THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS VOLUME V AUSTRALASIA 1688-1911 OTHER VOLUMES IN THIS SERIES The American Colonies, 1583-1763. 4s. 6d tiet. India, 1600-1828. 4s. 6d. net. British North America, 1763-1867. 6s. net. Britain in the Tropics, 1527-1910. In Preparation. South Africa, THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS VOLUME V AUSTRALASIA 1688-1911 BY A. WYATT TILBY LONDON CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LIMITED 1912 Digitized by tine Internet Arciiive in 2007 witii funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.arcliive.org/details/australasiaOOtilbiala DU 23.3 ma. PREFACE The present volume, like its predecessors in this work, deals with the foundation of new English settlements by the old British stock. Like the settlements in Canada, but unlike those in the tropics, the colonies in Australia and New Zealand grew into new English nations ; the history and circumstances attending that growth and national develop- ment, with its divergence from the parent people, are the subject of the following pages. It has been a task of no little difficulty to rescue from old newspaper files, from mildewed forgotten pamphlets, and the tedious records of too often stupid travellers, the original materials on which the present book is largely based. Pro- longed research has frequently revealed nothing but literary rubbish ; but occasionally I have found the crudely expressed letters of old travellers quite extraordinarily illuminating in their revelation of the forces that were moulding the new English society in Australasia. The letter from an emigrant to New Zealand, for instance, which is quoted at the opening of Book XXII., throws considerable light on the social jealousy and class hatred which existed in England, and which largely accounted for the determination to make and keep Australia a democratic country among the free settlers of the middle nineteenth century. We know what the literate and governing classes thought about the illiterate and governed ; we have little to show what the governed thought about their governors. The letter in question helps to supply the gap. 1015188 vi THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS I may point out here that this volume helps to correct two misconceptions, the one the consequence of the other, which have arisen about Australia. It is sometimes suggested that the present inhabitants of the Commonwealth are mainly descended from the convicts of early years ; and indignant Australians, hard pushed to answer an accusation which hurts their pride, have advanced the theory that the convicts were the victims of British laws. Both statements contain a little truth and much falsehood. As a fact, the average convict transported to Australia a century ago was no more reputable a person than the average criminal to-day, and the evidence which is cited in the follow- ing pages leaves little room for the pleasing theory of his apologists — that he was more sinned against than sinning. The English criminal law of the period was always harsh, and occasionally barbarously severe ; but it seems generally to have succeeded in laying the right persons by the heels, if their subsequent record in Austraha goes for anything. The other theory, that the Australians of to-day are mainly descended from convicted felons, also vanishes on investigation. I have examined, not without trepidation, the records of as many Australian families as have come in my way ; the total making a not inconsiderable number, and including nearly all who have played a notable part in the exploration, industry, and politics of the antipodes. In no single case has the bar sinister of felony been found upon their origin — a fact which goes far to prove that the convicts had as little influence on the future of Australian society as the Pilgrim Fathers on the future of the United States ; and that the present-day Australian is about as likely to be descended from the one as the modern American from the other. A. Wyatt Tilby. CONTENTS FA.OK Preface v BOOK XVII THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES : 1605-1821 CBAF. I. The First Adventurers : 1605-1712 .... 1 II. The Kediscovery of Australasia : 1769-1802 . . 12 HI. The Penal Stations : 1788-1802 24 IV, The First Years of CoLONisiNa ; 1795-1821 ... 36 BOOK XVIII THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA : 1821-68 I. The End of Transportation : 1821-68 .... 54 II. The Free Settlers : 1821-59 85 III. The Five Colonies: 1821-68 103 ly. The Victorian Goldfields : 1851-60 .... 133 BOOK XIX THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION : 1850-1901 I. The Exploration op Australia 141 f iL^HK Individual States : 1850-80 172 III. The United Commonwealth : 1880-1901 .... 205 vii viii THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS f BOOK XX THE PACIFIC OCEAN : 1578-1911 CHAP. PAOK I. England and the Pacific : 1578-1910 .... 257 II. The Australian Tropics: 1824-1900 .... 299 liii. The White Australia Policy: 1841-1911 . . 310 BOOK XXI THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND : 1769-1911 I. Traders and Evangelists : 1769-1838 . . . 328 II. The White Settlers : 1839-65 333 in. The Maori Wars : 1840-70 360 IV. Union and Expansion: 1870-1911 383 BOOK XXII BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH: 1911 400 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Book XVII THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES: 1605-1821 CHAPTER I I THE FIRST ADVENTURERS: 1605-17121 'When Rome was still the one civiUsed state in Europe, there were already rumours among the learned of the existence of a great southern land, which some geographers The Great even conjectured might perhaps be a vast island South Land, with an inland sea.^ And during the long geographical night of the next thousand years some sapient doctor, more imaginative than the rest of the melancholy tribe * In few departments of history are materials more scanty and less trustworthy. Thick mists of uncertainty overhang the earliest European voyages in the antipodes, and neither research norcontroversy has dispelled the fog of geographic doubt. Hakluyt, Purchas, and the publications of the Hakluyt Society throw a little light on the discovery and discoverers of the South Seas ; a kindred Dutch; association, the Linschoten Ver- eenigung, is doing equally good work in the same field. Tasman's Journal of his Diwoverywas also published in Holland in 1898. Major's Early Voyages to Australia may be consulted with advantage ; also Heeres, ?'Ae Part borne, by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia. Kerr's Collection of Voyages is silent on this subject ; the Australian Book of Dates gives as complete a list as possible of the earliest known voyages, but few details. CoUingridge's Discovery of Australia is the best general work on the subject. Dampier's Voyages and other writings have been carefully edited by John Masefield. ^ Pliny. The belief in that inland sea misled many a later explorer. See bk. xix. ch. i. It may have been some distorted rumour of the great lakes of Central Africa that misled the ancients. VOL. v. A 2 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS that mouldered in the academic seclusion of a mediaeval cloister, might perhaps mention, in those idler momenta when his fellows ceased to dispute the number of angels that could dance on the head of a pin, the supposed existence of a continent in the unknown antipodes.^ But such surmises were never more than speculation, and throughout the Middle Ages the Pillars of Hercules still remained the utmost boundaries of ascertained knowledge. The wisest philosopher and the most learned scholar knew less of distant lands than the ignorant viking who ventured forth on plundering or colonising expedition to Iceland, Greenland, or America ; ^ but not the boldest viking ever tried to cross the torrid seas whose sultry breath parts Europe from Australia. The island continent lies alone, the stately, solitary queen of an almost solitary ocean ; a queen whose now dead or dying heart has burnt itself out in long ages of neglect ItB Isolation. ^ . , . ,1 i and isolation, but nevertheless a queen that proudly hid her still living beauty from the first adventurers who sought her across half a world of tropic splendour. The isolation of Austraha from the rest of the world ia strongly marked in her every feature. Her fauna and flora are different from those elsewhere ; the evolution of the life she nourishes has followed other hues, the struggle for existence has been less severe than in lands easier of access, and more open for the immigration of hunted man and beast. From her position on the globe Australia could not be discovered by the conquering white man until the way to ' Such speculations had all the charm of danger for the religious ; for some theologians declared it impious to suppose that God would have created countries, and suffered them to remain unknown. But the idea persisted, in spite of the denunciation. St. Augustin (De Civitate Dei, bk. ix. ch. xvi.) held the view that, even if land existed in the far south, and even if it were habitable, it could not be inhabited, since the Scriptures made no mention of it, and the desctndants of Adam could not have crossed the immense ocean. But the holy Father's argument proved too much. - Vol. i. bk. iii. ch. iv. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 3 Africa, Asia, or South America was found ; even then the mariner might well hesitate before he risked his frail cockle- shell across thousands of miles of stormy ocean that had no known end save the death that too often waits on daring. Some fragments — they are nothing more — of the aboriginal history of the antipodes have been recovered ; some tra- ditions and conjectures of a crude barbaric drama ^^ ^^^^ played by primitive peoples in the southern seas Europeans have been restored ; some legends of a remote or ^^'"*'^*^^- fabulous past survive ; ^ but the first firm step in Australasian annals begins with the arrival of the first Europeans about the year 1605. During the whole of the previous century, indeed, the old belief in the existence of a southern continent had steadily gained ground. Ever since the discovery of America and the opening of the long ocean-route to the Indies, Spanish and Portuguese adventurers had pushed onwards from Java and the spice-laden lands of the Malay Archipelago towards Papua and the neighbour isles. One by one they added gorgeous realms of fertile beauty to the charts, or perished by the way. And some of their number, of whom no record remains, possibly or even probably touched the shores of Australia knowingly or unawares ; ^ some luckless mariners, driven by ^ Professor Gregory records a tradition of the Australian aborigines that the deserts of central Australia were once fertile, well-watered plains ; tlie heavens above mantled by a vault of cloud, so dense that it appeared a solid roof ; the land covered with giant gum-trees, whose trunks formed pillars to support the sky ; the air, now thick with saline dust, washed with soft cooling rains ; the roof of the world inhabited by strange monsters whose bones now lie around Lake Eyre. But the clouds vanished, the rains ceased, the gum-trees died, and drought and desolation changed a happy garden into a wilderness, whose monsters perished and whose people fled. See also bk. xx. ch. i., and bk. xxi. ch. iii. for some traditions of the Pacific islanders and the Maories. '^ The early sixteenth-century belief in the existence of a southern con- tinent was scarcely more than a belief ; and although Australis Terra or Jave la Orand". appears on some old maps (among others on that of Gaillaume le Testu, a Proven9al pilot, in 1542, and the Dauphin map, about 1536), we seem justified in disregarding such geographical guesses. 4 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS contrary winds, may have been wrecked there, and so died in miserable exile ; ^ but the first explorers whom certainty admits to have started of set purpose to find the southern continent were Spanish. The Spanish explorers de Quiros and de Torres sailed from in the absence of any real evidence. The question has been investigated by E. Heawood, Geographical Journal, 1899 ; he is inclined to reject the authenticity of the early traditions. I have looked at several of the early maps, and confess myself entirely unimpressed by them. On the other hand, the description of Australia by Wytfliet, a Dutch geographer at the close of the sixteenth century, is so definite that even the sceptic finds it difficult to dispose of as mere surmise. ' The Australis Terra,' says Wytfliet, 'is the most southern of all lands. It is separated from New Guinea by a narrow strait. Its shores are hitherto but little known, since, after one voyage and another, that route has been deserted, and seldom is the country visited, unless sailors are driven there by storms. The Australis Terra begins at two or three degrees from the Equator, and is maintained by some to be of so great an extent that, if it were thoroughly explored, it would be regarded as a fifth part of the world.' This account is surprisingly accurate ; if it was not derived from the Malays, who regularly visited the coasts of Northern Australia (bk. xx. ch. ii. ), possibly some European traveller of whom all other record has been lost, and who has thereby missed an otherwise certain immortality in the annals of discovery, gave it to W3'tfliet, and the geographer forgot to mention the name of his informant. It is curious that Wytfliet's mention of the strait dividing Australia from New Guinea — Torres Strait — was unknown to de Torres himself several years later, and it does not even appear on a French map of 1754. 1 It is stated in a pamphlet published in 1911 at Sydney that a Spanish vessel was wrecked off Facing Island in 1600, the crew of which left some account of themselves, now almost obliterated by time, in a record cut on a rock on the shore. (See Lope de Vega, by L. Hargrave. ) There is nothing improbable in this, but the author draws wider con- clusions than the actual evidence he cites will warrant. A claim to be the original discoverer of Australia has been made on behalf of a French mariner, Binot Paulmyer, Sieur de Gonneville, who was blown out of his course and driven by a storm on a large island, supposed to be Australia, in the year 1503. The claim is warmly sup- ported by Favenc, Atcstralian Exploration, who, however, fairly admits the difficulties in the way. There is not much real evidence to support the conclusion in Gonneville's own account of his voyage, which might equally well have been to an island in the Malay Archipelago. But certainty is of course impossible, and there is nothing very improbable in the story. Other claims have been put forward : see Le Descobridor Oodinho de Eredia, par Dr. Hamy, and both Magellan and Amerigo Vespucci have had their advocates. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 5 the port of Callao in South America on 21st December 1605, at the head of an expedition whose errand was the discovery of the still unknown land. Steering to the south- Spanish west, and lighting soon after on an island of the iJ^q^q^ New Hebrides group, it was named La Australia straits, leoe. del Espiritu Santo ; perhaps de Quiros mistook it for the land he sought, as Columbus had mistaken a smaU West Indian island for a continent. But the crew now mutinied, and part of the expedition was compelled to sail towards the Phihppines ; de Torres, however, pushed on, and passed through the strait that bears his name, whence he may have seen the distant shores of Austraha. But he achieved no more ; and the next explorer in the South Seas came from a rival nation. In the same year, 1605, the Dutch vessel Duyfken ^ sailed from Java with the Uke hope of discovering a southern continent. The Duyjken reached the Gulf of ^^ Dutcii Carpentaria and turned southwards ; but when Explorers, some of the crew went ashore they were attacked by the natives and forced to return. The first white man who is definitely recorded to have touched Austrahan soil thus beat a hasty retreat from an unfriendly, if no longer altogether unknown land. Ten years later Dirk Hartog, another Dutch seaman, reached Sharks Bay, in West Austraha, and discovered the island that stiU bears his name. Another four years, and Van Edels sailed along the same coast, and from that time something hke a regular series of Dutch voyages of exploration to Austraha took place. In 1623 the north-west coast was visited ; the name of Arnhem Land, which was given to the district, perpetuates the memory of the next traveller's European home and antipodean journey. One Pieter Nuytz sailed along part of the western and southern shores in 1627 ; ^ Z)u2^X;en= the littl« pigeon. Some writers have mistaken the word for Dolphin. 6 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS de Witt was on the north-west coast the following year, at the same time that Pieter Carpenter was exploring the Gulf, now called after him, of Carpentaria. The Dutch traveller Pelsart, who was wrecked about this time on the west coast of Australia, brought the first authentic description of the country to Europe. His report was far from favourable ; indeed, all the earher accounts of the antipodes were directly at variance with the high expectations that had been formed of the unknown south in the northern world. But so far little more was known than that a large island, or group of islands, existed to the south-east of the Dutch settlements in Java and Sumatra ; it or they might be the southern continent, or merely a continuation of the East Indian Archipelago. They were certainly less attractive, and apparently less fertile and more uncivilised, than the lands already known. The great voyage of Abel Jansen Tasman in 1642 hardly brought better news. He discovered the island of Tasmania, which he called by the name of Van Diemen's Land ; and sailing eastward, he landed on the shores of New Zealand, naming it Staaten Land, in honour of the States-General of Holland. Two years later he surveyed the north and north-west coasts of Australia ; and the island continent, whose main outhnes were now roughly marked upon the maps, was for long known in Europe by the name of New Holland, which Tasman had given it when taking nominal possession of the whole country for the Netherlands. All but one of these early visitors to the antipodes had been Dutchmen. None, however, could see any opening for Abandoned trade in those bare inhospitable regions ; and for byHoUand. other than trading colonies Holland had no desire, even had the prospect been more enticing. Apparently satis- fied with the knowledge gained, there were no further Dutch expeditions to Austraha for over forty years. The exploration of the southern seas, indeed, was now prohibited by the THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 7 Dutch East India Company ; and Sir William Temple, the British ambassador at The Hague in the latter part of the seventeenth century, stated that that powerful corporation had * long since forbidden under the greatest penalties any further attempts at discovering that continent, having already more trade than they could turn to account, and fearing some more populous nation of Europe might make great estabUsh- raents of trade in some of these unknown regions, which might ruin or impair what they already had in the Indies/ Such conduct was of a piece with Dutch commercial policy everywhere ; and the next visitor to AustraUa was an Enghshman. The first European discoveries in the South Seas had given no indication of the part that England was to play in the develop- ment of AustraUa. It is true that a project had England and been launched in the reign of Ehzabeth for ' the Australia, discoverie, traffique, and enjoyenge for the Queen's Majestic and her subjects of all or anie lands, islands, and countries southwards beyonde the ^Equinoctial, or when the Pole Antartik hathe anie elevation above the Horison ' ; ^ and in the year 1625 another project had been set on foot for the finding of the ' Terra AustraUs Incognita extending eastwards and westwards from ye Straits of Le Maire together with all ye adjacente Islands.' But nothing came of these schemes ; and not until the year 1688 did the first Englishman set foot in AustraUa. WilUam Dampier, the hero of that voyage, was the son of a tenant-farmer near the placid country town of Yeovil, in Somerset. He had served in the Dampier'a mercantile marine and the Royal Navy, besides igYs^and engaging in the more or less legitimate logwood i699. trade in the West Indies, and doing a little buccaneer- * See Lansdcvme MSS., printed in the Hakluyt Society's edition of Frobisher'a Voyages. The original is dated 1673, and is endorsed by Lord Burleigh. 8 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS ing in those parts. ^ About the time that William of Holland was preparing to accept the throne of England, WilUam Dampier was cruising off New Holland in the Cygnet ; and after returning home and publishing an account of his discoveries he was again sent out in 1699 to make further discoveries. He now explored the coast from Sharks Bay to Dampier's Archipelago, and thence to Roebuck Bay, which takes its name from Dampier's ship. But his report was almost as discouraging as that of Pelsart had been. 'The land,' he wrote, ' was not very inviting, being but barren towards the sea, and afiording me neither fresh water, nor any great store of other refreshments, nor so much as a fit place for careening.' In places, it is true, he saw plants which ' smelt very sweet and fragrant ' ; but the natives were hostile and ' the miserablest in the world ' ; and there were few animals, save * beasts like hungry wolves, lean hke so many skeletons, being nothing but skin and bones,' and a mysterious creature that jumped with its forelegs and resembled a racoon. It is not difficult to recognise the kangaroo from Dampier's short description. Six years later, one Willan de Vlamingh, a Dutchman, was on the south-west coast ; but he saw only the black swans of the district, and having given a name to the Black Swan River, he returned home again. Again there was a long pause. Roggewein of Holland discovered the Thousand Isles ; Carteret touched at New Britain and New Zealand in 1727 ; other stray travellers may have come and gone, of whom no record remains ; but beyond these few, Austraha was deserted until Captain Cook arrived in 1770. The main reason that it was left in continual isolation was the uninviting aspect of its shores. Almost every European who had landed there had landed on arid stretches of the western or northern coasts ; the more fertile eastern side of ^ For the buccaneers, see vol. i. bk. ii. cb, vi. