_, marched through the principal streets on their way to a huge garden party at the Zoo. The streets were packed as thickly with shouting, excited people as would have been the case in London or Liverpool, and the air rang with Banzais. I was standing at one of the windows of the Vienna Café, whither I had been invited to lunch by Mr. Atlee Hunt to meet Mr. Alfred Deakin, Prime Minister of the Commonwealth. At first I was alone, but Mr. Deakin joined me before the martial procession had passed, and as soon as the cheering had subsided he said, "Fine fellows, aren't they?" "Yes," I replied, "but what are you going to make of this portent? After your speech yesterday, when you most justly and truly praised them for the noble deeds by which they had won their high position among the nations, how are you going to deal with their application to be admitted into the Commonwealth on the same footing as other civilised people?" "Oh," he said, "we shall refuse them admission, of course, as before. This cannot affect that." "Ah," I retorted, "but how will you maintain that attitude? Suppose that they insist upon being treated as white men and allies of Great Britain, how will you keep them out?" "We shall keep them out all right enough," he replied; "and besides, they have got their hands full in China and Korea for many years to come--much too full for them to worry about us."

I was fain to drop the subject then, but as may readily be supposed I was entirely unsatisfied with this method of disposing of a mighty issue which may be presented at any moment, and cannot but be precipitated by the language of the newspapers aforesaid.[1] Even the tiny squadron here present of third-class cruisers is armed and manned as if it were of battleships, and I fairly gasped with amazement to see that one of them carried a 12½-in. (66-ton) gun. I am almost ashamed to point out how absolutely defenceless this wonderful land is with practically all its portable wealth concentrated within easy reach of the sea, at the mercy of a modern fleet, and of the lamentable way in which defence is allowed to drift, in reliance unspoken, but none the less definite for that, upon the immensely burdened Old Country for protection. It is inexplicable that from the point of view of self-preservation something is not done and done quickly. If only they would, as I have had several opportunities of telling them in public meetings, tax themselves to the same extent for the Navy alone as we are taxed at home, or to the extent of, say, 25s. per head of the population, they would have instead of the beggarly £200,000 per annum they now contribute, an income of £5,000,000 per annum which, in three or four years, would make either Germany or Japan think twice before attacking them, if the money were properly spent.

I am immensely grieved at the defenceless condition of this people in case of anything befalling the Mother Country in the shape of a European war. Their only hope in such a case of preserving their independence should disaster overtake the British Fleet (and we must face that possibility) would be to enlist the aid of the Japanese, whom they treat at present as savages unless they come with a fleet. It is an impossible position, and one that cannot much longer be maintained. It must be settled one way or the other, in spite of all the wrangling of professional politicians, and I can only hope that it will not be settled by force of arms, because that could only be such a one-sided affair, could only be settled in the least desirable way by all English-speaking people.

I am leaving Melbourne much saddened. It is such a beautiful city. It represents so much of human energy and skill, and also such a vast amount of kindliness and courtesy, especially towards that country which the native-born still speaks of regretfully as Home. I was told by a great many people that I should find much of the offensive bumptiousness with which Americans speak of Britain out here. I have not found any of it. The people are, as is quite natural, fiercely resentful of criticism from anybody, and especially from the Mother Country. But they are also intensely loyal, as well as intensely self-critical. There has been quite a storm raised here just lately. The Exhibition building--State property--has been leased to a gambler, a speculator in other men's earnings, for the purposes of so-called sport, for a prize-fight. They called it a boxing competition, but we all know what that means. Several thousands of people crowded to see it, among them many prominent public men. In fact, if you can imagine the Albert Hall let for the same purpose to a prominent bookmaker for a boxing match and the leading members of both Houses of Parliament attending the show, you can imagine what it was like. There was a fierce controversy in the newspapers about it, in which all the old arguments about the manly sport were trotted out, but the result was that the speculator netted an enormous sum of money, and continues to defy the Government by keeping open gambling-houses where whosoever will may throw away his money on the possible result of a horse-race. Still, I have just read that the Government has decided that the Exhibition building shall not be used for such purposes again. That decision, however, may be rescinded to-morrow.

Now I go to Sydney, the Queen of the South. I have not said all I could say by a great deal, for there are some subjects too thorny to touch in print, but I hope all Melbourne folks will recognise how much I love their beautiful city, and how deeply I wish it well.

Footnote:

[1] When this paragraph reached Melbourne, some reporter interviewed Mr. Deakin on the subject and endeavoured to make a grievance out of it against the writer. But the Right Honourable gentleman refused to see the matter in that light, and behaved with his usual kindly courtesy; otherwise the passage should have been deleted, much as I feel its importance.