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 9 the continent was undiscovered, and the south was scarcely better known, since it was still thought that Tasmania belonged to the mainland. And every sailor who had set foot in Australia had been repelled by the natives ; every adventurer was quickly convinced that it would be futile to look for gold, or, indeed, for riches of any kind, in a country that seemed to offer its own inhabitants nothing but a few roots as a means of subsistence.^ But, despite their failure, the romance of the Elizabethan age, that mingled love of adventure and riches which led men to risk their lives in America and the Indies, had The south touched also in later times the vast seas of the Int^^ unknown south with something of its glamour. Literature. The first travellers may have returned home disappointed ; but the spirit that animated them has left its mark on our literature. The mighty mind of Francis Bacon, perhaps with some strange prescience of a future Enghsh Commonwealth of the antipodes where statesmen would strive to build a better nation than the old under better social conditions, had pictured an ideal commonwealth of New Atlantis far to the south of Peru, in the direction where Austraha was supposed to he. In the same years Bishop Hall the satirist amused himself with sketching a fanciful description of the antipodes as another world that was yet the same, a land of Australia hitherto always unknown.^ ^ The English translator of de Brosscs' French Collection of Voyages to AiistrcUia suggested that Britain should colonise the antipodes, but regretted that ' the coasts of New Holland are very difficult of access, and the parts that lie next the South Sea absolutely naked and barren. Carpentaria labours under the same disadvantage.' The book was pub- lished in 1766. An earlier suggestion that Britain should colonise Australia was made in 1759 by the anonymous author of Terra Australis, who advised that the task should be undertaken either by the East India Company or the Africa Company, or, failing them, the South Sea Company. The suggestion was made to deaf ears. ^ Mundus Alter et Idem, sive Terra Australis antehac semper incognita (1605). The map accompanying the volume is adorned with imaginary 10 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS And in the dramas and lighter works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the yet undiscovered countries are often alluded to, and always in the same sense, as expressing a remoteness almost infinite, and a wealth that could not be guessed at, * Will your Grace command me any service to the world's end ? ' cries lighthearted Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing. ' I will go on the slightest errand now to the antipodes that you can devise to send me on ; I will fetch you a toothpicker from the furthest inch of Asia ; bring you the length of Prester John's foot ; fetch you a hair of the great Cham's beard ; do you an embassage to the pygmies.' Again, the love-lost Rosalind declares that * one inch of delay is a South Sea of discovery ' ; and her superlative shows all future generations, who have not forgotten that luckless damsel's wanderings in the cause of love, the unbounded expectations entertained by men from those parts which they loosely denominated the antipodes. As the world south of the Equator became better known geographical terms received a more definite meaning. But Congreve could still speak generally of the antipodes a century later, ' where the sun rises at midnight and sets at noonday ' ; another character in his Way of the World says : ' Your antipodes are a good rascally sort of topsy-turvy fellows ' ; * and two generations later, Lydia Languish, as undaunted at heart, if less heroic in costume than Rosalind, declares of her lover, ' Now I could fly with him to the antipodes.' The long-faced Spectator has his word on the subject, when islands such as Insula Hermaphroditica, Erotium vel Amantina, a coast called Aphrodysia, and a Terra Sancta ignota etiam adhuc — the latter rather a happy touch of episcopal wit. Seventy years later, in Heylin's Cosmographie, Appendix (1677), the Falkland Islands and Utopia are both placed in the Terra Australis incognita — a curious blend of real and imaginary geography. ' The stockbroker in A Bold Stroke for a Wife cries on the Exchange, ' South Seas at seven-eights, who buys South Sea bonds due at Michaelmas, 1718,' reflecting the speculation and bubV)le of Walpole's day. Fifty years later, ' Old South Sea annuities ' are mentioned in the Clande&tine Marriage. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 11 a youth whose excessive vitaUty became troublesome to staider folk at home wrote, ' Old Testy sends me up word that he has heard so much of my exploits, he intends immed- iately to order me to the South Sea.' The Taller, too, has his humorous allusion to the boatswain in Dampier's ship ; Robinson Crusoe was supposed to have found his desert island in that enchanted region ; and the immortal Gulliver jour- neyed in the antipodes, identifying Van Diemen's Land with the abode of the Lilliputians.^ In all this there is no mention of a settlement, and for. the best of reasons. No settlement existed. Not until the nineteenth century could the novehst picture Wilkins Micawber, no longer ' waiting for something to turn up ' in England, but prosperous and happy in Australia ; or the poet of Tober-na-Vuolich sing of Elspeth and her husband emigrating to New Zealand.^ The term South Seas, in fact, was so vague that it included the whole globe south of the Equator ; the antipodes, which appealed so strongly as a figure of speech to English playwrights, was used equally loosely. But the very mystery that hung over these remote and unfrequented parts served to make them the more alluring. For the bold, there was the prospect of another era of adven- ture, of moving accidents in flood and field ; for the covetous, despite past failures, the possibility of a second El Dorado. And when adventure and gold unite to lead men on, their power is as great as that of women. * The geography of Gulliver violates all the maps. Brobdingnag was supposed to lie in north-west America; Laputa and its dependencies are described as forming ' part of a continent which extends itself eastward to that unknown tract of America westward of California,' — a part that is still unknown, since it unfortunately does not exist. '^ Readers of the Water Babiet will also remember that one of the parents of little Tom Grimes was sent to Botany Bay ; and Australia appearB incidentally in Pevdennis, in connection with Colonel Altamont, transported thither for forgery. 12 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS CHAPTER II THE REDISCOVERY OF AUSTRALASIA: 1769-18021 Among the many fanciful suggestions of the Guardian, which that grave mentor dehghted in laying before the frivolous breakfast-tables of the time of Queen Anne, was a remark that the foreign trade of England would never increase * unless our merchants should endeavour to open a trade to Terra Austrahs incognita.' The experience of the South Sea Bubble a few years later made the nation very shy of any such enterprises ; and Australia remained neglected and practically forgotten for another half-century. What was as yet known of the continent was indeed very Uttle, and that httle very bad. More than a century had passed since the Dutch had abandoned a land which was never more than nominally theirs. No Frenchman was certainly known to have set foot there. No Spaniard had been near Austraha since Torres sailed through the straits that bear his name. The British flag had not been carried to the antipodes since the expedition under Dampier ; and no living Enghshman had ever seen Australia. But it was the southern seas, rather than the southern continent, that now attracted the attention of England ; and in the years immediately after the Peace of Paris, when the disputes with the American colonies first began to look serious, a few daring navigators forced their way into the Pacific, determined at length to wrest the last secrets of the 1 There are full records of the voyages of Byron and Wallis. A whole literature has been written on Captain Cook and his oJ3icers ; his own Journals, however, are by far the beat authority on himself. They may be supplemented by those of other members of the expeditions. Kitson's Captain Jamen Cook the Circumnavigator is invaluable in clearing up many misconceptions of his career. The early colonial oflScial papers, as mentioned in the next chapter, together with CoUins's Account of the English Colony in New SotUh Wales, describe the subsequent explorations of Bass and Flinders. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 13 greatest ocean from her mysterious bosom. It was these voyages that led directly to the rediscovery, and indirectly to the settlement, of Australasia by Britain. On 2l8t June 1764, Conmaodore Byron of the Royal Navy left the Kentish Downs for the South Seas. After annexing the Falkland Isles in the name of His Majesty, Voyages of and encountering what he supposed to be a race ^^^*" of giants in Patagonia,^ he rounded Cape Horn, 1764-8. resolved ' to stand to the westward, till he should fall in with Solomon's Isles, if any such there were.' ^ These he failed to find ; but he touched at one of the Society Isles, where, unable to land owing to lack of anchorage, and alarmed at the hostihty of the natives, he named them Isles of Disappointment, and sailed away, regretting their useless beauty. Steering steadily to the north, he came nowhere near Australia, and returned to England in 1766. A second voyage in the Pacific by Captain WaUis brought more definite results. Leaving home on the same errand of discovery, he followed nearly the same course as Byron, but was fortunate enough to discover the delightful land of Tahiti, where he was able to go ashore and engage in traffic. The islands were lovely, the natives now proved friendly, and their women affectionate ; indeed, so easy to arrange was commerce of all kinds with both sexes that the ship was in serious danger of being surreptitiously denuded of its nails and iron fittings, which were greatly coveted by the islanders, and Uberally bestowed on them by the gallant sailors in return for the favours of love. Returning to England in 1768, a glowing account by Wallis ' The gigantic stature of the Patagonians was reported by one traveller after another ; but they gradually shrank as closer observations were made, until it was discovered that their height was little above the normaL For the history of the Falkland Isles see vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. iv. ^ These islands had been discovered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth centary, but the knowledge of them was suppressed as far as possible. See bk. xx. ch. i. 14 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS of his journey raised high expectations of the value of South Sea enterprise. But still none had visited Australia ; and the voyage which Lieutenant Cook was now commissioned to make had for its object the astronomical observation of the Transit of Venus from Tahiti, geographical exploration being for the moment a secondary consideration. James Cook, a Yorkshireman of Scottish descent, to whose discoveries we owe the first real knowledge of Australasia, Captain ^^^ ^^"^ ®° ^^^^ October 1728. His parents were Cook, in humble circumstances, and the lad's early years 17 8-79. y^exe spcut in a two-roomed cottage of the kind known in the north of England as a clay biggin. Little is recorded of his youthful days ; but after a few years of such education as the place afiorded he became an assistant in a haberdasher's shop at the village of Staithes, near Whitby in Yorkshire. But the call of the sea was upon him, and young Cook entered the mercantile marine, subsequently enlisting in the Royal Navy. Employed on active service in the great campaigns which resulted in the conquest of Canada, he soon gave evidence of the possession of peculiar talents by the excellence of his surveys of the coasts of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Shortly afterwards came the opportunity of more important work. Captain WaUis had reported strongly in favour of Tahiti being chosen as the best place for the astronomical observa- His First tions which were contemplated at that time ; Voyage and Cook was now appointed to the command World, of the Endeavour barque, and ordered to proceed 1768-71. thither in charge of a scientific expedition. He sailed from Plymouth on 26th August 1768 ; the isles of the Pacific were reached, and the Transit of Venus was success- fully watched the following year in the South Seas, to the accompaniment of continued good cheer among the friendly people of the Society Islands. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 15 Having carried out the primary object of the voyage, Cook now turned southwards, and* sailed many days before dis- covering land on 8th October 1769. The land he found proved to be an inlet on the east coast of the north island of New Zealand — the name of Poverty Bay being given it because nothing of which the NewZeaiand, expedition was in need could be obtained there ^'^^^• save a small supply of wood. But the surrounding country was not unattractive, and it was found to improve consider- ably on closer acquaintance. Cultivated land was met with in many places ; a sure sign, as Cook remarked, that the country was both fertile and well inhabited. The two great islands of which New Zealand consists were both circumnavigated, in order to ascertain whether they formed part of the southern continent ; and while that ques- tion was being answered in the negative, it was discovered that the two differed greatly in their natural wealth and the character of their inhabitants. In the north island the soil was Ught, but so fertile that it would bear all the products of Europe ; there was much good timber, and flax was abundant. Of the south island, on the other hand, it was reported that ' no country on earth can appear with a more rugged and barren aspect than this does from the sea, for as far inland as the eye can reach nothing is to be seen but the summits of rocky mountains, which seem to lay so near one another as not to admit any valleys between them.' In some places the inhabitants, whom a later generation knew as the warlike Maories, were friendly and open in their bearing, and were found to possess the rudiments of civilisa- tion ; in other parts they were absolute savages, poor and miserable, living without decency, hostile to and distrustful of all new-comers, and frequently indulging in sanguinary wars among themselves, which generally ended in an orgy of cannibalism. ' Their ideas,' it was reported, * were so 16 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS horrid and brutal, that they seemed to pride themselves on their cruelty and barbarity, and took a peculiar pleasure in showing how they killed their enemies.' They appeared, in fact, to have changed httle since Tasman gave the name of Murderers* Bay to the spot at which he had anchored in 1642. After a sojourn of nearly six months on the shores of New Zealand, Captain Cook sailed westwards for Australia on Australia, 3l8t March 1770 ; and four weeks later, on 1770. 29th April, the Endeavour dropped anchor in an inlet which was named, from the abundance of its flowers and shrubs, Botany Bay. Here the aborigines seemed inchned to be hostile, although Uttle intercourse was possible on this first visit ; but while the native language was adjudged neither harsh nor inharmonious, and the people were con- sidered well-made and active, it was easily seen that they were in a very rudimentary stage of development. And ' their skins were so imiformly covered with dirt that it was very difficult to ascertain their true colour ; we made several attempts, by wetting our fingers and rubbing it, to remove the incrustations, but with very little efEect.' On a first appearance, and allowing for the fact that it was the middle of the dry season, the land appeared well watered ; and also, as Cook admitted, the whole country was still virgin soil ; but even at that, there was provender for more cattle all the year round than could ever be brought into New South Wales. And Cook believed that most kinds of grain, fruits, and roots would flourish, were they once planted and cultivated. But taken as a whole, the prospect was not particularly inviting. Despite the fact that New South Wales, as Cook now called the entire continent, was beheved to be larger than Europe, and that the coast was known to possess good har- bours, and the neighbouring waters an inexhaustible supply of fish, the general estimate of the country was unfavourable. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 17 It was stated to be * upon the whole rather barren than fertile, yet the rising ground is chequered by woods and lawns, and the plains and valleys are in many places covered with herbage ; the soil, however, is frequently sandy. The grass in general is high but thin. The soil in some parts seemed to be capable of improvement, but the far greater part is such as can admit of no cultivation.' The expedition proceeded to coast Australia from the extreme south-east to Cape Tribulation, which owes its name to the disaster that now overtook the explorers ; and Cook would probably have circumnavigated the whole continent had not the Endeavour struck upon the Great Barrier Reef at this point on 10th June. The accident, which threatened to bring the voyage to a disastrous close, forced Cook to return to England immediately ; and after putting in at Batavia for repairs and provisions, he reached home again on 13th July 1771. The reports of the voyage at once aroused enormous interest. The enthusiasm for discovery now increased ; and a second expedition was quickly fitted out, which left cook's England, again with Cook as commander, in the vovaffe two vessels Resolution and Adventure, exactly a 1772-6. year after the Endeavour had returned. The chief aim of this second voyage, however, was the exploration of the South Seas ; once more Austraha hardly came within its scope. Cook penetrated far into the Antarctic, into such high latitudes that icicles more than an inch in length frequently hung to the faces of the crews ; and when he eventually turned sharply to the north, he touched at many of the semi-tropical isles of the Pacific. Australia was left altogether on one side, but the south island of New Zealand was again explored : Cook's second report, however, was not materially different from his first. * The country,' he wrote, ' is exceedingly mountainous. A VOL. v. B 18 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS prospect more rude and craggy is rarely to be met with ; for inland appears nothing but the summits of mountains of a stupendous height, and consisting of rocks that are totally barren and naked, except where they are covered with snow. But the land bordering on the sea- coast and all the islands are thickly clothed with wood, almost down to the water's edge. The trees are of various kinds, such as are common to other parts of the country, and are fit for the shipwright, house-carpenter, cabinet-maker, and many other uses. Here are, as well as in all other parts of New Zealand, a great number of aromatic trees and shrubs, most of the myrtle kind ; but amidst all this variety there were none that bore fruit fit to eat. . . . The soil is a deep black mould, evidently composed of decayed vegetables, and so loose that it sinks under you at every step.' Although Captain Cook, in the report of his first voyage, had recommended that a settlement should be made either at the Bay of Islands or on the Thames River, his suggestion was disregarded. New Zealand was neglected for another half-century ; but the accounts that were brought back in 1775 of the extraordinary beauty and fertihty of the scattered groups of islands that lie hke moles on the vast bosom of the Pacific Ocean caused considerable excitement among the adventurous and commercial, while the rehgious spirit of the age dreamed of fresh conversions in a new mission field.^ A third voyage was projected a year after the second was ended. But once again Australia was neglected. Cook's cook'sTMrd object on this occasion being not so much a voyi^e* continuance of discovery in the South Seas as 1776-9. to ascertain whether a northern passage existed between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans — the old search for the North- West Passage, in short, which had baffled Davis, Hudson, and Baffin, was to be continued, but in a reverse direction. ^ For the misKions in the Pacific, see bk. xx. oh. i. THE INVASION OF THE^ANTIPODES 19 Cook left England on 12th July 1776— a date which his old crews had marked as a lucky day, as it was the anniversary of the departure of the previous expedition. His vessel, the Resolution, which was accompanied by the Discovery, arrived in Tasmania the following January ; and having observed the wide difference between the mild and stupid aborigines of that island and the bloodthirsty Maories, he proceeded to New Zealand, and onwards to the Pacific. He explored the great west coast of North America, which two generations of French and English traders had striven in vain to reach by the overland route from eastern Canada ; ^ he sailed through the Behring Straits into the bleak solitudes of the Arctic Ocean. Baffled by ice and snow, he was forced to turn back to warmer latitudes ; but death awaited him in the tropics. At Hawaii, on 14th February 1779, Captain James Cook the circumnavigator was slain by accident in a brawl with some of the natives of the island. The great sailor was little more than fifty when he died ; but in that short Hfetime, and within the hmits of ten years' travel, he had opened up the Pacific Ocean to British enter- prise. What had hitherto been thought a waste of waters — for the Spaniards and Portuguese who traversed the vast expanse of the Pacific had suffered few of its secrets to be divulged — was now known to be studded with rich and fertile groups of islands, to contain a great continent in Australia, and two considerable countries in New Zealand ; and not many years were allowed to pass before these discoveries were turned to profitable account.^ A few years after Cook met his tragic death the first British ^ See vol. iii. bk. x. ch. iii. Alexander Mackenzie crossed the American continent a few years later. ■^ History repeats itself. When America first became known to Europe, the small West Indian islets were perhaps unduly prized, while the con- tinent itself was less esteemed. Much the same mistake was committed in Australasia ; for it was the fortune of New Zealand and Australia to be depreciated, while the Pacific Isles were better known and more highly valued. The sraall is more readily appreciated than the great. X 20 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS colony in Australia was founded at Port Jackson. But for some time subsequently there was little exploration of the Further interior ; nor could there, indeed, be any great Exploration, attraction in such work at that day. For this pioneer settlement in the antipodes was formed mainly of criminals ; its prosperity in early days was always precarious, and frequently its very existence hung by a thread. It was planted on the edge of the ocean ; inland was a wild and apparently unprofitable country, where those few who ven- tured to enter generally died miserably, either of starvation or at the hand of the aborigines. So httle did the exploration of Australia advance, in fact, that some years later it was considered a feat worthy of record when the governor of the colony rode thirty miles from the coast ; anything further than this was stopped by the Blue Mountains, whose ranges separated the establishment at Sydney from the unknown wilderness of the interior. Another generation was to come and go before long- distance overland journeys could be attempted in Austraha ; Bass and ^^^ ^^® present it was by sea alone that exploration ninders, was possible. Along the coasts, however, some useful knowledge was gathered by Bass and Flinders, a surgeon and heutenant stationed at Port Jackson. Sailing to the south in an open boat in the year 1798, they surmised from what they saw that Tasmania was an island, or rather a group of islands, and not part of the continent, as had heretofore been supposed. Another journey in the following year decided the question. They passed through what is now known as Bass Strait without reahsing exactly where they were ; only the long swell of the southern ocean convinced them that their supposition regarding Tasmania was correct. They succeeded in circumnavigating the island ; and after touching at various places on the coast of the country which now forms the state of Victoria, and visiting some of the smaller islands that lay along their course, they THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 21 returned to Sydney ; but their report, on the whole, was disappointing. It is true that the land they saw near Port Dalrymple was evidently fertile. ' If it should ever be proposed to make a settlement here,' they wrote, * this part seems to ,j^^^ ^^ merit very particular attention.' In places the couraging hills were ' grassed and wooded close down to the ®^° ' waterside ' ; elsewhere the explorers were astounded by the varied and magnificent scenery, and attracted by the docility of the natives. But in most places the soil was stony, or else wet and salt. In either case it was scarcely fit for pasturage. In the Twofold Bay district it was ' much more barren than productive,' and the same seemed true of the greater part of the country which they explored. Most of the islets they visited were also wild and deserted, showing nothing but brown and starved vegetation. The final conclusion of Bass and Flinders was that both New South Wales and Tasmania were poor countries. In the former, the soil that was fit for culture was supposed to /\ consist only of a few distinct patches of limited extent, and of varying quality ; in Tasmania good soil was more equally distributed, and therefore spots of abundant richness were less frequently seen. In both countries it was at once noticed as a grave difficulty that the water supply was deficient.^ In the same year, 1799, the coast to the north of Sydney was explored, but nothing was added to what Cook had already discovered, nor did Bass and Flinders reach so far as he had done. The real exploration of Austraha was still to come ; but the accounts given by the early travellers, who saw only the superficial aspect of the land, cannot fail to suggest some singular reflections. There iseemed nothing inviting in the whole continent. -V ' It must have been an annsually dry season, for Tasmania is generally well watered. 22 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Almost without exception the reports regarding AustraUa \/ had been depressing ; almost without exception the reports Australia *^^* yreve given for years to come by every travel- held in Low ler who visited the antipodes were equally pessi- y ^ **™" mistic. Even Darwin, who had keen eyes both for natural beauty and for natural possibilities, had few good words to say for the country, and no great belief in its future, when he visited it forty years later. For a long time little attention was given to Australia in Britain ; not until the discovery of gold in 1851 did the EngUsh colonies there emerge from obscurity.^ The quiet beauty of Australia was not of a kind to appeal to men who had seen the prodigal luxuriance of Nature in the South American tropics, or the pearl-hke splendour of the Pacific Isles ; rather did the peaceful monotony of its land- scapes repel them. The aborigines had done nothing to cultivate the land ; everywhere was virgin bush or untamed desert. Its distance from home, and its supposed disadvan- tages as compared with the United States, prevented many emigrants from coming who would otherwise have settled in the antipodes. And various artificial methods had to be resorted to before cultivation was possible in many parts that only needed irrigation to blossom abundantly. The tardiness of Nature, and the many difficulties that had to be faced before profitable agriculture was possible, compelled co-operation on a larger scale than had been tried elsewhere. Thus, from the exigencies of its natural conditions, were laid 1 Sir Joseph Banks, the naturalist and President of the Royal Society, who accompanied Cook on his first voyage, had a better opinion of Australia, and considerable influence in inducing the British Government to found a settlement there. But even his first impression was not too favourable. And Darwin, in the Voyage of H. M.S. Beagle (1836), after some expressions of moderate approval, confessed that he left Australia ' without sorrow or regret,' and remarked that ' nothing but rather sharp necessity ' would make him live there. He admitted that the continent might some day ' reign a great princess in the South,' but he thought 'such future grandeur rather problematical.' For the discovery of gold, see bk. xviii. oh. iv. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 23 the foundations of the social policy that has since been so conspicuously identified with Australasia. And certain peculiar but not regrettable features have characterised the subsequent development of the new nation whose seeds Britain now began to scatter carelessly through the southern seas. There have been few dramatic episodes in Australian history. It is one of the few considerable countries in the V world that has never known invasion by a foreign power. It has experienced no civil war. It has become involved in no international complications of any magnitude. It has seen but little bloodshed. And in spite of enormous improve- ments in modern means of locomotion and transit, it is in many respects still isolated. It has afforded a footing to no European people save the English ; it has been the home of no non-European people save its own aborigines at all. It has stood apart from the world's disputes ; its whole development has been peaceful, and it is in this that the main interest of its history lies. It is true that the slur of crime was cast upon the continent in its earlier years ; but apart from this, the British have begun and continued unhampered in AustraUa. The protecting wings of the great empire have been over the colonists in the antipodes, leaving them free to concentrate attention on their own affairs ; and in consequence they have evolved a civilisa- tion, original and distinctive in some respects, marvellously successful in a material sense when the short term of its existence is considered, and perhaps not less fertile in a spiritual sense when we remember the high ideals that animate Australia and New Zealand at the beginning of the twentieth century. 24 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS CHAPTER III THE PENAL STATIONS: 1788-18021 As Captain Cook sailed from place to place on his voyages of discovery in the southern seas, he claimed each spot at which he touched for Britain. In consequence, practically the whole of Australasia came into the nominal possession of England ; ^ and lands whose very size and shape were still unknown, whose products and fertihty could hardly be estimated, whose languages and peoples could not be enumerated, were henceforth considered to be subject to George iii. That monarch had lately lost one empire in America by his own act ; he now gained another in Australia by the acts of his lieutenants. The curious ethical conceptions of right v/hich underlay 1 There are many histories of early Australia. Auckland's History of New Holland (1787) deals with precolonisation times. Pateraon's History of New South Wales may be consulted, as also Mudie's Picture of Australia, and Lycett's Views in Au-^tralia. For early days the Voyage of Governor Phillip (1790), White's Journal of a Voyage (1790), and Tench's valuable Narrative of the Expedition (1789) ; also Hunter's Historical Journal of Transactions at Port Jackson (1793), and Marsden's Present State of New South Wales. The various Voyages and Narratives published under the name of Barrington are not original. The best and fullest accounts of the whole period are Bonwick's First Tioenty Years of Australia, and Collins's Account of the Engliah Colony in Nev) South Wales. The former is founded on the official records of the Colonial Office, but the author is not always impartial ; the writer of the latter was one of the prominent officials in the first settlement. There are several pamphlets relating to old Botany Bay in the British Museum, mostly of the 'last confession of a doomed criminal' order. They are of little value, but of some interest as the only apparent survivors of a species of literature which must have been fairly common at the time. '^ The designation New Holland remained on the maps and in popular currency for several years. In the charts accompanying Oxley'a Journals (1820) the western half of Australia is called New Holland, and the eastern half New South Wales. The name New South Wales was given by Captain Cook ; the same name had been given, rather inappropriately, by an older explorer to the west coast of Hudson Bay (vol. iii. bk. x. oh. i.), but long since forgotten. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 25 these claims to land that was already partially occupied, and therefore necessarily to some extent owned, by others, might perhaps have caused a transient feeUng of amazement in a different planet, whose inhabitants were not subtle enough to disguise the happy behef that desire is a justification of possession under the spreading mantle of international law ; but the practice was too conmion to excite much remark in the civiUsed countries of Europe. Yet in a logical world which regards the fact rather than the theory, the undeniable might rather than the problematical right, it must be admitted that however vaUd the claim, effective colonisation, not discovery, is the only real test of possession ; and as yet there were no English colonies in Australasia. The first British station in those parts was not founded until 1788, and the early years of settlement gave little promise of the Commonwealth of the next century. The first use that was made of the new British possessions v was as a penal station for convicted criminals. The scum of England was transported to the antipodes, along with the victims of the barbarously severe judicial code of the day ; and there both were set down in bondage and exile, the un- fortunate rendered desperate by the wrong that had been done them, the bad corrupt to the last degree — a miserable inauguration of a new English nation. In paUiation of the Imperial Government's action may fairly be urged the extreme ignorance which still prevailed as to the resources, and even the extent, of Australia ; and not only that, but the reports which had been received regarding the new dependency of the Crown were none too laudatory. In ; striking contrast to the rhapsodies that had been indulged in when Virginia was discovered,^ the verdict of almost every visitor to the antipodes was pessimistic. Pelsart and Dampier had both given a bad account of Australia. Cook was less depressing, but he had reserved all his enthusiasm for the ^ See vol. i. bk. i. ch. vi. 26 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS beautiful islands of the Pacific. None of the explorers in the southern seas thought highly enough of the new continent to rank it as a second America, as compensation in part for the secession of the United States.^ Australia had hidden her face from those who found her ; for some years more she hid her face from those who mis- judged her. But meanwhile the position in England was urgent and \( full of menace. The prisons were full to overflowing. Crime in Prisoners of all classes and both sexes were England. herded together indiscriminately ; no distinction was drawn between the hardened offender and the youthful unfortunate, and both in time became equally bad. John Howard, the father of prison reform in England, and John Wesley, the apostle of the eighteenth century, had, indeed, already called attention to this evil state of things, and had formulated proposals for betterment.^ But the reform had not been thoroughly carried out in the short time that had elapsed since their investigation ; and though the age was big with schemes for revising the drastic criminal code, no definite steps had yet been taken to alter the harsh legal system of Britain. ' It might also have been urged in defence of the Imperial Govern- ment's action that the criminals stood a better chance of reformation in a new laud. But this idea had been refuted by past experience. See vol. i. bk. i. ch. vi. and bk. iv. ch. v. Bacon had long since pointed out that ' it is a shameful and unblessed thing to take the scum of people, and wicked condemned men, to be the people with whom you plant ; and not only so, but it spoileth the plantation ; for they will ever live like rogues, and not fall to work, but be lazy, and do mischief, and spend victuals, and be quickly weary, and then certify over to their country, to the discredit of the plantation.' But statesmen do not always study pliilosopby, which in this case was a true prophecy. The transportation of convicts is one of those apparently convenient short cuts which, in politics as on other equally dusty highways, pro- verbially prove the longest way round. 2 John Wesley admitted that Newgate Prison in London had recently been improved, but stated that other prisons were still in a disgraceful condition in 1761 ; only in Newgate were the sexes separated. See Wesley's Journal. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 27 And still the prisons remained full, and the Government could not indefinitely continue the building of new ones. And since the revolt of the old American colonies it was no longer possible to get rid of the convicts by the quick and easy method of sending them to work in the plantations. An attempt was indeed made to find a suitable place for a penal and reformatory colony in Africa, but none offered for the dubious honour. And ever the problem of accommodation pressed more and more urgently ; and Austraha was now ^ mentioned as a convenient station for transportation. The Imperial Government soon determined to try the experiment ; ^ and on 13th May 1787 Captain Arthur Phillip ^ sailed from England for Botany Bay with six The Penal transports and three storeships, taking with him BotanyBay 565 male and 192 female convicts, together with 1788. 18 children. The prisoners were stated to be humble and submissive in their demeanour, and the voyage was without incident, save for the attempted escape and easy recapture of a convict at Teneriffe. The human cargo arrived without mishap at its destination on 20th January 1788 ; and six days later, after Botany Bay had proved unsuitable for colonisation, the first British settlement in Australia was founded higher up the coast at Port Jackson. The story of that settlement is not a savoury one. The men were blackguards and the women prostitutes. Philhp ^ There were strong protests against the establishment of a convict settlement in Australia ; see, for example, A Sericma Admonition to the Public on the Intended Thief Colony at Botany Bay (1786). John Howard himself condemned the Botany Bay scheme as ' expensive, dangerous, and destructive.' These remonstrances, however, were no more effectual than the suggestion in A Proposal for Establithing a Settlement in New South Wales, that Australia would ' afford an asylum to those unfortunate American loyalists to whom Britain is bound by every tie of honour and gratitude.' But most of the United Empire loyalists were already settling in Ontario and Maritime Canada, countries which they would certainly prefer to the remote distances and evil reports of Australia. See vol. iii. bk. ix. ch, ▼. 28 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS himself said of the latter that ' in general they possessed neither virtue nor beauty/ and he proposed to allow the The Convict men promiscuous intercourse with the more aban- settiers. doned.^ The less disreputable among them, he thought, might intermarry with the better class of convicts, or wives might be found for the latter among the native women. And from these debased and promiscuous ingredients was to spring the first generation of British Australasians ; the garrotter and the forger, the diseased harlot of the London streets and the aboriginal ' gin ' of the bush were to be the first parents of an imperial state. At first sight New South Wales seemed a fitting station for the involuntar y colonist s. One of the officials wrote that ' in the whole world there is not a worse country.' Another did not beheve that anything could be profitably grown in any shorter time than a century, and said it would be ' cheaper to feed convicts on turtle and venison at the Tower of London than to be at the expense of sending them here.' It is curious to reflect that these words were spoken of a spot which is now the centre of the wealth and splendour of modern Sydney ; ^ but the first few years of the colony did not behe them. Immediately on landing some of the men were lost in the dense backwoods. Scurvy broke out, and many deaths took place. The wilder convicts, impatient even of the gentle discipline that was at first enforced, wandered away and were lost. Those who returned were punished, but nothing could prevent further desertions. Within three weeks of landing a court of criminal judicature had to be established, and later a force of night-watchmen was instituted. Executions and floggings were frequent. Gross licentiousness prevailed ; and ^ Tench remarked {Narrative of the Expedition) that to ' prevent the intercourse was impossible; to palliate its evils only remained.' The Government was not very successful even in that, and some of the officials were found to have taken female convicts for their mistresses. ^ The name Sydney was derived from Viscount Sydney, the Secretary of State in the Imperial Government, who was mainly responsible for the foundation of the settlement. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 29 while petty thefts were continual, the men found an easy way of hiding their gains in the huts of their paramours. The inevitable discovery of a gold mine was proclaimed ; and it was not until a convict had been flogged into confessing that he had fashioned the nugget he exhibited out of a guinea or a ring and a buckle that his tale was disproved. Even then many thought he was keeping his knowledge secret till a better opportunity offered. The indifferent or friendly attitude of the natives soon changed into one of hostihty. A ridiculous conspiracy was set on foot that was planned to end in a general mutiny, and an expedition by the convicts to Tahiti. Greater severity was introduced from this time, but with little effect. Others, with pitiable ignorance, thought they could walk overland to China, and started out with that end in view. A great plot was discovered among the Irish rebels who had been transported ; they beheved that another white colony existed some three hundred miles to the south, where they would be free to live in idleness. Not until the Governor allowed five of them to go on an exploring expedition was the baselessness of the story demonstrated ; they returned worn out and footsore, after undergoing terrible hardships in the trackless bush. Small material advance was made, for nothing could over- come the idleness and lassitude of the men. Those employed on public works, at constructing a wharf or build- Their Lazi- ing the first clay or grass-roofed huts, did no more ordination than was necessary to save their backs from the and Misery, whip. Those engaged in agriculture either could not or would not dig. There was not, as indeed there could not be, among such a crew of ruffians, any idea of making common cause in estabhshing a self-supporting community. It is not surprising that famine was soon added to the other troubles of the settlement. Great hopes had been entertained of an abundant supply of sea-fish, but these proved delusive. 