VIII

On The Old Track

Fortunately for me one of the fine ships of the Orient-Royal Mail Company was available at the time that I wished to leave for Sydney, so that I was able to travel in the pleasantest possible way according to my ideas, long train journeys having no charms for me. The _Ortona_ was due to leave Port Melbourne railway pier at 8 in the evening, but owing to various hindrances of the usual character she did not get away until nearly midnight. But I looked my last upon the brilliant city at the time appointed, and having made myself comfortable on board did not care to go back again. Besides, I knew that I should have an opportunity of bidding a final farewell on my return journey, as it is inevitable that I pass this way, and there is always a day to spare. So that whatever points about it I have missed I shall be able to pick up in a later chapter.

At last the whole of the outward cargo is out, the last slingful has been lowered into the railway truck alongside, and immediately the clang of the engine-room gong "Stand by!" is heard. No matter what the size of the ship or the distance she may be going, her departure has no more of fuss in it than a man makes leaving his own front door for work in the morning. And in our service at any rate the tendency is to work ever more quietly, so that you shall see the whole vast fabric glide away seaward, and hear nothing save an occasional whistle or the clang of a telegraph gong. To-night, for instance; the _Ortona_ is 9,000 tons, a huge monster lying stern to seaward, and secured to the wharf, alongside of which she towers, by sundry steel hawsers. One whistle and those hawsers are cast off, men on the wharf slipping their bights off the mooring-posts. A responsive whistle informs the bridge that she is free. There is a clang in the engine-room, and the great shadowy mass glides astern until clear of the pier. Then another clang orders the port propeller to go ahead, and the ship revolves almost upon her axis in ghostly fashion without the aid of the rudder. As soon as she is round far enough another message is sounded in the engine-room, "Ahead starboard!" and with both propellers revolving the same way and the helm over to starboard she comes round to her course and is away in more than stately wise, but just as easily as a motor-car leaving a garage.

The superb management of the modern mail and passenger ocean steamers in all departments renders it possible for even the least experienced voyager to feel completely at home within an hour of the vessel's leaving the pier, even when she goes straight out to sea at once (sea-sickness, of course, always excepted); but your Australasian passenger around the coast is seldom inexperienced. The distances are great between the principal cities, but the fares are quite moderate, and the vessels are so comfortable that there is an immense and incessant passenger traffic, the percentage of travellers coastwise being at least twenty times what it is at home. And I do not see that the connecting up of the cities by railway, with its great saving of time, has lessened that percentage much--it has merely increased the numbers of those who desired to travel, but dreaded the sea journey. So, as usual, we had a large number of short-distance passengers; in fact the _Ortona's_ huge accommodation was rather severely taxed, and yet within, as I say, one hour from Port Melbourne nearly all of them were snugly in bed and asleep, while the captain and pilot on the lofty bridge guided the big vessel through the mirk along the tortuous deep-water channel leading from Port Melbourne to Queenscliff, the Heads of Hobson's Bay, some fifty miles distant.

Daylight found a few of us kindred spirits on deck in pyjamas sniffing the keen ozone-laden air, and watching with awe and admiration the amazing miracle of the sunrise. And here let me say that while I have often experienced terrific weather in these waters, I know of no other part of the world where, when the weather is fine, a man can feel the zest of living more keenly than he can here even in summer if he be up early. But now, in what they call winter, it is delightful beyond expression. It is revivifying to the invalid who withers under a cold blast and languishes in the warm airs, but having the air exactly tempered to the happy medium cannot but feel the desire of life return, the malaise of feeble health passing away until existence puts on bright hues and the greyness of things disappears as do the morning mists before the conquering sun. We linger on and on, trying to pick out once familiar headlands from the blue outlines of the land far on our port beam, until the warning bugle sends us scurrying below, etiquette demanding that all _déshabille_ be _tabu_ after 8 a.m. But only fools and ladies linger long over their toilet on board ship. Experience soon teaches the landsman to be like the sailor in that respect, and so most of us are on deck again in a few minutes, unwilling to miss the gorgeous panorama of Bass's Straits near Wilson's Promontory, which we are rapidly nearing. Here is that marvellous dome of rock rising sheer from the sea to a height of about 400 feet, and almost as symmetrical as St. Peter's, except that on the southern side a huge cavern, whose floor is 40 feet above high-water and whose roof is over 100 feet high, has been scooped out by the hand of Nature--a cave inaccessible save by the sea-birds, whom, however, I have never seen entering it: a place that impels the beholder to dare all dangers in order to investigate its mysteries, but even on a day like this, when the ocean is peaceful as the bosom of a sleeping child, the gigantic swell of the South thunders up against those sheer walls of rock, and says, in unmistakable language, that for any intruder it is the place of death.

But we glide rapidly past it at our sixteen miles an hour, round the much-dreaded Wilson's Promontory, which seems to be a gathering-point of storms, and along the picturesque coast, passing on our way many inter-colonial steamers befouling the bright air with their black columns of smoke, the coal they burn being native, and not of a quality conducive to clean burning; that is reserved to the coal from Wales which we are still using, and in consequence showing but a misty feather from our twin funnels hardly discernible against the sky. This is the invaluable fuel which we are so eagerly selling to our enemies to be used against us in the near future. But, of course, when we give away our trade with both hands, when we send abroad our best bone and muscle, and employ wastrel alien labour instead, a little thing like selling our incomparable naval coal to the enemy is a mere detail. I was asked the other day why Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and his henchmen did not, while in power, make short work of their opportunities and invite the Germans to take possession of South Africa, tell the Colonies to look after themselves, and suggest that it was unchristian to keep Great Britain under British rule, since it was manifestly more righteous, according to Bannerman, Massingham, Stead & Co. that it should be run by Michael or Uncle Sam than by John Bull & Co. This question I could not answer, but it was a fair sample of what every nation in the world thinks of us to-day. It is about the only thing they are agreed upon--that Britain is a sort of Jubilee Juggins, in the common slang, who stands in the market-place and invites the tricksters and the shysters of the world to come and divide between them not merely the contents of his pockets but his heritage. It is fast becoming difficult to avoid being ashamed to bear the name of Englishman.

But we are nearing Sydney and all my interest is at concert pitch, for with the exception of a couple of days, while on my passage South from Brisbane in '80, I have not been here for thirty-five years. Of course I know that the amazing beauties of Port Jackson cannot be altered by the hand of man, but I am very curious to see what the superficial changes are. In the glory of a perfect morning we draw near the Heads, so close in that I am able to pick out the track of the electric cars going to Bondi or Botany Bay, the only alteration that I can see. When to me comes a young gentleman with an awful (yes, I can't help the word) collar that almost decapitates him, and seizing me by the arm, exclaims with almost frenzied eagerness, "D'you see that gap there? That's where the _Dunbar_ was lost, lemme see, ever so many years ago. Y'ore a stranger, come in the smoke-room and have a drink, an' I'll tell you all about it." (At 7.30 a.m.!) I gaze upon him benignantly, allowing no facial sign to betray the fact that when lamp-trimmer of the old A.S.N. Co.'s boats out here thirty-five years ago I had made many grateful shillings and eke half-crowns retailing that yarn to wondering passengers. And he beams upon me through his gold-rimmed spectacles as he retails a mass of distorted fact, what time I cling to the rail and refuse to be drawn smoke-roomwards at any hazard, for I want, in the words of Wan Lung, "makee looksee go in." He finally concludes with the encomium, "Well, old chap, you're a good listener, anyhow. Come and dig me out, won't you? I room at so-and-so, and I'll show you Sydney, real; I was born here." I compose my features and accept his card, never once, thank goodness, losing command of my features; but I am equally grateful to say that I never saw him again, knowingly.

A swift pilot steamer ranges alongside, drops a boat as smartly as heart could wish, and (I timed it) in eight minutes from our "slow down" bell we were going full speed for the entrance and the boat was rehoisted on board the pilot steamer, she making frantic efforts to keep up with us as we swept grandly in for the narrow entrance. And then came the old familiar thrill as, sweeping round the South Head with the helm almost hard a-starboard, we open the harbour, so cunningly hidden by nature that even our greatest navigator sailed past it and did not realise what lay within. The frowning scarp of the North Head towered above us in all its grim majesty, the wake made a perfect semicircle on the glassy sea, and, behold, the opening closed in behind us and all the lovely panorama of the most beautiful harbour in the world unfolded before us as we glided swiftly towards our goal. My longing eyes saw little change as yet. All was as it had been--a few dwellings dotted here and there as if haphazard among the wooded eminences, except that the trolley lines showed up here and there. A pause for the doctor, a merely perfunctory visit anyhow, and away we went again, turning a sudden corner which showed me what a splendid city Sydney has become. But a spasm of horror went through me as I noticed that the city was enshrouded in a pall of filthy smoke belching from a forest of chimneys and hiding its beauties most effectually. And I wondered mightily at the gall of Sydney folks whom I had met in London complaining about our atmosphere! However, that is a reflection that will continually occur to the Londoner, abroad especially, after he has grown to accept it as unanswerable that London is the grimiest, gloomiest, and altogether most uninhabitable city in the world. I suppose it is a part of our national magnanimity to acquiesce in all the hard things that are said of us and the vaunts of our visitors, but I don't know whether the time has not arrived when we might with advantage talk back, in some directions at any rate.