30 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS The plants and animals that had been brought over from Europe and South Africa died. The crops would not mature. Additional supplies occasionally came in from Cape Colony, but not enough to restock the storehouses. The whole colony was frequently on half rations. The ^ military guard was often on the verge of revolt. Of the marines at the station it was said that ' not one of them had a shoe to their feet, nor scarce a shirt to their backs, nor a pot to every twelve men, nor a bed nor a blanket among them.' Meanwhile the British Government was sending out further batches of criminals every few months, and thus placing more ^ The Trans- burdens on the Governor of New South Wales, portsMpa. wlien he could barely provide for those he had already. By 1795 the number of those transported had reached 4937, and it was increasing every year. But the prisoners often died on board, owing to the overcrowding and lack of cleanliness which made a convict ship very like a slaver. Governor Phillip wrote in 1790 that ' of 939 males sent out, 281 had died on board, and 50 since landing ' ; while those who survived were * emaciated and worn by long confine- ment or want of food.' A few years later the conditions were improved, owing to the exertions of the philanthropic Mrs. Fry and her devoted band of followers, who personally inspected each vessel before it sailed from England ; but from one point of view it was a blessing that so many perished, for an official in Australia wrote that, ' had not such numbers died on the voyage and since the landing we should not at this moment have had anything to receive from the public stores,' The fresh convicts who arrived were in a miserable state ; X * a great number of them lying, some half and others nearly quite naked, without either bed or bedding ' ; as late as 1798 a complaint was sent to England that * the whole colony was actually naked, no clothing worth mentioning has been THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 31 received here for more than two years. Not a blanket to wrap themselves in during the night/ Insubordination and crime now increased among the prisoners, aliJThe men pro- -^ fessed themselves too weak to work ; but it was noticed that ' the distress of the colony did not seem to make any amend- ment in the morals of the convicts,' From beginning to end the whole system was vicious and immoral. As soon as a convict vessel left England, the ship's officers selected the most passable among viciotxsnesa the women prisoners, and hved with them during of the the voyage ; the less attractive were taken by y**®™- *^-^ the sailors. On landing in Australia, a similar process was gone through ; the Grovemment officials took their pick, the remainder were distributed among the male convicts accord- ing to choice. Often a prisoner would claim as his wife a strange woman immediately on her arrival, and if she did not disown him the pair Uved together as long as both were agreeable to the arrangement. At j&rst marriage was not thought of in New South Wales ; V' even in 1807, after twenty years of the penal system, the Governor reported that * the married women were immorality 395, concubines 1035, legitimate children 807, ^men- natural children 1025.' ness. Drunkenness was the common curse of the place. Thieving XK became so general that it was hardly noticed ; the death penalty was no deterrent. Riots and disturbances were frequent, while there were constant desertions from the settlement ; men wandered ofi into the backwoods, and were lost or killed by the natives. From these hopeless elements it was the task of the Governor to rear a self-respecting community. No provision had been ^ made for schools, and but httle for rehgious ^^ children teaching ; yet there were children in this terrible of the settlement. It is to the credit of the officials ° °^^* that they saw in them the hope of the future. The chaplain 32 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS of the colony interested William Wilberforce in the instruction of the convicts' offspring ; a long correspondence was ex- changed between the two ; and by 1792 the rudiments of education were introduced. This, however, was not enough ; the children were visibly degenerating through association y with their own parents ; and to prevent the spread of cor- / ruption an orphan school was opened. ' It was the only step,' wrote the Governor, ' that would ensure some change in the manners of the next generation. God knows this is bad enough.' But no funds were forthcoming from home to carry on the good work. Since England did not yet recognise the right The First of her own children at home to instruction, it is .^ School. not to be wondered at that she made no provision for the unfortunates of her most distant possession. The Governor, however, was equal to the occasion. Orders were issued in the year 1800 to raise funds from ' such donations as may be received, and a regulation duty on the entrance and clearance of vessels, landing articles for sale, privilege of watering at a convenient place for shipping, and issuing blank forms of promissary notes.' By this means were rescued those ' deserted female orphans from those scenes of prostitu- tion and iniquity that disgrace the major part of the inhabi- tants of this colony ' ; and such were the feeble beginnings, in the twelfth year of the British occupation of New South Wales, of the educational system which has since developed into so efficient an institution in Australia. But it was of necessity a long time before the ameliorating influence could be felt in any marked degree ; and meanwhile X there were other difficulties of more urgent character. The arrival of supplies from England was always precarious, and it was therefore the natural policy of the administration to encourage land settlement, agriculture, and stock-breeding. The whole of the original imported resources of the colony had consisted of seeds which, when sown, would not come up, THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 33 on account of the ignorance of agricultural methods shown by y the convicts ; and in Uve stock the place possessed but one bull, four cows, one calf, one stallion, three mares, Agricultural three foals, twenty-nine sheep, twelve pigs, and a Resources, few goats. These latter were carefully tended, but some escaped to the backwoods, where they were found in 1795 in a pleasant and fertile inland country. Their increase demonstrated the natural fitness of Austraha for cattle-raising ; but the scarcity of corn remained a serious difficulty. The convicts were t oo indolent to do more than X^ they were compelled ; while those whose sentences had expired, and who started operations on their own account, were generally more troublesome than before. The unsatis- factory condition of a colony founded on time-expired soldiers, sailors, and prisoners became every day more apparent ; and the officials sent home an appeal for a more respectable class y; of ^migrants. The convicts, it was proposed, should then be placed out among the free settlers as indentured labourers ; ^ it was urged that a better social tone would thereby be given to the colony, while those who had come out of their own free will would have an interest in the country which no prisoner could pretend to possess while he was still pining for his old haunts of crime. The appeal was not neglected. Apphcations had indeed already been received by the British Government from people in England who desired to settle in Austraha, The First but who could not go, partly on account of lack ggttiers of funds, and partly because permission was as 1792. yet withheld. The Government seems to have thought it extraordinary that anybody should wish to go to so unattrac- tive a place as New South Wales ; and some of the apphcations * This remained indeed a favourite scheme for many years in other colonies. It was suggested that convicts should be transported to Cape Colony to take the place of the South African slaves emancipated in 1834 (vol. vi. bk. xxiii. ch. iv.), but neither Dutch nor English would hear of the idea. VOL. V. 34 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS that arrived in London were from men who evidently had no chance of success in Australia. One pressed his claim because he was an accountant, one because he spoke excellent French, and one gave the more relevant reason that he was in love. But these apart, there were still some who were eligible ; and the regulations that were drawn up in consequence were framed in no ungenerous spirit to the future settlers. To the marines on duty at Port Jackson allotments of eighty acres were offered to single men, and one hundred to married ; to non-commissioned officers, one hundred and thirty acres to single men, and one hundred and fifty to married. In addi- tion, ten acres were allotted for each child. They were supplied with free clothes, tools, and seeds, and a year's provisions ; the land was free for five years, and afterwards subject to a rent of a shilling for every fifty acres. In this way was formed the first New South Wales military corps, for these privileges were conditional on service ; to the emigrants from England a free passage was granted, with tools, land, and the service of convicts free, together with provisions for two years. Some took advantage of the grant, and the Governor found his pohcy quickly justified. The criminal slur that was thrown on Australia was indeed removed very slowly. A colony that has been reserved for convict settlements is no very inviting place for the homes of honest free men. The prejudice which looked on the antipodes as the land of out- casts died very gradually ; and as the Imperial Government insisted on its right to transport criminals to various parts of the country well into the middle of the nineteenth century, it is scarcely wonderful that people with indifferent geo- graphical knowledge did not distinguish very accurately between penal stations and free pioneering settlements. The same stigma of crime was cast over the whole. ''' But the arrival of free colonists was nevertheless the THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 35 turning point of Australian history. Within a year there was a noticeable difference in the harvests ; the Uve stock of the country increased ; the first squatters -nieir took up land. success. From this time, in fact, there were two distinct elements in New South Wales. C)n__the_one__hanj[, there were the convicts, without vohtion or energy, hating and hated by ^ ^e free settlers, in some respects a danger to the colony, ^^li/y in some perhaps an advantage, since their labour, of Httle ^^ "^ value though it might be, was unpaid. On the other hand, y^ there were the free colonists, men ready to build theiFHomes U^ C^ in Australia, and detestmg the action of the British Govern- ment in making a prison of the country. They recognised, it is true, the advantage they obtained by the forced work of the convicts, but none the less they hated it ; and the more prosperous they became the more they hated it. The )(w history -of- Austraha for some years is that of a struggle between the two elements^ the free and the ^ound ; and between these two came the ^royernor, who, as sole representa- tive of the Crown, was forced to moderate between both, and who, in consequence, was generally the most unpopular man in the place. >, In the first few years of British Austraha there is thus httle j that is attractive, and there are few of those incidents which / lend colour to the early records of other colonies. It is one drab expanse of misery and crime ; the real progress of the country began later ; for the transportation period is no more the history of Austraha than the Newgate Calendar is the history of England. / 36 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS CHAPTER IV THE FIRST YEARS OF COLONISING: 1795-18211 With a touching belief in the possibiHty of founding a colonial empire out of the criminal population of England, the British Character of Government continued to transport the convicts tue Convicts, of the United Kingdom to Australia. It will probably give a clearer idea of the character of the earhest European settlers in the South Seas if a detailed list is set out of the crimes for which they were expelled their own country. We may take as a typical instance the 170 prisoners who came out on board the Neptune in 1817. Of these 44 were convicted of felony, 41 of robbery and burglary, 17 of small thefts, 10 of grand larceny, 8 of forgery, 7 of highway robbery, 8 of horse steahng, 8 of sheep and cow steaHng, 6 of circulating forged notes, 2 of desertion, 1 of frame breaking, 1 of assault and robbery, 1 of stealing from the person, 1 of larceny, 1 of obtaining goods under false pretences, 1 of breaking out of prison, 1 of aiding in the same, and 6 were respited of capital punishment. Six had been transported before, had served their time, and were now sentenced afresh for further crimes ; 85 were to be transported for hfe, 33 for fourteen years, and 52 for seven years.^ ^ Authorities. — Rusden's History of Australia is by far the best general work on the subject. Collins's Account of the English Colony of New South Wales is still useful as a contemporary chronicle. There are many other interesting histories of early Australia, and for at least the early part of the above period the great series of Historical Records of New South Wales renders all the authorities almost super- fluous. Some curious information regarding transportation will be found in Reid's Two Voyages to New South Wales. Lang's Historical and Statistical Account of New South Wales is untrustworthy, but Wentworth's New South Wales should be consulted. ^ I cite these cases in detail because it is sometimes stated that the con- victs who were sent out to Australia were mostly the unfortunate victims of bad laws, mere poachers and sinners against the barbarous Game Acts, men who were just as honest as their fellows, except that they had stood THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 37 Other vessels carried similar cargoes. Some brought female convicts, who ranged from the thief and the associate of forgers to the diseased and intemperate street-walker. Others, again, carried the wives and children of the convicts, at times mixed promiscuously with the criminals. Disturbances were common on the voyage. The men would conspire against the ship's ofl&cers. The boys were found indulging in unnatural vice. The sailors wished to live with the women. Not infrequently the women wished to live with the sailors. On some occasions this was connived at ; on others it was forbidden. In one of the latter cases, the infuriated women attempted to mutilate the surgeon who had refused such Mcence. It was common knowledge that reform was impossible, either on the voyage or on landing in Austraha, even had the prisoners wished it ; and many did not. * Were angels from heaven placed here as we are,' said one of the women on a convict ship, ' they would in three nights be corrupted.' And nothing availed to improve the conditions in the colony itself. Governor King on his arrival in 1800 found that' the 'children were abandoned to misery, prostitu- tion, and every vice of their parents.' Another wrote that * vice of every description is openly encouraged.' All the old evils of immorality and drunkenness continued without \X in the Old Bailey dock and vainly pleaded not guilty to trivial charges. That contention cannot be upheld when the cases are examined one by one, although several isolated instances can certainly be quoted in its favour. English justice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was stern and harsh, but it was just, and it did not condemn a man for crimes he had not committed. The accused seldom got so far as the dock without good cause ; he was rarely sentenced without having done something to warrant his punishment ; and the crimes mentioned in the text are sufficient to show that most of the convicts who were trans- ported had committed offences of a serious nature, the committal of which even under the present mild laws would be rewarded with five or ten years' penal servitude. The criminal does not vary much from age to age; and if some of those who pour out their sympathy over the criminal of the past were to study the criminal of the present at close quarters they would probably change their opinions. ^ 38 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS abatement. Intercourse between the male and female con- victs remained to a large extent promiscuous ; it was only limited, in fact, by the ojficials of the colony selecting the more attractive of the women for themselves. There were frequent disputes with the natives, for the prisoners would often tempt the aboriginal women to live with them, in the absence of more congenial, if temporary, partners of their own colour. The illegitimate children numbered one in ten of the whole population. And concubinage, it was stated, was held in higher esteem in New South Wales than marriage in England ; even the missionaries who left Tahiti for Sydney in 1799 were scarcely able to exaggerate the prevaiUng immorality when they appealed to London for help. For some years there was no place of worship in the colony. The first church was not built until 1793 ; even when Richard V Johnson, the chaplain who had come out with the original shipment of convicts, insisted on the erection of an edifice to be consecrated to divine service, he could obtain no assist- ance from the Government ; and St. Philip's, Sydney, as the rough bam of wattle and daub that was roofed with thatch was called, was built by his private exertions' five years after the colony was founded. The foundations of another church were at length laid at Parramatta, but before it was finished it was used as a prison, and after its completion it was turned into a granary.^ The chaplain of New South Wales, a disciple of Wilberforce and an earnest evangehst, was snubbed by the officials whenever he attempted to hold a service ; and both the convicts and their rulers openly laughed at his ministrations.^ ^ It has been stated, I know not with what truth, that St. Philip's, Sydney, and St. John's, Parramatta, were named, not after the Christian saints, but after Governor Phillip and Captain John Hunter. But the insinuation is made by a cleric of a rival faith, the Catholic UUathorne, in a very polemical Reply to Judge Burton. ^ The playhouse was more Buccessfnl than the Church in these early days. A theatre was opened at Sydney in 1798 by an ex -convict. The price of admission was one shilling ; but as the colony was badly supplied THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 39 It is true that there were some people of a better class y among the early convicts in the colony. There were the five men who were transported to Australia nominally for ' stimu- lating the people of Scotland to effect a reform of parliament ' in 1793, and who were generally known as the .Scottish, Martyrs. Their pohtical schemes were visionary, and of tEal~3angerous revolutionary type which so many copied from the French disorders of the time ; but they were not criminals in the ordinary sense of the word. There were likewise some innocent victims of the Irish rebellion in 1798. But their numbers were too small to have any elevating influence : and the majority of the thousand Irish political convicts were wild and desperate men whom it was necessary to keep down with a firm hand. In 1804 they rebelled, incited thereto by the Scottish plotters. For some days the colony was under martial law ; and years after the outbreak was suppressed the possibihty of another such insurrection was a source of anxiety to the Government. Nor did the convicts often show any improvement when v their sentence expired. By an almost inconceivable piece of official negligence, the British Government had omitted to supply the authorities in Australia with records of the sentences which had been passed upon the criminals ; and from the nature of things, the prisoner's word could not be accepted on the point. Most of the convicts wished to return to England ; and ' to compel these people to remain,' • wrote Phillip, ' may be attended with unpleasant consequences ; for they must be made to work if fed from the public stores, and if permitted y to be their own masters they must rob, for they have no other way to support themselves.' * ^, with currency, spectators were allowed to pay in kind, with a bag of flour or a bottle of rum. The ticket-office must have been as picturesque as the stage under these conditions. * The authorities gave no free passages back to England to the time- expired convict, and few of them were therefore able to return. (See i^ 40 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS '1 To a large degree their release was a matter of guesswork, depending on a possibly quite misleading display of good A The conduct while in prison ; and the n ew class of Emancipists, population thus created, called emancipists, were idle, dissolute vagabonds, with no knowledge of agriculture, and no intention of cultivating the soil, so long as they could obtain free rations from headquarters, or pick up an even less reputable hving by other means. King lamented that ' he could not make farmers of pickpockets ' ; and every governor complained that the women were worse than the men.^ The y men could be kept in rude order by flogging : the superin- y tendent of pohce was allowed to flog pubhcly with fifty lashes or imprison for thirty days any person convicted of idle or disorderly conduct on the evidence of one credible witness ; but the sternest disciphnarian shrank from apply- ing such measures to women. And these latter were fre- quently upheld by the ofl&cers and soldiers who should have assisted the law. The New South Wales Corps, to whom the task of keeping order was committed, was Ukewise corrupted by its sur- _ roundings. A rather dishonourable pohce service TheSoldiery. •,, ^ .-,.., , . , m the most distant of our possessions was not highly esteemed in England, and the best men seldom entered the corps while there was more glory to be obtained in the ygreat European wars. And as the governor of the colony was appointed from the navy, there was constant friction between the two services. evidence of T. Estcourt before Select Committee on Secondary Punish- ments, 1831 : 'Speaking of country and agricultural parishes, I do not know of above one instance in all my experience ' of transported convicts returning to England.) Yet some made their way back, as the lists of the Neptune transport, quoted a few pages earlier, prove. It may be mentioned that the reward for an informer after a crime had been committed in Australia was sometimes a free passage away from the colony. But, hated as Botany Bay was by its involuntary settlers, even this did not always induce men to turn king's evidence. ^ The type of which they consisted may be judged from such sentences in the official correspondence as ' among these are two young creatures, Tery abandoned . . . one is only thirteen and the other sixteen. ' ? / THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 41 Once arrived in Australia, the troops became almost as (^profligate as the convicts. They added to their pay by abusing their privileges. Something hke a monopoly was established by the corps in many articles : the officers had first call on the stores sent out in Government ships, and they retailed the goods thus seized to the other inhabitants of the colony at enormous profits. Fortunes were accumulated in this way : it was calculated that a hundred pounds worth of South American tobacco would sell in Australia for four thousand pounds, while writing paper was two guineas a quire. ~ J" But all other kinds of traffic paled before the buying and aXX, seUing of drink. Rum was at once the passion, the currency, and the ruin of the community. ' Crops were xhe Traffic no sooner gathered than they were instantly dis- in-, Drink, posed of for spirits, which they purchased at the rate of three, nay, even four pounds per gallon — a spirit, too, often lowered one-fourth or more of its strength with water.' The population, it was said, was divided between those who sold rum and those who drank it. There was neither gold nor silver in New South Wales : the Imperial Government per- sisted in sending out nothing but specie from England ; and the result was that all debts were paid either in spirits or wheat. Of the two, the former was the more usual and popu- x lar. Even Macquarie, who was instructed on his appointment as Governor in 1810 to put down the traffic in spirits, priced the contract for the building of Sydney Hospital at over sixty thousand gallons of rum, while the wages of the workmen in his time were generally calculated at the rate of one gallon of rum weekly. The men refused at times to recognise pay- ment in any other currency. An attempt was made to abolish the traffic in spirits : but v restrictions only made matters worse. lUicit stills were set up ; and when these could not supply every need, an exten- sive system of smugghng made good the deficiency. As the contraband trade was mainly in the hands of the officers and X 42 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS men of the New South Wales Corps, it was impossible to stop it. It was found, of course, that the passion for rum increased when the supply was made illegal. ' If people were thoroughly drenched with liquor,' wrote one resident, ' they would prefer water.' It was notorious that one supreme judge of the colony was never sober ; and more than one of the magistrates was suspected of trading secretly in the very goods he was by law bound to prohibit. -^^"^ It was evident that matters would not improve while Austraha remained a prison : yet the British Government The Hunter continued to send out two or three crowded trans- River setue- ports every year, satisfied to have got its criminals off its hands. New stations were estabhshed, as the population of Sydney grew unmanageable : and in all of them the evils inseparable from the convict system flourished as luxuriantly as in the parent settlement. When coal was discovered at the mouth of the Hunter River, the most desperate of the Irish convicts were transported to that district in 1805. The town of Newcastle was thus founded, and the counties of Northumberland and Durham marked out, the names at least being reminiscent of the mother country. Another settlement was made at Port Philhp in 1803 : but this proved abortive, mainly owing to the character of the man The Failure *^ whom it was entrusted. Colhns, the excellent, at Port kindly officer in charge, whose annals were for long Phillip. 1803. ^jjg ^j^jy g^^g ^^ ^j^g ^^^Yj history of Austraha, was neither stern nor enterprising enough to found a convict colony. Although the place to which he was sent, with 299 male and 16 female convicts, had been highly spoken of by previous explorers, and although it was within a few miles of the splendid site on which Melbourne was to rise a few years later, he considered it altogether unsuitable for habitation. * Every day's experience convinces me,' he reported, ' that it cannot, nor ever will, be resorted to ' ; the THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 43 soil seemed barren and sandy, the timber poor and stunted, there was not enough water, there were too many insects, snakes, hzards, and ants, while the natives were imfriendly and threatening. After a few months he removed the settle- ment to Tasmania. But the penal colony of New South Wales had not been founded a year before it became clear that a criminal population was not the stuff out of which to.' ^^.^^ fashion a self-respecting community. Governor settlement j Philhp requested again and again that free settle- ^®^^® • ment should be encouraged. ' If," he sent word to England, ' fifty farmers were sent out with their famihes, they would do more in one year in rendering this colony independent of the mother country as to provisions than a thousand convicts.' But his suggestions met with scant response. The emigra- tion^f"some Quaker lamilies~was mooted, but nothing came of the idea. It was thought that the American LoyaHsts might remove to the antipodes ; but those whose attachment to the Empire urged them to quit the newly-formed repubUc preferred Canada or the West Indies to Australia. And in the meantime the main tide of British emigration continued, independently of the poHtical severance, to flow to the United States. Nor was it an unhealthy or an unpatriotic instinct which drew men to America instead of Austraha. The antipodes were iintned" countries. The voyage was costly. Special permission had to be obtained from the Government before anybody could proceed thither. Many would naturally hesitate before undertaking a voyage to the other side of the world, and that, too, to a country where they could associate only with felons and loose women. And, in addition, there seemed less chance of achieving material success in Australia at that period than elsewhere. But the land has yet to be discovered to which some few British pioneers do not feel themselves attracted. On 14th July 1792, the Bellona transport arrived at Sydney : and in 44 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS addition to her usual cargo of social wreckage and prison stores, she carried eleven free settlers. From time to time The First their numbers were added to in subsequent years. Settlers '^^^ ^^ three families would come out in one vessel ; \ 1792. in the next there would be none ; and then again {(& few more would arrive. The process was a^low one. At times it was checked artificially, as when Governor Macquarie discouraged the free immigrants as far as possible, and declared that the emanci- pists were * by many degrees the most useful members of the J^ community ' ; and at no time was there any general impulse in England to undertake the thorough colonisation of Austraha, as there had been as regards America, when the Royalists grew enthusiastic over Virginia, and the Puritans founded their kingdom of God in Massachusetts. ^ Yet slowly as the settlement of free men progressed, it never A went backwards. The first arrivals began farming operations near Sydney, naming their abode Liberty Plains, to dis- tinguish it from the forced-labour stations of the convicts in the neighbourhood ; and when the results of one season's cultivation proved unprofitable, they removed to the rich * country hke an Enghsh park ' on the Hawkesbury River. Here the magnificent virgin soil brought them immediate suc- ■ cess ; in fact, the greater part of their troubles henceforth were caused by the very easiness of their hfe. The aborigines tried to plunder their corn. More than once a flood on the river swept away their farms and houses ; but repeated warnings could not prevail upon them to build further away from the stream. It was complained that they became reckless, and spent ' their time and substance in drinking and rioting, and trusting to the extreme fertility of the soil, which they declared would produce an ample crop at any time without much labour.' It seems, indeed, that the free men rather imitated the habits of the convicts than set an example to the fallen. Nor is it wonderful that such was THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 45 the case, for they were few among many : their servants were convicts, their wives or concubines were often drawn from the same class ; and though free themselves, they hved in the same tainted atmosphere of crime. The terms offered to settlers by the Government were not, however, ungenerous : and it seems not to have been difficult to obtain further concessions from the colonial John authorities. Far larger estates, indeed, were Pioneer ^' granted to, or at least taken by, the officers of the squatter New South Wales Corps than to ordinary settlers ; Breeder*^' and one of their number, the first of the sheep- 1793. breeders or squatters, had already been the means of intro- ducing into Australia one of the greatest, if not actually destined to be for all time the greatest, of the industries of the continent, John Macarthur, a heutenant of the Corps, had obtained in 1793 a hundred acres of land near Parra- matta : and the following year he began sheep-farming on an extensive scale. An account of his methods survives in his own words. * In 1794,' he writes, * I purchased from an officer sixty Bengal ewes and lambs which had been imported from Calcutta, and very soon afterwards I procured from the captain of a transport from Ireland two Irish ewes and a young ram. The Indian sheep produced coarse hair, and the wool of the Irish sheep was then valued at no more than nine- pence a pound. By crossing the two breeds I had the satis- faction to see the lambs of the Indian ewes bear a mingled fleece of hair and wool. This circumstance originated the idea of producing fine wool in New South Wales.' In 1797 he bought some South African sheep, which for- tunately included three rams and five ewes of a very fine Spanish breed ; and these were added to by subsequent purchases on a visit to England. Macarthur, however, was not satisfied, as were most of his neighbours, merely with the sale of the sheep in the restricted local market, although he 46 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS notes in his journal for 1805 that the price of a fat wether was then £5. He continued patiently to breed, and cross, and select from his stock, which he pastured at Camden on the Cowpasture River, where he had acquired a large grant of ten thousand acres from the Government. In a few years he had obtained fleeces of the finest texture, which found a ready sale in the English wool market. From that day the success of Australia as a sheep-breeding country was assured. Had Macarthur been content to abide by the expert advice of the British Government, the antipodes might have waited long before their fleeces competed with the merinos of Spain in the markets of the world ; for the Government, taking that uniformly pessimistic view of the prospects of Austraha which had become its habit, strongly dissuaded him from the experiments he undertook. But the obstinacy of the man, as outstanding a feature in his character as the bold if frequently tactless honesty which makes him the one con- spicuously pleasing figure in the annals of early New South Wales, triumphed in the end. It was inevitable that so successful a citizen as Macarthur Y^ should take a prominent part in the social and political events of the colony ; and his influence was generally exerted for good, in opposition to the miserable system of administration ^ which then prevailed at Sydney. The first occasion on which ^ he intervened in the public affairs of the day was in 1807, in the crisis which led to the deposition of Governor Bligh early in the following year. Captain William Bligh was a distinguished officer of the British navy : he was the hero or the victim of the famous Deposition KU^tiny on the Bounty ; ^ and he had been publicly of Governor thanked by Nelson for the gallantry and skill he Bligh, 1808. j^^^ displayed at the bombardment of Copen- hagen. But however valuable his qualities as an officer at sea — and there is no reason to doubt them — he was not by * See bk. xx. cli. i. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 47 any means fitted, to act as a colonial governor. Tyrannical Y and choleric in disposition, the same defects of leadership which had caused the mutiny on the Bounty incensed the free settlers of New South Wales. BUgh's favouritism, mostly extended to unworthy objects, roused general indignation ; and the doggedness with which he maintained his creatures in office made matters worse. In any case, a naval officer commanding miUtary troops was in a deUcate position, owing to the traditional jealousy of the services ; and the extent of Bhgh's diplomacy may be gauged from one of his outbursts. ' The law, sir ! ' he cried in a rage ; ' damn the law ! My will is the law, and woe unto the man that dares disobey it.' And however genuine were his efforts to stop the hquor traffic which still disgraced the colony, he was wholly in the wrong when he attempted to make a scapegoat of Macarthur, whose wealth was acquired by honourable industry : and the latter, who had fought a duel with his superior officer when in the army, was the last man to allow himself to be accused without just cause. Bligh seems indeed to have conceived an unworthy spite against the great stock breeder. ' Are you to have such flocks of sheep, and such herds of cattle,' he said to him once, ' as no man ever heard of before ? No, sir ! I have heard of your concerns, sir ; you have five thousand acres of land in the fairest situation in the country, but, by God, you shall not keep it.' Macarthur rephed with perfect truth that he held his lands by order of the Secretary of State on the recommendation of the Privy Council ; but Bligh retorted passionately, * Damn the Privy Council ! and damn the Secretary of State too ! What have they to do with me ? You have made a number of false statements respecting your wool by which you have obtained this land.' The accusation was unjust : but so far from retracting it, other charges were levelled by Bligh against Macarthur. The 48 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS squatter was arrested on a pretext, tried by a judge who was an ex-convict, and committed to prison. These arbitrary proceedings, which showed that BUgh's character had not changed since the revolt of his crew on the Bounty, at once set the freemen of the colony in an uproar. Nobody was secure when such acts were possible ; and the unpopularity of Bhgh came to a head through his persecution of the leading man in New South Wales. An immediate agitation was raised for his deposition. Major Johnston, the military officer who had put down the Irish convict rebellion of 1804, took upon himself to insist on Macarthur's release ; and the Governor was himself arrested. ' You are charged by the respectable inhabitants,' said Johnston to Bhgh, ' of crimes that render you unfit to exercise the supreme authority another moment in this colony, and in that charge all the officers serving under my command have joined.' The gang of Bhgh's favourites fell with their master ; and the adminis- tration was carried on by Johnston and his brother officers until a new governor had been sent out from England. At the exhaustive enquiry subsequently held into what was legally an act of rebeUion against the Crown, Johnston and those who had acted with him were substantially acquitted, and Bhgh's conduct was thus constructively condemned : but Macarthur was for some years refused permission to reside in Australia. In no part of his career was the dogged honesty of the man more admirably displayed. He was pining to return to his wife and children, his estates and stock-breeding experiments. But unless he acquiesced in a decision that left a stigma on his character, the British Government would not grant him a permit ; and he dechned to return until he was given an absolutely free pardon. Denied again and again on various or no pretexts, he continued to state his case before the official world. When at length his desire was acceded to, he found a new poUcy had been inaugurated in Austraha. /There was, indeed, THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 49 no diminution in tlie number of convicts who were despatched thither. There was no perceptible change in the character of the crimes of which they had been convicted. Qoygj^oj. The criminal law of England had not been Macguaxie, altered, nor had a new system of treatment been ^^ ^'^ ' recommended to the Governor of New South Wales by his superiors at home. / But Macquarie, the new governor, had himself changed the official policy on his own initiative. He V' came out to Austraha with a generous desire to better the ^\ condition of the convicts. He was not incorrect in thinking that they had often been treated in an ' extraordinary and ilHberal ' fashion ; and his desire to reform them, and to convert them from felons into respectable citizens was worthy v of all praise. But well-meaning as he was, he carried his ideas to an extreme, that if permanently persisted in would have left a perpetual slur of crime on the antipodes. He His discouraged the immigration of untainted free towardsthe men, for, according to him, ' the best description Emancipists, of settlers were emancipated convicts, or persons become free ^ by servitude who have been convicts.' This grotesque mis- conception was fortified by the warning that ' free people should consider they are coming to a convict country, and if they are too proud or too dehcate in their feelings to associate with the population of the country, they should consider it in time, and bend their course to some other country.' He did more. He irritated the free settlers of New South Wales by endeavouring to make them receive the time-expired X, convicts into their society. * My principle/ he declared, ' is that when once a man is free, his former state should no longer be remembered or allowed to act against him.' As a legal maxim, the justice of this was self-evident : but human society is not controlled by legal maxims, and it by no means followed that freemen would welcome as guests at their dinner-tables, or as profitable companions for their wives VOL. V. D 50 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS and children, convicts whose sentences had been served. And Macquarie's attempts to run counter to what he would! have called the prejudices of colonial society merely made the free settlers more determined to resist him. Emancipists were invited to functions at Government X House ; the only result was that freemen stayed away. Before Macquarie had been at Sydney a fortnight, an emanci- pist was made a magistrate ; the inevitable outcome was that freemen as well as convicts held the judicial tribunals of the colony in contempt. On the same principle, when the Governor founded the Bank of New South Wales in 1817, one who had served a sentence for felony was among the directors ; it need not be wondered at that the public confidence in the security of its investments was limited. ^ There were soon violent protests at Macquarie's favouritism. ^ When Macarthur deplored the regulations which placed ' the good and bad servant, the honest man and the thief, upon the same footing, and authorised him not only to claim but to insist upon the same indulgences,' he only expressed what every respectable colonist was thinking. But the emancipists became rich through the privileges loaded on them. They flaunted their wealth insultingly before those who had had no advantages save what their own industry and honesty had provided them with. And it soon became evident that conviction for a crime in England was equivalent to signing the indentures for a colonial apprentice- ship, which after a few years would provide a ready means /\ of entering on a successful career on the other side of the globe. It is true that Macquarie's action was dictated by humane motives. Much of his work during the eleven years that he was Governor of New South Wales was highly beneficial. He built largely ; and in a new country every new building is a national asset. He improved Sydney almost out of recognition. Much important exploration of the interior was undertaken in his time. In many ways he was an excel- X THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 51 lent ruler. But his whole administration was vitiated by his experiment, humanitarian indeed but predestined to failure, of endeavouring to transmute the dross of felony into the gold of citizenship. - It may be freely granted that the original fault lay with England, in her bhnd poUcy of abandoning a magnificent ^ country to the lowest class of her population. But Macquarie did not disapprove of transportation ; it was free immigration jtb^t he sihiected to. It was not so much that he thought the punishment too heavy for the crime ; it was rather that he thought the taint could be eradicated in a new land, and that a continent was well sacrificed for the purpose of the experiment. Perhaps it was well that the experiment was made ; for if anything could have justified transportation as a means of reforming the criminal, the eleven years of Macquarie's government would have justified it. In the end he failed ; but by his failure the future of X^ AustraUa was secured. The very resistance which the free settlers made proves their growing strength. Dis- iSrowing couraged as they had been, they had still advancedij of the'pree while the ex-convicts remained discontented and settlers.,/ mutinous, even under Macquarie's pohcy of favouritism. As Gibbon Wakefield characterised them in his first anonymous pubhcation in 1829, they ' talked of perfect independence ; they were rebels, every one of them, at heart ; and nothing but a sense of weakness deterred them from drawing the QP'Y^^ sword." Thq^^.had indeed no reason to be loyal. They had been cast out from the mother country in disgrace ; and though they had served their sentences, and under the foster- ing care oF~the "Governor of New ^SQU^"'W;ales had even acquired pro£ert\-, they were social ly ostrac ised. ' The civil ^K^ and mihtary ofiicers,' complained Macquarie, * were in the habit of exacting from emancipated convicts the same species of respect as they had yielded in their former state o£ servi- tude ' ; and nothing that he could do made any alteration 52 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS in their social status. There might be hope for their children ; / for themselves there was none. r' But the fact that the influence of the free settlers was ■U ^ I becoming more marked in the colony, while the evils caused *'■-'! by the convicts did not diminish and their numbers increased yearly, pointed to the speedy arrival of a day when the free- / men, for their own protection, would find it incumbent upon j themselves to insist that transportation should cease entirely. / At the time they were not strong enough : but the question j of the class of immigrants whom it was desirable to encourage was already being debated. The one great industry of the country, thanks to Macarthur, was pastoral ; and it was but natural, in view of his own The Squatter success, that he should advocate large landed Aristocracy, settlement and the extension of the squatter system. The small farmer, he thought, could not exist in Australia ; and many of the latter type who had emigrated to make a fortune had, in fact, become bankrupt, although their failure was rather due to their own carelessness, which he had been the first to condemn, and to the peculiar con- ditions then existing in the country, than to the inherent weakness of the smallholder in a new land. But they were certainly heavily handicapped. The only labour they could obtain was that of convicts, which was almost invariably unsatisfactory ; and practically their only market outside Sydney was in England, while there were no means of trans- port or communication within the colony save what they could themselves provide, and only irregular and expensive transport to Europe. And the smallholder required to turn over his capital quickly to derive any profit from it, whereas the great landowner could wait for years if necessary.