It is now that the visitor, returning after the lapse of many years, realises for the first time what immense changes time has wrought in the appearance of a place once so familiar. Adelaide, and even Melbourne, do not impress one until close attention has been paid and improvements pointed out by residents, for in their general aspect they remain the same as they did a quarter of a century ago. But Sydney bursts upon the view, dominating its magnificent bay as the veritable Queen of the Waters, and when seen in the early dawn, before the aforesaid disfiguring pall of black smoke has been spread, beautiful and picturesque to the limit of expression. But it is in the aspect of the harbour itself that a seafarer will find the greatest change. When I came here first, thirty-five years ago, Sydney was most noticeable for the magnificent fleets of noble sailing ships that lay reposing in all their stately beauty on the waters adjacent to the city, or were ranged all around the Circular Quay. All the grand old classic names which thrill the hearts of old sailors with memories of wonderful ocean races are associated with Sydney as with no other port in the world. The splendid fleets of Devitt and Moore, of George Thompson, the Duthies, Greens, Wigrams, represented by such flyers as the _Thermopylæ_, _Sobraon_, _Parramatta_, _Brilliant_, _Abergeldie_, _Superb_, and a host of others whose names leap to the memory, lay here as much at home as they were in London, and of course seen to much greater advantage. For Sydney lends itself so easily and naturally to maritime display, and its visitors were almost invariably of the aristocracy of the sea. No ship could hope to compete successfully for the immense valuable freightage of wool unless she were of the highest class and speed, and had also good passenger accommodation. And so the noble company of vessels which burst upon the beholder's gaze as his vessel rounded the quaint little island fort of Pinchgut impressed him mightily.

Steam was in those days only just beginning to make itself felt in shipping out here. The P. & O. sent an infrequent ship, and a company had just crept into being which was endeavouring to institute a steam service from the Old Country with a few vessels of poor size and low power; but the dainty clippers ignored these grimy interlopers, looking down upon them as if with conscious pride in their own beauty from their splendid panoply of tophamper soaring into the skies. The Australasian coasting trade was beginning to be dominated by steamers which, however, in those days, were a collection of the quaintest freaks ever seen outside of a naval museum of antiquities. Yet such as they were they earned golden harvests for their owners in spite of their evil accommodation, their snail-like pace, and general unpunctuality. The food supplied was good and plentiful, if fairly rough in its preparation, and in any case the Colonial coasting passengers had not then learned to be fastidious. But these vessels used to sneak into Sydney and past the splendid host of sailing ships into their own out-of-the-way corner, as if ashamed of their ungainly hulls and their habit of befouling the bright air with the belching black clouds from their funnels--the result of burning native coal. They never dared to aspire to an honoured glance at the swagger curve of Circular Quay or Sydney Cove; that was reserved for sailing ships alone. It is a beautifully-shaped indentation in the shores of the harbour, the bow of which comes into what might be called the heart of the city. Its waters are deep and uniform; in fact, it is a natural dock of the most perfect type and in the most suitable place. But in those days its shores were sloping and unembanked, so that the ships were moored as close to as they could get, and long, massive stages connected them with the bank, for it was so sheltered that this primitive arrangement was quite undisturbed by weather.

That is all altered now. There is as great a change as from the _Dido_ and _Basilisk_, ancient men-of-war of the Australasian Squadron of those days to the _Powerful_ and _Challenger_ lying in Farm Cove adjacent, which we have just passed. The few sailing ships that are here now are anchored in out-of-the-way coves far from the city, and they look as if pitifully aware that they are only here on sufferance, that their day of pride and power has gone, never to return.

IX

The Queen City Of The South

Circular Quay, Sydney, is now embanked and faced in permanent and enduring fashion throughout its entire length of shore, and such splendid ships as the _Moldavia_, of the P. & O., the _Orontes_, of the Orient-Royal Mail, and the huge ships of the North German Lloyd's lie close alongside as if in dock, while all along the Circular Quay to the Darling Harbour Bridge there is splendid wharfage for the big steamships of Messrs. Howard Smith & Co., the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand, and the A.U.S.N. Co., in whose hands are practically concentrated the Inter-colonial (or, as they prefer to call it, the Inter-state) trade. Here is to be found a most wonderful development of Australasian energy, and it is especially a credit to Sydney, which has always taken the lead in shipping matters out here, although there is something very wonderful in the rise and progress in the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand. The vessels to be found lying at these wharves would be a credit to any country and any trade in the world for size, speed, and comfort of passengers. They are equipped not merely for coastal trade, but for a whole-world trade, some of them being far finer in every way than the liners from home were twenty years ago.

However, in spite of the development in the shipping trade and the rise in power of the shipping companies, there has been practically no falling-off in the status of the men who do the work. In this favoured land Jack is no inarticulate helot, doomed to spend his strength for the benefit of others, and take just what they choose to fling him contemptuously in return. The seafarers here are a highly organised body, able and willing to speak with the enemy in the gate, and the conditions under which they live are little, if any, inferior to any enjoyed by their fellow-workers ashore. The standard wages for seamen is £6 10s. per month, with, of course, an eight hours' day when in port, and a shilling per hour overtime, while firemen and trimmers get 30s. and 10s. per month more respectively. And the food is not merely good and plentiful, it is excellent, and lavish in its profusion. It should be, of course, this being the land of plenty, especially in the matter of eatables. Altogether, I should be inclined to say positively that in no part of the world is the seafarer so well off in every respect as in Australasia, and certainly there is nowhere in the world where the seafarer has so much Parliamentary and Governmental influence at work for his benefit--influence which is energised by the fact that the men who use it are mostly men who have had practical experience of a seafaring life themselves.