^ 1 In this matter, of course, Macarthur and his fellow-squatters were only echoing the views of the dominant school in English agriculture, whose foremost representative was Arthur Young. That school held strongly to the belief, and there was much to justify it, that farming must be on a large scale to be successful. THE INVASION OF THE ANTIPODES 53 Macarthur, therefore, was able to make out a good case X for the encouragement of capitaHst .pioneers, through which the strong aristocratic prejudice of the territorial proprietor and the ex-officer shows itself with somewhat amusing in- genuousness. ' Adventurers without capital,' he said, ' retard all improvement, and as they sink deeper into poverty and distress swell the mass of discontent, become most furious democrats, and attribute the misery into which they are plunged not to their own idleness or want of discretion, but to the errors of the Government and the oppression of the wealthy/ In Macarthur's eyes democrat, emancipist, radical and rogue were almost synonymous terms. The subsequent history of Austraha was to show that both . the squatter and the small farmer had their use and place in /( the economy of the country. Book XVIII THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA: 1821-68 CHAPTER I THE END OF TRANSPORTATION : 1821-68 » The first half of the nineteenth century was heralded by many excellent persons in England and elsewhere as the ' beginning of a period in the history of the world during which ^'{(^ mankind as a whole was to forget its original national and racial sentiments in the appreciation of a doctrine of universal brotherhood and general benevolence. Unfortunately for the dehghtful theory of international concord, it was precisely during this period that a great revival of national sentiment took place in Europe ; and it was noticed as a remarkable phenomenon by close observers that this revival in the old world was paralleled by an equally pronounced movement in ^ Authorities. — Rusden continues the general history of transportation. Those who desire fuller details of the subject will find them in the official records (some of which are still in manuscript) and among the newspaper files of New South Wales ; as also in the parliamentary- debates, reports, and governmental despatches on this question. In addition, for Tasmania, Bonwick's Last of the Tasmanians and The Lost Tasmanian Race ; also the histories by West and Fenton. There is much scattered information in G. T. Lloyd's Thirty-three Years in Tasmania and Victoria ; his writings are of peculiar interest, since he was one of the few advocates of transportation. For Norfolk Island, Burton's State of Religion in New South Wales, and the same author's paper on ' Society and Crime ' (in the Colonial Magazine) ; and Maconochie's ' Criminal Statistics of Norfolk Island ' in the Statistical Society's Journal. The latter writer was more successful as a statistician than as an official. Bunbury's BetninisceTices are interest- ing, but of small historical value. 64 THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 55 the new. The unity of the English republic in America was cemented by civil war. The imperial provinces of Canada passed through the years of internal strife and agitation which are the inevitable accompaniment of the birth of a new nation. And a generation later, the same pains of labour in the antipodes preceded and proclaimed the birth of another nation — the new English nation in Australia. But the awakening of a national spirit in Australia was ) dda^d by the evil conditions which accompanied its early c X colonisation. The slur of crime lay over the island continent ■ for more than half a century ; and it was first necessary that | its various provinces should be purified of the convict stain | )\ before they could become the foundation^ of a united"nation. | A child may be born in sin : a nation cannot. The purification of AustrahaTwas therefore the immediate work which lay before the English in the antipodes during the early years of the nineteenth century. The task was indeed stupendous, but it was achieved ; yet not without a struggle with the imperial authorities that at one time bade fair to end in serious disorder and armed rebeUion. We have already noticed some of the evils introduced into ^ Austraha by the system of convict colonisation. Yet terrible ' as they were, these were but the minor ills that sprang from / [transportation^ The full results^ of the policy that was per- ; sisted^ uTby the imperial authorities must now be traced. J The original convict colony at Sydney had within a few years become the parent of other settlements of a hke char- acter. Norfolk Island, Newcastle on the Hunter ^^^ convict River, and Tasmania were all made the homes of system English criminals. Nor did it appear probable ^^^^ '" that the hand of sin was even yet stretched out over the antipodes to its fullest extent. Year by year shipload after shipload of wretched men and women were despatched to Austraha. It was impossible to herd them all together at Sydney ; in the words of Sir Joseph A X K 56 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Banks, that place had become ' completely saturated ; we must let it rest and purify for a few years until it is in a condition to receive again/ Accordingly, other parties were sent to Moreton Bay in the future colony of Queensland, and to King George's Sound in West Australia ; it was only the failure of a second attempt to found a convict establishment at Port Phillip that saved the province of Victoria from the criminal taint. But these settlements, hke Sydney, rapidly became con- gested. And with a whole continent waiting to be colonised, it seemed possible to the British Government that the process of defilement might be continued indefinitely. The successor of Governor Macquarie, who retired from New South Wales in 1821, faced indeed an impossible task. ^' (^ ^J^ New South ^^ ^^® ^^^ hand, the free settlers were dissatisfied ^6^ Wales, with the favouritism that had been shown the emancipists ; on the other, the emancipists were discontented because they were not received in the free society of the colony. And the new Governor, Sir Thomas- Biisbgiie, was not firm enough in character to hold fast to any policy against which a strong current of opposition was directed. A man of science who took considerable interest in astron- omy and exploration — his name lives in the capital of Queens- land and the river on which it stands — Brisbane was able at first to repress outward disorder, whether it sprang from native, bushranger,' or convict, while his chief ojB&cial stifiened his back for him ; but when Goulburn, the Colonial Secretary, resigned after a quarrel, Brisbane fell more and more under the influence of the emancipists. He followed the line of least resistance in conciHating that numerically large class, which now used every means of agitation in its power : but his efforts to imitate Macquarie, and to carry his predecessor's pohcy to a successful conclusion, still fell helplessly against the resolve of the free settlers not to mix with the tainted element on equal or, if possible, on any terms. THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 57 Brisbane was followed in 1825 by Ralph Darling, a soldier who cared nothing for public opinion or agitation, and whose sternness wa^^s much hated by the emancipists as it was v welcomed by the freemenr So detested was he by the former that his rule was described by them as a reign of terror ; and on his departure a tumult of rejoicing took place among the baser inhabitants of Sydney. Oxen were roasted whole, and the mob had the indecency to carry a bullock's head in pro- cession through the streets and j&nally to exhibit it before the port-hole of the ship's cabin in which Lady Darhng was waiting to sail. The new Governor, Sir^ Richard Bourke, who assumed control in 1831, steered a middle course between the extreme favouritism of Macquarie and the severe coercion crime and of Darhng. His enemies derided his mildness in ^^he*^°° referring to runaway convicts as absentees, and colony, cursed his folly in appointing time-expired criminals to the magistracy : his friends perhaps doubted the wisdom of his pohcy with some reason. In any case, the colony remained in a.dangeroua-state of disorder : and the Judge's Charge to the Supreme Court of New South Wales in 1835 furnishes fearful evidence of the insecurity and crime that continued unabated. * In 1833,' said the Chief Justice, ' there were 135 capital convictions ; on 69 sentence of death had been passed. In 1834, there were 148 capital convictions, on 83 of which sentence of death had been passed. In 1835 there were 116 capital convictions, and 71 sentences to suffer death. . . . [And] it was to be remarked that capital punishment had been taken away from several offences since August 1833, 80 that those which had taken place since that time had been for crimes of violence, murder, rape, robbery, burglary, mahciously stabbing, shooting, and wounding, and offences of similar character. . . . The picture presented was one of the most painful : it would appear as if the main business were the commission of crime and the punishment of it ; as X 58 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS if the whole colony were continually in motion towards the M^^ several courts of justice.' * fi^ b< ^ There were many minor reasons, apart from the one great {^,^0^ "^reason that transportation continued, for the persistent dis- •^ orders. Most of the free settlers took no interest in, or care yof, their convict servants ; beyond the mere selfish protection of their houses and persons, and the extraction of a certain daily minimum of work, the masters left their assigned labourers very much to themselves. As a result, escape was often not difficult ; while the recapture of a deserter, despite the efforts of the surrounding settlers and a large body of civil and mihtary pohce, involved a long and frequently a fruitless chase. The deserter, if he survived, might become a bush- ranger or a sheep and cattle thief ; he might gain a livehhood >f ^ ^ selhng iUicit drink at secret but regular criminal haunts^; or he might even, if he were so daring, risk further imprison- ment by coming down to Sydney and there Hving under an assumed name or attempting to return to Britain. If the escaped or pardoned convict simulated a politic or effected a real reformation of character, he had some oppor- tunities of becoming rich and independent in a country which, maugre its crime, was yet making a rapid material advance ; but many, perhaps most, sank to the condition graphically described by a traveller in New South Wales. * One will often,' remarked Henderson, ' stumble upon a miserable cabin, shut out from the rays of the sun, instinct with hfe in the shape of gigantic mosquitoes and other vermin, and inhabited by a lonely sawyer and his dirty and forbidding wife or mistress, probably a ticket-of-leave woman or emancipist. * Previous to this period it would appear that prisoners suspected of crime were flogged or otherwise tortured to make them confess. — House of Commons Papers, 18th April 1826. Ullathome (Reply to Juchje Burton) malignantly remarks that three of the magistrates responsible for ordering the flogging were clerics. So was Ullathome himself, but a cleric of another faith. Evidently he thought it legitimate to blacken the cloth, so long as it was a different cut fi'om his own. THE PUKIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 59 If there are any children, they are in the last stage of squalor and filth, their pale emaciated features already showing that fever and ague have begun their work. . . . When rum is v/ brought, and a few sawyers are convened, then begin scenes ^^ of riot. . , / Another secondary reason for the disorders was the estab- lishment of road-parties of working convicts. It is true that these gangs were instrumental in constructing thoroughfares in the bush ; but the gangs themselves were described by » Judge Burton as ' establishments like beehives, the inhabitants -"^ busily pouring in and out — but with this difEerence, the one work by day, the other by nightj the one goes forth to industry, the other to plunder." rAnd while crime was im- abated, if not actually growing, drink j^as still the curse of V^ the colony. New South Wales was probably the only agri- cultural country in the world in which the amount of rum i imported exceeded the amount of wheat exported ; and } much vile hquor was compounded in_secret stills, in addition to the genuine spirit legally imported, j Nor did the sexual morahty of New'South Wales show any improvement. The female factory near Sydney, in which women convicts were housed, was spoken of by Macarthur as * a hotbed of depravity, where idleness gave full scope for the growth of every vicious propensity, and from which a con- tagious influence was spreading itself far and wide.' If any children were born in that awful place, they were taken away from their mothers at the age of three and educated separately in an orphan school, lest they should be con- taminated by their own parents. And even pure women who were sent out to give a better tone to the community too often fell into the same habits as their dissolute sisters, so strong was the example of evil. * To pour from time to time,' said Archbishop Whately of Dubhn with truth when speaking of this subject, ' sound wine into a cask of vinegar, in hopes of converting the vinegar 60 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS back into wine, would have been as rational and hopeful a scheme.' Most of the women who were deported to the antipodes had left their virtue many years behind them in England. Some of them possibly discovered it again in Australia. But the majority seem to have preferred the elastic ties of periodic concubinage to the permanent restraints of matrimony ; and a number found it profitable and perhaps satisfactory to ply an ancient trade in a new land. There were still three men to every two women in the colony, even six years after trans- portation had ceased : and since most up-country settlers came down occasionally to Sydney to obtain supplies and to spend their money freely on dissipation, that particular market was probably neither overcrowded nor its prices undercut. The schools of the colony were not yet advanced beyond the rudimentary stage : nor indeed could they be either efficient or numerous, when it is remembered that in 1825 less than £10,000 was spent on education, and that further economies were made under this head in the years immediately following ; while even in 1837, after Archdeacon T. H. Scott had spent much labour in improving and extending the exist- ing scholastic apparatus, they cost but £13,014. By that time the five infant schools of Darling's administration had grown into thirty-four or more primary free schools, in addition to the orphan schools, a voluntary school of female industry, and the King's School at Parramatta. But out of ten thousand children in New South Wales only two thousand could read ; and in 1846, out of a total population of 189,609, there were still 69,393 persons returned as illiterate. It is fair to remember that many of these ignorant citizens must be accredited to the mother country, which still neglected for another quarter of a century the education of her children ; but Australia, though showing some signs of awakening attention to the mental needs of her early offspring, had not K THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 61 yet made any decided steps along the road she has since trodden so well. On the other hand, if knowledge was starved, the adminis- v tration of justice was of necessity hberally endowed. By far the largest item of expenditure in the annual budget was that on the police service, which in 1837 amounted to £45,200, 13s. 4d. ; and the judicial estabhshment cost an additional £20,229, 3s. 9d. But it throws a curious hght on 5r the methods and the civihsation of the early nineteenth cen- tury that the educational training of the people should have been everywhere neglected, while its punitive organisation, in consequence, was excessively developed. It was both aN j false economy and a selfish cruelty that neglected the child, S ^ ^ and therefore found it necessary to punish the adult. ) But crime had increased enormously in Great Britain during and since the Napoleonic wars. Industrial distress and political agitation had jeopardised the state more than once, and the sole remedy still seemed to be to transport the offenders to the antipodes. Complaints, however, were now coming from New South Wales in stronger form year by year as to the evil effect of the system on the rising generation in Australia. /^Y\ M acartEur, the pioneer sheep farmer of the colony, fore- r' told rebeUion if transportation continued ; Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who was already meditating the foundation of a more honourable commonwealth in the southern seas,^ en- dorsed the prophecy and partially agreed as to the remedy. Macarthur, who looked on every radical as a rogue, and on every democrat as a public danger, advocated the immigration qUj. body of really respectable settlers ; men of real capital, not^needy adventurers. They should have estates of at least ten thousand acres, with reserves contiguous of equal extent. Such a body of proprietors would in a few years become wealthy, and, with the support of the Government, powerful * See ch. iii. of this book, and bk. xxi. ch. ii. for the Wakefield colonies. /7^^<-C- 62 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS as an aristocracy. The democratic multitude would look upon their large possessions with envy, and upon the pro- prietors with hatred. As this democratic feeling has already taken deep root in the colony in consequence of the absurd and mischievous pohcy pursued by Governor Macquarie, it cannot be too soon opposed with vigour.' He wished also still further to bridle the infant press of the colony, which was actively and not very scrupulously directed by the emancipists ; and he characterised the four Sydney news- papers with some truth as being ' all in the convict interest, the editors all desperate radicals, alike shameless and un- principled,' who ' inflamed the worst passions of the lower orders, exciting a spirit of animosity towards the upper classes, and contempt for all legitimate authorities.' A^ Many of the free settlers agreed with him in principle, though their language was perhaps less extreme. A section, ^1- it is true, were ready to assent to transportation so long as it furnished them with cheap labour ; but the majority loathed the constant influx of criminals, and fully recognised that the evil reputation of the colony deterred men of better character ^ from settling there. New South Wales was the one country in the world, said an old colonist, to which a man was ashamed of going, and to which he was careful not to allude on his return home. Fortunes were made there ; but instead of being proud of the land in which they had acquired them, men concealed their place of origin, lest it should be thought that the first stepping-stone to wealth had been the Old Bailey dock. _And other ^ave anomalies appeared^a s tran sp ortation /^ continued. Ex-convicts obtained the right to sit on juries ; but /no free settler would wilhngly consent to have his case <^ tried^l)y men of that kidney, and miUtary juries still remained in favour. The latter knew little of business and less of law ; but there was at least a reasonable probability that honest men would be empanelled. It went hard with a free citizen THE PUEIFICATION OF AUSTEALIA 63 who came before a jury of ex-criminals ; but the latter were naturally merciful to their own class. On one occasion a jury of emancipists acquitted a convict who had murdered his "^^ wife, and similar miscarriages of justice were not rare ; while in another instructive instance the prisoner exercised his right of challenging the jury, and thus eliminated all the respectable men, while the prosecutor for the Crown was forced to challenge all the rest for want of character, and the trial therefore could not proceed. Such outrages could not continue indefinitely. Yet while trans portati on persisted there was no means of remedying them : and Boiirke*s governorship had come to parUament- an end, and Sir George Gi pps succeeded him in aiy Enquiry /Z^q^ 1838 ; but still vessels regularly brought their portation, I I cargo of iniquity to New South Wales. ^^^^' 1^3^ It happened, however, that circumstances had at that time caused England to take a somewhat unusual amount of interest in her possessions overseas. Gibbon Wakefield had begun to make his theories regarding colonisation known, and had gained a small but powerful body of adherents. The rebellion in Canada had proyed that there was a flaw in the V British method of governing distant dependencies. Sporadic trouble in South Africa brought that lesson home from another quarter of the globe. And it was evident that the protests from Austraha against the continuance of transportation /^X / indicated a deep feeUng of discontent in the antipodes. The Canadian crisis was settled by a statesmanhke solution.^ The South African problem unhappily received no such judicious treatment ; it was allowed to fester and rankle till it became an interminable legacy of discord and difficulty for a later generation.^ But wiser counsels prevailed as regards Austraha, and[^ Select ParUamentary Committee was appointed in 1837, alter a discussion on the subject in ^ See vol. iii. bk. xi. chs. iv. and v. 2 See vol. vi. bks. xxiv. and xxvi. X ^ 64 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS the House of Commons, to enquire into the whole question of transportation.} The Committee sat for many months, and a mass of evidence was taken. It was proved that crime and immorality had attained terrible proportions in Australia ; that the great bulk of the disorders came from the convicts and ex-convicts ; and that the progress of the country was seriously hampered by the continuance of the system. The miserable story of a fifty years' experiment was told in all its disgusting but hitherto unrealised details ; and it was suggested that the experiment had failed even in its original idea of being a deterrent to the evil-doer at home. ' Transportation,' said the Committee, ' may perhaps reheve Great Britain and Ireland from a portion of their burthen of crime ; though from the httle apprehension which it produces that fact may be reasonably doubted.' ^ That the system had generally failed in its reformative aspect was abundantly clear ; the very appointment of a TransDort Committee of Enquiry, and the protests and ationsus- petitions which had led to that enquiry, were pendedi84i. eyfjjgj^cg ^j^^^ i^ j^^^^ worked badly in Austraha. It was therefore finally recommended by the Committee that ' transportation to New South Wales and to the unsettled districts of Van Diemen's Land should cease as soon as ' An idea had got abroad in England, fostered no doubt largelj^ by Macquarie's methods of government, that transportation was no very terrible punishment. The evidence of Sir George Arthur, Governor of Tasmania, which had been published in the Con-espondence on the Subject of Secondary Punishments in 1834, should have disabused those who held this view. 'Deprived of liberty,' he wrote, 'exposed to all the caprice of the family to whose service he may happen to be assigned, and sul)ject to the most summary laws, the condition of a convict in no respect differs from that of a slave, except that his master cannot apply corporal punishment by his own hands or those of his overseer, and has a pro- perty in him for a limited period only. . . . Idleness and insolence of expression, or even of looks, subjects (the convict) to the chain-gang or to hard labour on the roads.' Nevertheless, it is the fact that a good many convicts made their escape into the bush or into the islands of the Pacific (bk. xx. ch. i. ). Their life may or may not have been miserable ; but at least it was free. X THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 65 practicable/ _The British Government decided to act on the advice ; and) Lord John Russell announced that ' in August J840 transportation to New South Wales would cease for ever/ Almost at the same time, on 8th October 1838, Gripps was able to inform the Legislative Council of the colony that ' all convicts arriving in future from the United Kingdom were to be transferred to Norfolk Island. . . . The settlers must be prepared for the immediate diminution of assignments, and the speedy discontinuance of it altogether/ The doom of transportation seemed sealed, and the convict ship Eden, which arrived at Port Jackson on 18th November 1840, was to be the last vessel landing a criminal cargo on the shores of New South Wales. But the lowest organisms of nature are often those which are the most tenacious of hf e, and/ four years later the British Government, under Lord Stanleyj- attempted to But revived revive the vicious systenaj The advantag es of ^^*8- . -^ convict labour were paraded before the Austrahans by the Colonial Office, and a small number of settlers were not unwiUing to see the resumption of transportation. But the best men qf the colony detested the idea, and on tha t occasion it failed. LTwo years later a similar scheme adumbrated by Gladstone likewise proved abortive Ibut in September 1848 y an Order in Council was issued under which New South Wales was again marked out as a transportation area.l The indignation in the colony jwa g^ intense . Earl Grey defended his action on the ground that the * judgment of the Legislature had varied at difierent times, and the opinions of the country were known to be divided ' ; and this was in fact so far true that the emancipists and less reputable settlers had been opposed to the aboUtion of transportation in 1840. Opinion, however, had rapidly advanced since that time ; and while only 525 signatures could now be obtained for petitions in favour of the continuance of a modified system VOL. v. E r\^ 66 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS \y!^ of transportation, 36,589 persons in the Sydney district alone prayed for its total and immediate abolition. When the first of the new convict vessels arrived at Port Jackson on 11th June J.849, the situation became da ngerou s. Robert Lowe was then a settler in Xustralia ; and he at once protested pubhcly, in the same passionate and bitter terms which the British House of Commons afterwards came to know so well, that ' the time was not far distant when they would assert their freedom not by words alone. As in America, oppression was the parent of independence ; so it would be in that colony.' The immediate crisis was averted by sending the convicts to the remoter country districts and to Moreton Bay ; but in August of the same year the convict ship Randolph arrived in Port Phillip Bay. Now the southern district of New South Wales, as the present state of Victoria was then called, had never been a convict settlement, and the master of the vessel was instructed to carry his unwelcome cargo on to Sydney. He refused, on the ground that he was insured as far as Melbourne only ; and the Randolph dropped anchor in Hobson's Bay. But the local government was as deter- mined as the sailor ; and when it became evident that he could only land his prisoners by exercising physical force, he at length consented to leave for Sydney. [These proceedings showed in no uncertain hght the intensity of hate with which the Australians regarded the attempt to Finally reimpose the convict slur.j And that no loophole New^South^ of escape should be left to the British Government, Wales, 1861. the Legislative Council of New South Wales re- solved ' as its final conclusion that no more convicts (were) to be sent to any part of the colony,' and declared that in no other way could social and pohtical tranquillity be main- tained ; while the people of Tasmania, with an outspoken severity not altogether unjustified, decided that Earl Grey's * subterfuges, equivocations, and breaches of faith ' over this THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 67 )C question had ' unhappily destroyed all confidence in his administration of colonial affairs.' At length, in April 1851, Lord Grey jaelded ; but he yielded with evident regret. It is obvious, indeed, that neither he, nor Stanley, nor yet Gladstone — high-minded Enghshmen all, whose title to statesmanship cannot be gainsaid — ever understood the real grounds upon which the Australians objected to the contamination of their land. They would have understood promptly, and protested strenuously, had it been proposed to transplant Australian or Canadian felons to Great Britain ; the fact that they were unable to perceive the parallel case demonstrates in how small a measure the problems of empire were appreciated in those days at the imperial headquarters. Meanwhile, when the parent colony of New South Wales became inconveniently crowded, the Government had cast their eyes further afield for suitable convict van Die- stations. There was some beUef that the French (^asmani^ had designs on Tasmania, then known as Van 1803-56. Diemen's Land ; and both in order to prevent Gallic aggran- disement in Australasia and to reUeve the growing congestion at Sydney, two settlements were made in 1803, the one at Port Dalrymple in the north of the island, the other at Rest- down on the Derwent River in the south. Restdown was soon corrupted into Risdon ; and five miles away were laid the foundations of the capital of Hobart, so called from the name of the then British Colonial Secretary. A few free settlers appeared in 1804, and others followed from time to time ; but for half a century they remained a small minority. The basic population remained criminal and convict. ^ The map of modem Tasmania, which is inscribed with jivicta .who-.waridfiasBd ..beyond Jth.6_|l^e^^-0^ settle- ment round the coast, and occupied or squatted upon the unclaimed districts of the interior with cattle, horses, or sheep which they had raided on their way. They had no more right to the Crown Lands up-country than to the stock they had stolen ; but escape was easy and pursuit difficult. The Government was not strong enough to put down the abuse ; and so late as 1840 the ' nefarious practices ' of these lawless gangs were the subject of an official enquiry. But such men did as little for the industry as for the morals of Austraha. Fundamentally they were but one degree removed from the bushrangers, the regular cattle-thieves, and the horse-fakers who infested New South Wales ; their security, such as it was, sprang from the weakness of the administra- tion ^ andjth^^ecessarily (^^ as civihsation advanced." A better class of_ sgUlera.-hQggygrj..,ha,d appeared aftEe sanmJiinief of who m the first and perhaps the greatest^was \^ Joh^ Macarthur i la nd ^^""^ ,|tl]jgf^ f -„|^ fl^ ^ squatter aristo- "^ "• .cracy was evolved . They were frequently retire? naval or militaiy officers who had been stationed some years in X^ 94 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS .^ Australia. They were generally men of good family ; they mostly possessed private resources which they employed, sometimes unsuccessfully, in stock and sheep-breeding, and it was often the case that their experience in the services, while it had not qualified them to shine either in agricultural hfe or in commercial pursuits, had yet rather increased their inborn contempt for the trading and farming classes, and made them extremely impatient of any competition or encroachment on the somewhat extensive conception they possessed of their political or territorial rights.^ Holding his lands of the Crown at a nominal grazing rent until they should be required for other purposes, a prosperous squatter's domain might extend over thousands of acres ; and as the closer settlement of farm and township spread / inland from the coast, he had ever to move further into the \ interior for fresh pastures. The squatter was thus the chief forerunner of civihsation in the wilderness, the immediate successor of the pioneer expTorer of a virgin soil ; and it would be difiicult to exaggerate the usefulness of his work. The great grass countries of the southern continent lay open for pasturage, serving excellently for sheep and, in a less degree, for cattle : the squatter appeared with his flocks and herds, and occupied them. He led a strange, lonely life in a^ilentland. A few retainers to guard the station and the flocks — woolcombers, shearers, and sheep-drivers, a rough but hardy class of men of every social rank and of none : such were the sole companions of ' See, for instance, Bowen, Thirty Years of Colonial Government, in which he remarked that many of the settlers in Queensland — the colony he knew most intimately — were ' retired oificers of the army and navy, weary of the routine of a mess-room or ward-room, or Oxford and Cambridge men preferring an adventurous life in the open, and other gentlemen of birth and education.' Every Australian colony had a sprinkling of such settlers. lu the Journal of the Society of Arts for 1866, it is stated that, among the well-known English families that had already sent cadets to Australia were the Wordsworths, Coleridges, Broughams, Faradays, Dickenaes, Gladstones, and Arnolds of Rugby. THE PUKIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 95 the squatter and his family in the solitude of the bush. The form of society, as in all pastoral communities, was patri- M-chal : the squatter ruled his family and his men with rough discipline and often with private laws of his own making. Often, however, he lived altogether alone, especially if un- married when he left England. There were comparatively few women in the colony ; of those few, the virtue of the many who had been transported was precarious. And the squatter might well prefer utt6r soUtude tP the society of a decayed V^ beauty from the London pavements, who would only be true to him because she could find no neighbouring beau in the bush with whom to play false. But the lack of women was necessarily a serious social drawback. Not only was the population less numerically progressive than it should have been, but manners grew rough without them, and homesteads frequently were little better than hovels. It was well for the settler if in his loneli- ness he did not take rum for his bride, and become careless both of his appearance and his comfort. ' With hundreds of cattle,' said Henderson, ' he has no butter, cheese, and very often no milk. With a rich soil, he has no garden, nor any vegetable or fruit to drive away the scurvy. With grain, he has no poultry ; with a gun, he has no game ; with hooks, he has no fish. His hut with its bark roof and earthen floor is a hotbed of vermin ; a paling or a couple of hurdles are in front of the door to sun the blankets on,' and thereby diminish their minor parasitic inhabitants. The picture of monotonous discomfort was probably some- what overcoloured ; many of the squatters' homes were surrounded by plantations, and trees were often imported for that purpose at considerable expense from Europe, while if business prospered the first rough shanty would in a few years be replaced by a substantial and comfortably furnished house. But the rougher stations in the remote up-country XX- 96 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS were generally primitive in the extreme. Pioneers in the wilderness have seldom either time or inclination Tor'USe accessories of civiHsation ; and when a nation is in the making its raw edges are apt to grate on sensitive nerves. SucL carelessness for appearances was, however, not confined to the more distant settlers : a lady who has left some Uvely sketches of life in New South Wales at this time has recorded her disgust at the neglected and wretched aspect of the huts of the lower classes near Sydney, around which were strewn on an ash-heap ' broken bottles, old casks, old rags, bones, and shoes.' A certain genius for disorder is seemingly as inherent in young nations as in young children. . . . Th^^rofits of the squatter were occasionally large, but always uncertain . A dry season diminished them ; a drought — the periodic curse of Australia— frequently wiped out both profits and capital alike, and life had to be begun again with a loan from the bank. ' The slow, pitiless, everlasting horror of a drought means ten years added to the life of the squatter or manager,' said an Australian writer of the time ; ' after a good spell of it, endured on a diet of mutton, bread, jam, and stewed tea ' — a diet which at once loathed the appetite and ruined the stomach — ' one's indifference to life becomes all but complete. There is nothing wild or hysterical about it ; it is only a profound and passionate heedlessness of danger and death. Life being mostly a curse, it is no use pretending it is anything else. But it is only the coward who whines.' ^ Nor was a drought the only obstacle to success. A disaster ^ This thought is frequently met with among Australian writers. See, for instance, the Sydney Bulletin, 13th April 1911 : 'Australia is the hardest, kindest, cruellest, and most beneficent country. The real Australian, not the little Australian -born person of the cities, is the best type of man on earth because he survives its recurrent and brutal un- kindnesses. The great Australian quality is resilience. Its men are capable of enduring to the verge of collapse and then recovering without effort. A country destined by its climate and its sunlight to produce people of Latin temperament, a country that must sing and write verge, and must paint and make statues, simply because the joy of life is strong, and craves expression.' d/i/yojrM^cf ^-imy^ THE PUEIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 97 such as occurred on Black Thursday — 6th February 1851 — brought ruin to all within hundreds of miles, and death to many. On that day, at the close of an unusually dry summer, the parched Victorian bush caught fire, and the flames de- voured everything — forest, pasture, horses, sheep, cattle, the stations, and several of the men on them. The burnt leaves fell in Melbourne, and some of the ashes were even carried by the wind across the straits to Tasmania ; there was no staying the fire, which only ceased when incalculable damage had been done to the rising colony. At other times, though the sheep were fat and the wool was good, there might be no market for either. Transit to Europe was difficult, expensive, and irregular ; the processes of refrigerating and chiUing the carcases were unknown. And the few Australian townships were stocked to repletion ; meat was practically free to anybody for the asking, and five shiUings was a fair price for a dozen legs of mutton in times of glut. When thousands of sheep were thus worth but a few uncertain pounds steriing, the exigencies of the times introduced the tallow value. Sheep which should have been worth thirty shiUings had sunk in 1842 to eighteenpence ; but one settler reflected that the fleece alone must fetch from half-a-crown to three shillings in England, while the tallow in each animal would Ukewise be worth from three to four shilhngs more. The minimum value of each sheep, therefore, rose necessarily to some six shilhngs ; and forthwith hundreds of flocks were slaughtered, and the carcases boiled down. The wool and tallow were sold ; the flesh, soup, or gravy from the vats was thrown away to irrigate the land — which in the following season, it is said, bore splendid crops as the result of its strange fertihser. But henceforth the price of a sheep could never sink below its tallow value. One of the most serious draw- backs to the squatter's profits thus vanished ; although he could still be beggared by a drought, or ruined and rendered VOL. v. a 98 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS homeless by a bush fire, he could always obtain a minimum price for his sheep in ordinary seasons, even when there was nomarket for his meat. (^But great fortunes were seldom made by the squatters until some years later, when the Austrahan urban population had grown larger, and a quick steamship service with cold V storage facilities had rendered it possible to send meat direct to Europeri It was then that the hospitality of the Australian . squatter became as profuse and generous as that of the Virginian or West Indian planter had been. Hunts and balls were organised ; the scattered population of the bush were entertained to dancing and feasting ; the whole family were taken to Sydney or Melbourne on a round of enjoyment. The sons would be sent to England to complete their educa- tion ; the daughters perhaps might accompany the father on a tour round the world when business called him to London. In their efforts to obtain labour to develop their estates when transportation had ceased, the squatte rs had turned 'TheSmau to India and the Pacific. Iales-iQr._kiilIgj ^ when ( Farmers. that source was prohibited, they employed large numbers'of the British immigrants who had been assisted to come over. But the latter were laudably ambitious to become proprietors themselves ; an d from being the employees of the squatter they became his foes, as they discovered that the road to fortune was already blocked by their master, and that in jnanj cases it was almost impossible for the small farmer to obtain possession of the land, even in that country of illimitable acres. The squatters had followed the tracks of the explorer to the grass lands, or they had even been the pioneer explorers themselves : ^ the small farmers followed the squatters. But the latter were already in possession of tlie larger available part of the country. In the Port Phillip district they had within a few years divided up practically the whole sub- * See bk. xx. oh. iii., and bk. xxii. ' Sec bk. xix ch. i. THE PUEIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 99 province into sheep-raising stations, save what seemed the hopelessly barren mallee scrub of the Wimmera ; in New South Wales their sheep and stock runs stretched a hundred miles inland to Bathurst ; in South Australia, though that colony was only founded in 1835, a similar process was taking place ; in New Zealand again it was to be repeated some years subsequently. <^ But if the squatters were only temporary occupiers of the soil u^^^hjL under a license terminable by Government, their rivals who^x^/ / wished to become small farmers had not at first even that right, ^(^ The squatters, too, were powerful, both as large employers and as men of great possessions ; in 1846 they owned in the then undivided colony of New South Wales 1,345,973 head of cattle and 6,190,914 sheep. The new arrivals, on the other hand, had generally but very hmited capital, and no other resources beyond that except their own labour. The struggle, therefore, seemed an unequal one ; but it wa'S^caTflied from the bush to the legislature, aiid from the legislature back to the bush. The-^radjial.adyance of thp small farme r against the squatter was a sign that the future of Aust raUa was d emocratic and not aristocratic ; but the w many details of the prolonged fight, which was not near f^ its end even when the twentieth century dawned, must be postponed to a later chapter.'