I know I shall be confronted with a question as to whether I do not consider the position of the workers in vessels on the great American lakes superior to any others. Well, I know of those conditions, highly democratic as they are, and I unhesitatingly say that they are far inferior to those obtaining in Australasia. Assuming that the Lake business is seafaring at all and not ferrying on a fairly large scale, it must be remembered that, as in every other American institution, the men are the victims of corrupt combinations, that they cannot have good food because it does not exist--that is, according to our ideas of what constitutes good, wholesome food--and lastly, that while the wages are not higher, navigation is closed throughout the long and terrible winter by ice. Then the prudent worker lives on his savings, the imprudent majority starve or join the ranks of the hoboes, or fight for charity, as do the other victims of that terrible city, Chicago, to which place the great majority of the vessels belong. No, there is no comparison between the two services possible.

And yet, in spite of these favourable conditions, there are always efforts being made for further improvements. I have just received a Parliamentary paper, the Report of the Royal Commission on the Navigation Bill for the Commonwealth of Australia, and its terms made me rub my eyes. Here are all the possible grievances, limitations, and disabilities of the seafarer set forth in judicial and impartial language by men who obviously know what they are talking about, and who have no fear of shipping papers, living upon shipowners' advertisements, attacking them, and defaming their characters, as some of the reptiles do who write for some of the shipping papers at home. Of course we hear the same story out here that always sounds so cynical to me, of shipowners being driven out of business by the incessant demands of the men for decent treatment, which it is impossible to grant and pay dividends, but we do not read here, as we so often may at home, of these impoverished shipowners dying and leaving fortunes of hundreds of thousands of pounds.

In view of this satisfactory condition of things, I am extremely delighted to see that the Report already referred to contains a strong recommendation to the Government to reserve the coasting trade of Australasia to itself, excluding all oversea coming vessels of every other nation. One blot upon this sensible suggestion is, that it is proposed to treat British-owned vessels as foreigners, which is a blunder, especially in view of the tremendous fact that the British Navy constitutes the only defence against foreign aggression that Australasia possesses. And yet it is difficult to justify our claim to come upon the coast from England with our poorly paid men and much more cheaply run ships, which, after discharging their outward cargo, may go from port to port all around Australasia, carrying Inter-state freight and passengers in unfair competition with Australasian-owned vessels. But I feel sure that a compromise could be arrived at in our case--must be.[2] As for the Germans and French and Japanese and Americans, who so rigidly exclude all other nations from participating in what they call their coasting trade--from New York to the Philippines, for instance--they should not be allowed to carry an ounce of cargo or a single passenger from one Inter-state port to another under any pretext. Germany, for instance, which pays the Nord-Deutscher Lloyd £115,000 a year subsidy for its line to Australia, on condition that it does not bring Australian produce to Germany! That is the sort of country that needs a lesson in retaliation--a lesson that I rejoice to see our Southern brethren have the wisdom to compile and the pluck to put into practice.

But all this time the _Ortona_ is lying at anchor off Sydney Cove, for her meeting ship, the _Oroya_, is at her wharf, and so there must be a transshipment of passengers into a tender for conveyance ashore. This delay, which fills me with joy as affording ample opportunity for observing the changes of which I have been writing, seems to goad many of my unhappy fellow-passengers to madness, one especially who dressed himself with great care for going ashore at 7 a.m., and has ever since breakfast been carrying a case of golf-clubs and a small valise about, being specially incensed at the delay. I may say in passing, that I arrived at my hotel at the same time as this gentleman, who, having seen his room, descended to the lounge and lolled there all the rest of the day--which thing is mysterious, but usual with fussy folks.

Every berth at Circular Quay was filled with a big steamship, and I noticed that, as in Liverpool, Prince's landing-stage is the exchange, as it were, from whence all the ferry steamers to the Cheshire shore radiate, so here at the head of Circular Quay are the same conditions in full force. Quite a fleet of fine fast boats run from the comfortable series of piers to the various points across the harbour, and for the same ridiculously small fares. The boats are naturally not so large as at Liverpool, but they are beautifully built, engined, and kept, and I noticed with great pleasure that they were almost without exception produced locally. As a very large number of Sydney's workers live in the beautiful suburbs across the bay, or bays, the morning and evening traffic is very great, as, of course, it is also at holiday-times; for your Sydney folks are not only intensely proud of their harbour, but they use it, enjoy it on every possible occasion. On landing I found another profound likeness to Liverpool, in that the great electric car system in that city centres upon the pier-head, that is the landing-stage, so here I found a congeries of electric cars arriving from and departing to all parts, their common centre being Circular Quay. But the difference between Sydney and Melbourne is very great--greater indeed than can be described; it is to be felt immediately on landing. Sydney is a typically English city, with tortuous streets, not too wide, and wonderfully irregular buildings--a city which has grown up as our home cities have, and shows no sign of regular planning as do Melbourne and Adelaide, especially the former, which is as faultlessly regular as Philadelphia, only, of course, on a much smaller scale. And so, in spite of the long time which has elapsed since my last visit, fully twenty-six years ago, I feel at home at once but for one thing--those trolley-cars. What it is I cannot tell, but never before have I seen the overhead system so full of offence as it is here. The cars are of the American type, entered at the side and with no seats on top, and on routes where the traffic is heavy three of them will be linked together, in order to make them hold as many as one of our huge London conduit cars. But the nerve-wrenching, horrible uproar that they make, for some unexplained reason or another, is, in my experience, at least, unparalleled. I thought it would be impossible for trolley-cars to make more row than those in Turin, but that was due to banging of the badly laid metals, and to the drivers' insane craving for performing on the huge gongs. But here the rails do not jump up and down, nor do the drivers abuse their privilege of gonging. They need not. The car itself makes a hideous combination of uproars that puts every other sound out of court in its vicinity. All conversation indoors and out must cease until it has passed, and even a brass band in full blast is silenced.

It appears as if, since the conversion of the trams into electrics, the City Fathers have not been able to agree upon the method of repaving the streets, so that the roadways, after the magnificent paving and grading of Melbourne's highways, give one a shock. They are frankly very bad, and the fact that the great main thoroughfares of Pitt and George Streets are only about half the width of Bourke and Collins Street in Melbourne, aggravates this objectionable feature. Really, the condition of Sydney thoroughfares is a great blot upon this beautiful city, which ought to be removed as speedily as possible, since, as I have often observed before, most people form their opinion of the character of a newly visited city from the state of its roads. One point, however, I specially noticed in the management of the street-car lines which certainly puts us to shame at home. At converging and intersecting comers there will be found a small kiosk, in which sits a man whose duty it is to shift the points for cars going in different directions. This he does by moving a little lever no bigger than a man's finger, which at the same time shifts the points for a coming car and shows a light at the summit of the kiosk, as a signal that the road is clear. At home, as you all know, either the conductor or driver has got to get down and shift the points by a clumsy manipulation of a sliding knob of steel with a rod which he carries with him, or a boy who sits shivering on a stool at the roadside comes and does it, generally in imminent deadly peril of his life where the cars follow one another rapidly. In addition, there is the utter inhumanity of keeping these boys or men standing or sitting about in all the many weathers of our inclement climate for many hours, laying up for themselves an awful harvest of pain and misery by and by. The Sydney system shows how this can all be avoided and bettered, and there is absolutely no reason why it should not be followed at home.

Footnote:

[2] At the time of going to press with this book the Colonial Navigation Conference has met, and these questions have been settled, almost entirely in favour of the Colonies.

X

Some Friendly Criticism

Sydney is a city that grows upon a visitor immensely. Not merely from its almost ideal situation as the commercial capital of a great and growing country, or from the reminders which greet you on every hand of the fight which its people have waged to make their city worthy of its splendid environment, but from its amazing likeness to our cities at home, and from the general air of _homeness_, if I may coin a word, which pervades it. This one may say without any suggestion of detriment or derogation of or to the other Australasian States, because it comes as a natural consequence, Sydney being the Mother City of them all. There is, I find, among Sydney-siders the same diffidence of self-assertion that we have at home, with one exception--their harbour. Don't, as you value your happiness, say a word of dispraise of Port Jackson even in fun, it cannot be said in earnest. It will be taken most seriously, and will certainly be accounted unto the utterer for anything but righteousness. In other matters you may have your little joke and find your friends not at all thin-skinned, but please don't joke about the harbour.

Yet the citizens of Sydney need not fear comparison of their beloved city with any other in the world, except, as I have said, in the matter of the roads and the noise of the trolley-cars. The buildings are truly splendid, the two chief, the Post Office and the Town Hall, being certainly the finest in the whole of Australasia, and worthy to take rank with any similar buildings at home. Indeed, it is nothing short of marvellous how so comparatively small a population can manage to erect and maintain such splendid buildings as these, and many others which greet the eye on every hand. It has been said, and I believe with truth, that the vast majority of the Australasian population is to be found in the cities and towns on the seaboard, engaged in the work of distributing the imports and exports. But if this be true, what amazing energy must be manifested by the people "out back" who produce, and what would be the condition of these cities if only they had a population behind them able to cope with the teeming wealth of the soil? Which raises again the eternal question of population of this vast country--a country which has as yet only been played with, but which has shown such immense productive capacity, that its possibilities fairly stagger calculation, supposing them to be dealt with intelligently.

That, however, seems past praying for--as yet, at any rate. Can you imagine anything more unutterably foolish, short-sighted--oh! the dictionary does not contain adjectives to fit the situation--than the action of the Government which has been presented to all the world this week? The Japanese squadron, of which I wrote in Melbourne, has arrived here, and has been received with a perfect tempest of acclamations, both by Press and people, with the sole exceptions of the _Bulletin_, which in its charmingly witty and brilliant manner persistently refers to the heroes of Port Arthur and Tsutshima as "monkeys," and one other newspaper, of which I can only say that its publication is a disgrace to New South Wales, and would be a disgrace to Paris, which is not squeamish. At ball and banquet and reception the Japanese were rightly received with immense enthusiasm--a reception they have earned by their deeds, if ever men did. All honour to Australasia that, in spite of its intense dread of and antipathy to the yellow people, has thus recognised transcendent merit, both in civic and martial virtues. But while these festivities were going on, there happened to enter Port Jackson a certain steamship, the _Pacifique_, conveying six Japanese passengers to Japan. They were to be transferred to the _Kumanu Maru_, a fine mail steamer of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha, lying at the Circular Quay, but as their period of waiting extended over three days, they were naturally anxious to see the sights of Sydney and witness the reception accorded to their countrymen. They were not allowed to land! In spite of the fact that they were in transit, were clear of all suspicion of disease or anything of the sort, they were forbidden to set foot upon the sacred soil of Australia, where their naval heroes were being treated as demigods. Comment here is impertinence, but it may be pointed out that not one man in authority appeared to think that possibly a few of the 2,000 Japanese who were being thus _fêted_ and made much of might be taking voluminous notes of this occurrence, and compiling a bill to be presented in the near future. I ventured to point this out to several influential people, who admitted that it savoured of idiocy on the part of the powers that be, but also gave me to understand that it was none of my business, and that when the time came for that bill to be presented, they and the Australasian States might be trusted to--although they didn't use these exact words--muddle through it somehow. Which gave me quite a pang of home-sickness, for I recognise the speakers as veritable chips of the old block.

Of course I know that these remarks will be fiercely resented, because your Australasian (it will be noted that I no longer dare to say Colonial), while intensely eager to criticise all the rest of the world, is fully persuaded that no one has any right to criticise him, or at least the doings in his particular State. This, of course, implies that while you may in any one State criticise any other as severely as you choose, you may not criticise Australasia as a whole. This, equally, is very strange to an Englishman, who is so accustomed to having the shortcomings of his own country held up to scorn by all the rest of the world, and of calmly accepting the remarks made about her, that he is amazed when an expression of candid opinion by himself or his country's public men is taken as almost a personal insult.

The plain, unvarnished truth about the attitude of the Australasian Colonies generally towards the Mother-country is that they are and will be intensely loyal to her as long as they may do as they like without any interference, which freewill they interpret to mean also that if the Mother-country does anything to which they object they may not only protest against it but repudiate it as not binding upon them. That they may treat Britain in the matter of trade no better than any foreign nation, while at the same time enjoying as of right all the protection that the British Empire is capable of affording them, for which they do not consider it incumbent upon them to give anything in return. I asked a prominent editor out here the other day, who was very strong in his remarks about the Old Country, what benefit he supposed she derived from the Australasian Colonies. His answer will live in my memory. He said, with an air of gracious condescension, "Why, we send you all our produce!" I was so amazed, as well as amused, that I could say nothing for a little while, and when I did it was merely to remark, "That is an advantage, certainly; but whether to you or Britain is another question."

Please let it be understood that in the foregoing I have been speaking throughout of the professional politician, whom I cannot profess to admire in whatever country he may happen to be, and not of the general public, which is loyal, lovable, and level-headed. All the best traditions of our dear land are carried on here, and it is almost impossible for even the most nervous, morbidly sensitive man or woman to feel themselves strangers. And what strikes one as being quite touching is the way the Motherland is continually being spoken of affectionately, regretfully as "Home." You will hear it on the lips of grey-headed people who were born here (and it is surprising how many of them you meet), and have never been out of the Colony, "Ah! how I should like to go home for a trip." But the strangest of all is the way in which foreigners, such as Germans, Italians, citizens of the United States, &c., who have been domiciled out here for many years, will speak of Great Britain as home in the same way as do the Australasians.

A remarkable feature of Sydney, as of Melbourne, is the way in which the city has run over, so to speak, into suburbs; but there comparison ends between the two. For Melbourne suburbs, fine, prosperous-looking townships as most of them are, cannot be called beautiful, except where they are on the Bay, the country around being so very flat. But Sydney has every variety of scenery for which the heart could crave--hill and vale, rock and wood, while no residential suburb need be more than a few minutes from either one of many of the beautiful bays which run into the country from the main harbour like the tentacles of some gigantic but beneficent octopus, or the shore of the mighty Pacific itself. And communication with all these places by steamer, electric car, or train is at once cheap, rapid, frequent, and easy. So that housing of Sydney folks is never likely to become a problem, and overcrowding (although there are still a few slums) is entirely unnecessary, and would not exist if a certain type of people did not insist upon violating all hygienic laws and crowding together as closely as they can get. There will always be overcrowding unless the most drastic laws are passed to prevent it, as may be seen in any English or Scotch village, where, goodness knows, there is room enough and to spare, but the villagers persist in huddling their cottages close enough together to step across the lane from the front door into another opposite.

Yes, Sydney has every scenic, natural, and healthful advantage that a city can be favoured with, while architecturally, it must be admitted, its citizens have done their duty as far as possible, remembering their limitations. Like us, they do not believe in defiling their cities with skyscrapers, but keep their buildings of a reasonable height, in accordance with the width of the thoroughfares. Two buildings especially cannot fail to impress the most careless and casual observer--the Town Hall and General Post Office. I do no injustice to Melbourne, but only state the bare fact when I say that not only are these two really magnificent edifices far finer than the corresponding municipal erections in Melbourne, but in their position they are much more highly favoured, in spite of the fact that Melbourne's thoroughfares are so much wider and straighter than those of Sydney. But Sydney's Town Hall has what every civic structure should have, a vast open space in which to stand manifesting its glories--a position, in fact, like St. George's Hall, Liverpool, and the Town Halls of Glasgow, Manchester, and Leeds. Melbourne Town Hall, while undoubtedly a noble building, suffers much from its position at an angle of Collins and Swanston Streets, with other buildings crowding in behind it, so that from no point can more than a small portion of it be visible, and no view of it can be obtained from any farther away than across the street. And the same remarks apply exactly to Melbourne Post Office, which is at the corner of Bourke and Elizabeth Streets, and but for its grand tower would hardly be noticeable. Sydney Post Office is so magnificent in its outlines that it entirely puts to shame the similar buildings in such great cities as Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, or Glasgow, which have nearly double Sydney's population. And its situation is a peculiarly advantageous one in that, although it is in the heart of the city and bounded on two sides by the comparatively narrow yet noble thoroughfares of Pitt and George Streets, it has an exceedingly wide space on its immense frontage which already has some grand companion buildings on the opposite side of it, and will doubtless soon be completely edified and in full keeping with the stately façade of the Post Office, which fills the entire front of the block between the two main thoroughfares of the city. A curious but pretty feature of the fine promenade along the front of the Post Office, the busiest part of the city during the day, is the number of flower-sellers (all men), who stand at the edge of the pavement with huge baskets of glorious blooms before them. These they vend in great bunches, tightly tied up and as large as a medium cabbage, at a uniform rate of sixpence each, which leads to the belief that everything which grows in this marvellous country is characterised by a uniformity of cheapness. And of course I was told that, being winter, the show was nothing compared with its summer beauty.

XI

The King Of New Zealand

To-day I have had a veritable treat. By the courtesy of a few friends I was privileged to go and visit the _Sobraon_, that grand old flyer which, under Captain Elmslie, brought out from England to this Colony so many of her leading citizens. She is in her way almost as classic as the _Mayflower_ or the _Argo_, although towering mightily above them in beauty, size, and comfort for those who sailed in her. And she has met a far happier fate than have the majority of the celebrated old clippers of the bygone days. It gives the old sailor's heart a severe pang when he occasionally comes across a ship which in her day of glory was an honour to command; to be her master conferred brevet rank and dignity which nothing could rob a man of, even though, as, alas! was often the case, he descended from her wreck to a beggared old age; sold to the Norwegians, Italians, or even to some Indian coasting firm for a drudge and a byword. Some of these old flyers perished gloriously, but most of them were degraded into timber droghers or country-wallahs, without even the consolation that their shame was hidden under a change of name.

Not so the _Sobraon_. Trim and taut as ever she was in her prideful days as the premier ship _sailing_ to Sydney from England, she now lies snugly moored in one of the most beautiful bays of that most splendid of all harbours. She belongs to the Government of New South Wales, and it is her grand mission to receive and deal with those waifs and strays who in this country, with its floating and polyglot population, have drifted or may readily drift into crime. She is at once a reformatory, an elevator, and a school of the best type. And the proof of her usefulness is found in the splendid results shown from most unpromising material. For not only are many of the boys here the result of the most curious miscegenation, Chinese, negroes, aborigines, and every European race being mingled and producing some extraordinary blends, but they have, by reason of neglect and freedom of the wild, often become literally young savages. Yet so wise is the rule and so excellent the training that from this queer raw material there is turned out a really fine finished product. All the officers are enthusiasts. I protested against the boys being put through their facings to make a show for me, but I found that to refuse to witness what they could do would give not only the officers but the boys entirely unnecessary pangs of disappointment. So of course I yielded, and was exceedingly glad I did, for the spectacle I was treated to was an inspiring as well as an illuminating one. Also, the fates being propitious, during the exercises the Premier of the Colony, Mr. J. H. Carruthers, with the Japanese Admiral Shimamura and his staff, and a host of representative ladies and gentlemen, came alongside in a steamer and _assisted_ at the function.

I have never seen anything better done, and as for the singing of the boys, well, there must be something in Australian air that makes for excellence of the vocal powers. I have never heard children sing as they sing here.