^^ The struggte'did not prevent the general advance of New Sou th Wales. New industries were introduced year by year. The vine, which had been first planted at Kirton Advance of^'> A in the Hunter River district in 1828, with cuttings New soutii ) brought from Europe, flourished from the begin- ning ; and wine soon took its place among the regular products of Australia, ^ugar^was Ukewise grown ; in 1864 two acres of land in County Bath and on the banks of the Macleay River were sown with that crop ; and it proved so profitable that the area under cultivation rapidly extended. Tobacco ^ See bk. xxii. 100 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS was less successful. The settlers had indeed no difficulty in growing the divine herb ; but its quality was poor, and they were as yet unskilled in the tedious and difficult art of preparing it for consumption. Addition al i ndustries thus added to the prosperity of New South Wales ; the business facilities of the colony developed jgflnally with- jts indust ries. The first Australian bank^was opened on 8th April 1817, five years after Lord Liverpool had vetoed its formation as unnecessary. Others followed within a short time, and in 1832 a savings bank was insti- tuted. The_jpostal, service;^ though still expensive and inadequate, was gradually improving ; but the carriage of a letter in the colony cost anythiag from a penny to a shilUng, according to weight and distance ; and the charge for a single package by the overland mail to Adelaide was eighteenpence. There were only four post-offices in the whole colony of New South Wales, whose area then included Victoria and Queensland ; but four years after the discovery of gold in 1851 the number had risen to 155. There was a post to Melbourne three times a week, and a nominal monthly service to England ; but in 1857 the postmaster- general admitted that the mail contract was ' an utter failure, so far as the stipulated time-table might be taken as i a criterion.' Its speed and regularity, however, astonished the older settlers : men who remembered a period when it took two years to obtain an answer from England would hardly grumble if the fifty-eight days allowed between Southampton and Sydney was exceeded from time to time. Yet the prosperity of New S outh Wales was far from being unalloyed. A prolonged drought in 1827 caused Drought, great losses of hve stock, extraordinary fluctua- specuia- tions in prices, and general insecurity ; a decade { the Crisis later, in 1838 and 1839, the crops failed altogether, (j^i842. while the harvest of 1840 was again poor. The price of wool also fell heavily in those years; and this, '^^ i^%<^ THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 101 "^ combined with the speculation that had been previously indulged in, induced the great financial crisis of 1842. It is indeed good for a young colony to have unlimited confidence in the future. But when it proceeds to trade upon that future instead of more sohd assets, and credit becomes as unhmited as confidence, danger is not far distant. And seldom has hving been more extravagant, or speculation more reckless, than it was in New South Wales in the years immediately preceding 1842, j ' Every one who had a few acres of scrubby land near the coast, or by a creek or river,' says a writer of the time, ' forthwith dubbed it a town. A magnificent plan, laid out in squares and streets, and abound- ing in churches and other pubhc buildings, was exhibited, and the allotments put up to pubhc sale (were) greedily bought.' ^ An anecdote is preserved of a man who began business in Sydney with a capital of £40, and failed in six months for about £12,000. He fled to Hongkong, and so engrained was roguery in his nature that * he tried to steal the horse and saddle on which he rode down to the quay.' An isolated case proves nothing ; but in the six months and four days from 1st February — when a new insolvency law was passed — to 4th August 1842, there were 392 banknigtdes ; while in the following twenty-three months no fewer than 1135 persons were declared insolvent. It s eemed for a time that everybody was in debt, and that e verybody was being sold up. Business was at a standstill, _j;nd there were so many forfeited estates that few of them realised much. Valuable horses fetched only £3 ; cattle some- times went for Ts. 6d. ; and a sheep was hardly worth more than sixpence. Som e extraordinary changes of fortune were witnessed m the colony appeared to come daily nearer ruin. The thrifty ^ Possibly one of the contributory causes of this mania for speculation was the fact that transportation had recently ceased, and free settlers were coming over in large numbers. 102 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS servant bought his master's estate, and perhaps engaged his former employer as station-manager ; * an old military officer,' wrote Henderson, was ' reduced to let himself out for hire as a bullock driver ; a shepherd suing his master for £25 obtained the whole flock he had been tending, which in former times would have fetched from £500 to £1000.' The schooling was hard, but it was effectual ; th e years of depr es- sion which followed purged New South Wales of much of that •jhlsensate gambling in real estate which inevitably results in a financial catastrophe. The gold fever ten years later pre- pared the way for another but smaller reaction ; but the settlers were henceforth not so ready to run ahead of the sun.^ The colony did not completely recover from .ihfi-disMter^ until the discovery of gold in 1851 brought a fresh wave jof Railways prosperity ; but about that time occurred two and steam- other events of profound significance. On 3rd Ships. 1860-2. j^y jggg ^j^g gj,g^ g^^ ^j ^j^g g^g^ Austrahan railway was cut ; and two years later, on 31st July 1852, t£e first steamship made its way up Sydney Harbour. The new system of transit, thus peacefully inaugurated - for Austraha by the turning of a lump of earth and the churning of a paddle-wheel on the harbour waters of the capital, was" as truly the mark of a new era for the antipodes as any sanguinary battlefield had ever been for the older world. The knot of isolation was unravelled; the julse of qu ick and regular communication began to beat. * A similar mad folly of speculation in real estate led to a similar but even more serious financial crisis in 1893. The colony weathered the storm ; but thousands of men were ruined, and several banks had to close their doors and suspend payment. THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 103 CHAPTER III THE FIVE COLONIES: 1821-68 » [Tainted and diseased as it was at its first sowing, the seed of empire which the British had thrown upon the waters of the southern ocean had borne fruit after its kind. The healthier products of the next generation spread far and wide *^^/}' in Austraha, and the vitahty of the parent tree was proved ^, ^ by the sturdy vigour of its branches. Within fifty years oi her own inauspicious birth, New South Wales had become a mother of fresh colonies, and though each of the five Austrahan states and Tasmania had many serious diflSculties to en- counter, there was not one in which the settlement did not prove permanent and eventually prosperous. J ^ Authorities. — Rusden is the main guide for early West Australia, but there are many letters from early settlers there in the London press of the period. There are several gdod accounts of the founding of Port Phillip ; the fullest is Labilliere's Early History of Victoria, complete and painstaking. Stillinglaw's Historical Eecords of Port Phillip may also be consulted, and M'Combie's History. Westgarth's Colony of Victoria is specially valuable for the growing industries of the settlement. For South Australia, in addition to Rusden, the official account of the colony by Harcus is useful; and Hodder's History, with his life of G. F. Angas. The pamphlets on the subject of South Australia, published between 1830 and 1850, and collected in the London Guildhall Library, and in the Royal Colonial Institute, possess considerable interest. Wakefield's Art of Colonisation must be studied in detail. His life has been written by Garnett, and in the Dictionary of National Biography. The Life of Sir George Orey, by G. C. Henderson, supersedes the earlier superficial sketches of his career. The Life of Slurt, by Mrs. Sturt, gives the anti-Grey side of South Australian opinion. For Queensland, Coote's History, distinctly above the average of early colonial writers; Queensland, Its Resources and Institutions (1886), an official account which contains much information as to industrial history ; and H. S. RuBsell'a Genesis of Queensland, — rambling and discursive, but interesting. The Qneenslander newspaper is also of great value. The files of the London Globe newspaper for several years contain a large amount of original information concerning Australia. Its editor and proprietor. Colonel Torrens, was one of the chief promoters of Australian settlement, and inserted many letters from colonistB in his periodica]. 104 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS The eldest born of the children of New South Wales — one may disregard the wretched abortion of Norfolk Island — was West ^^^ Diemen's Land ; but the visage of CaHban Australia, was not more evil and forbidding than are the 1829-68. records of that settlement in its earUer years. And the second colony estabhshed on the mainland, while its infamy was far less pronounced than that of the island, was still less successful in a material sense for many years than Van Diemen's Land. To write the dreary history of Wes t Australia , declared Rusden with picturesque exaggeration, was like scraping the bones of the dead. The first ^enal settlement at King George's Sound in 1825 failed mise rably^ ; the free immigrants who followedjour years la^(glLJ!efii:fi,_Jlot more prosperous. The place began, indeed, under happier auspices ; the colony which was destined to be the last Australian province to receive convicts was the first that was founded on a free basis. No criminals were allowed to enter, and the land was allotted to the free immigrants in the proportion of forty acres to every three pounds invested by them. The fee simple of their grants was given when they had improved the plots at the rate of eighteenpence an acre ; otherwise the land itself was to be forfeited to the Government. The conditions sounded-attractive^^andJiyjbhe jend of 1830 West AustraHa had over a thousand inhabitants. But disappointments and misfor tunes — most of which should have been foreseen and provided against by better Its Early plans of settlement — dogged the cobnj_almost Misfortunes, from the beginning. The proprietors had vast estates, but they could do nothing with them, for no labour jwas_a yailable. They had no produce to sellj and even if they had had, there was no market at which to sell it, and no r oads along which to transport it. The city of Perth indeed existed — it had been founded on 12th August 1829 with a minor station at the mouth of the river that later grew into Fremantle — but both were as yet, and remained THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 105 for many years to come, mere skeletons. Capital dwindled day by day, and such labourers as there were seized the first opportunity that presented itself to quit a blighted land.^ The whole situation in West Austraha was well summarised by Colonel Torrens, when speaking at Exeter Hall, London, in 1834 on behalf of the then newly-formed South AustraUan Association. ' Numerous grants were made,' he said, * at the Swan River settlement. A single individual had 50,000 acres ; one person, I believe, had 500,000. These immense tracts sepj^tated the people, so that they could not communi- cate at all. They were so severed that, instead of being able to assist each other, though they were famishing, they could not pass through the unreclaimed lands to tell their state of destitution. Capital was sent there, but it was unproductive. Labourers were sent there ; some of these died from want, and the others went to Van Diemen's Land. Out of 4000 people, only 1500 remain.' And many more deserted the place within the next decade, for the misfortunes of the colony were not yet at an end. Wheat was at length raised from an arid and ungrateful soil ; but in 1840 practically the whole crop was destroyed by moth. In that year the total revenue deficit of the colony ^ An account of the colony before it reached this desperate pitch is given in a letter from a settler, dated November 1829, and printed in the London Olohe for 20th May 1830. 'The appearance of the settlement on landing,' he wrote, 'is most forbidding. The soil is entirely sand, which produces a great variety of plants and herbs, very curious to the eye of the naturalist, out of little use to the agriculturist. (But) even the first crop will make very tolerable hay ; when properly cultivated there is little doubt the crops will be very abundant. The climate is delightfully mild and serene, so that you may live entirely out of doors. We met with some very good land in exploring up the Canning lliver ; plenty of birds in every direction ; a black swan made a capital stew. At the landing- place is a horrid set of thieves, sailors, and others, who have nothing to do but get drunk. The natives hitherto have kept quite aloof. Cabbages and radishes grow famously ; stock can be bought here cheaper than in England. I think the proposed town of Fremantle will be given up. At Perth all the great officers of state live in huts of a rude structure, merely branches of trees stuck into the ground and covered with canvas. The Governor has a wooden house nearly ready.' 106 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS amounted to £235,098, which there was no means of paying, and the burden of which eventually fell on the British Treasury. Five years later the Governor truly said that if the creditors had been foreign claimants ' nothing would have saved the community from general bankruptcy/ In July 1849 public dissatisfaction found vent in a general meeting which declared that ' the distressed circumstances of the settlers, the continued high rate of shepherd's wages, and the low price of wool made it impossible for the stockholders to continue paying the present exorbitant and ruinous charge for depasturing licenses/ To the other troubles of the colony were now added a guerilla warfare with the aborigines. Already in 1830 a native had been killed for the attempted robbery of a settler ; the blacks retahated by murdering a white, and the feud con- tinued. ' Damn the rascals, I '11 show you how we treat them in Van Diemen's Land,' cried a farmer once as he shot at an innocent man ; the exclamation showed the spirit in which the whites were prepared to act, and several serious conflicts took place. These did not differ materially from encounters in the other colonies ; but the Westralians were far less able to stand the strain of a native war than the more prosperous settlers in the east. Some in despair suggested the total abandonment of the colony ; many, in fact, continued to desert so unpromising a Transporta- land. A te mporar y solution of the labour question Won, 1849-68. wf^g r|igpr>v^r^^l whftn the J^ritish Gove rnment acceded to the colony's request for convict labour in 1849 ; and about the same time an official party began to explore the interior and the coast in the hope of discovering a more fertile soil. Earl Grey, indeed, denounced the expedition from the Colonial Office in London, probably fearing it would prove but an additional expense for the Imperial Treasury without advantaging the dependency : but the party never- theless set out and travelled with some success. THE PUEIFICATION OF AUSTEALIA 107 It was already known that magnificent tracts covered with sandal and jarra wood slept undisturbed in their native forests for want of a market : but elsewhere industrial good pasture land was found at Champion Bay ; Progress, a coal mine was discovered on the Murray River, copper and lead ore on the Murchison, guano on an island in Sharks Bay, and pearl fisheries in the same neighbourhood. But for the rest, httle appeared save vast stretches of sand, varied by salt lakes, salt beds, and thickets. Gold ore in small quantities was indeed found in 1848, and elsewhere on the Bowes River in the Murchison District six years later ; but another genera- tion was to elapse before any deposits large enough to be worth working were discovered. Occasional excitement was caused, and false hopes were raised, by the reports of precious metals in various parts of the colony ; but a general survey in 1862 revealed httle of any value. Gxadually, however, the resources of the settlement were developedjj'nd its population no longer shrank. The wheat \^ area extended slowly. A small vineyard was planted at Hamilton Hill in 1832. Two years afterwards the first wool was exported ; in 1844 horses were sold to India ; the next year a shipment of sandalwood was made. A smelting furnace was founded in 1852, and the first lead was exported a few months later. jBut such steps forward were .p.uiLy.io.CQropan^ with the ^ajit strides raade b^ eastern states; and for many years to come West Austraha remained a despised half-sister of the jrounger, richer, and more successful colonies that v' Ji££Xa^omng up at Port Philhp, Adelaide, an By a happy bhndness on the part of its first visitors the future colony of Victoria was spared the evils of transporta- ._tion. A party of two hundred and ninety-nine port Phillip, male and sixteen female convicts had been sent 1803-28. to Port Philhp — so called after Governor PhilUp of New South Wales — from Sydney in 1803 under charge of Lieu- 108 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS tenant Collins ; but though the surveyor reported that ' the country in general was excellent pasture/ CoUins soon abandoned it for Tasmania. The water supply was bad ; and in his opinion there were too many insects and reptiles in the place to make it habitable. A second attempt was made on 4th December 1826, when another body of convicts and sailors was landed at Port PhiUip from Sydney. Claim was now laid to the district, in order to frustrate a possible French invasion that was feared : but once again the deficient water supply caused the removal of the settlers from Port Western to Geelong, and finally their withdrawal altogether early in 1828. There were no further endeavours to plant criminals on the soil of Austraha Fehx. When one reahses the grave disorders that must inevitably have occurred had the discovery of gold in 1851 taken place in the midst of a criminal population, one is almost inchned to echo the earlier annahsts of the colony, who ascribed their immunity from the convict slur to the intervening hand of a special Providence. But it was stated by one of those who formed the second expedition of 1826 that ' nothing could surpass the beauty of the situation or the fertihty of the soil ' ; and already the fame of the place was being bruited abroad. A few sealers and the black women they had kidnapped or bought from the aborigines alone occupied the port ; yet others were by now ready to try their fortunes in a land so fair. John Batman, an Austrahan of Yorkshire descent, who had been born at Parramatta in 1800, possesses the proud title of John Bat- the founder of the colony of Victoria. Physically man, 1800-39. a^^ morally strong and~rugged, Ihe family of Batman had carried the strict Methodism of the sternly rehgious northern dales to their far home under the southern cross ; but the harshness that sometimes characterises the straiter Nonconformist sects was absent from John Batman. For some years in Van Diemen's Land he was one of the most THE PUEIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 109 active in tracking the bushrangers and natives that terrorised the island : yet his kindness of heart, especially towards the aborigines whom he captured, was soon proverbial ; his wife, for whom a constant tenderness peeps out in his letters and diaries, was a girl refugee whom he discovered in the Tasmanian forests, and whom pity perhaps as much as love prompted him to marry ; while creeks, bays, and headlands that he passed on his wanderings to and fro were named after his children. Of a roving disposition — at one time he had entertained the idea of a trans- Austrahan expedition — the project of a settlement on the southern shores of the continent seems to have been in Batman's thoughts for some years. In 1827 he joined with a Tasmanian lawyer, GeUibrand, in applying to the Government for a grant of land at Port Western : it was refused, and Batman thus suffered the first of a long series of discouraging repulses from the official world. He delayed, but did not abandon his scheme ; and after many difficulties had been overcome, eight years later he sailed with a few friends and servants from Launceston for Port Phillip, on a journey of discovery and settlement. Arriving there, probably on 26th or 29th May i833,-^he quickly found that rumour had not exaggerated the natural resources of the coimtry. On every page of his notebook is the recurring entry, ' Very good sheep land,' as he explored further and further into the interior ; in most parts it was * as rich land as ever I saw, with scarce a tree upon it, the grass above our ankles.' He was enchanted, for * the whole appeared like land laid out in farms for some hundred years back ' ; and this Nature had done unaided, for the few natives he met were too ignorant to cultivate the fertile soil. The absence of water had wrecked the expeditions of 1803 and 1826 ; but by ordering * one of the men to make a hole with a stick in a damp place,' Batman quickly obtained ' a plentiful supply 110 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS of good, soft, beautiful and clear water/ and presently he discovered a river. Here, then, was the ideal place for a pastoraljjqlonj^^uch _as he sought ..to establish : and on the map which Batman constructed he noted, with the unerring eye of the pioneer prospector, * the place for a village/ Some years afterwards, when the magnificent city^ of Melbourne rose on the site, the prediction was more than justified. John Batman had seen too much of wanton cruelty to the ")( Tasmanian natives not to be studiously careful in his dealings with the aboriginal inhabitants of the mainland. The opening scene in the British settlement of Van Diemen's Land was the unprovoked attack by a gang of soldiers and convicts on a body of curious but not unfriendly natives ; the free colonisa- tion of AustraUa Fehx opened more auspiciously with a. solemn covenant between white and black. The presumed heads of the tribes that were supposed to be possessors of the district were discovered, and a treaty with them was executed on 6th June 1835, by which the soil, to the amount of ' 500,000 more orless acrei ' in one Sstrict, and ' 100,000 acres more or less ' in another, was bought for ' the yearly rent or tribute of 100 pairs of blankets, 100 knives, 100 tomahawks, 50 suits of clothing, 50 looking-glasses, 50 pairs scissors and 5 tons of flour ' for each of the two allotments. Much good-humoured ridicule was cast on the terms of the treaty by Batman's old acquaintances in Tasmania : (t he British Governme nt flatiy refused to recognise its vahdity, on the ground that all ^.occupied lands in AustraMa belonged to the Crown, and nqt^to the natives at all : the aborigines probably did not understand, although they do not seem ever to have wished to repudiate, the contract ; but at least it was an honest attempt on Batman's part to regularise his position in Port Philhp, and as such perhaps not less entitled to respect than the calm ignoring of native rights upon which the imperial Coloniar Office insisted. THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 111 Possibly not altogether displeased with the idea of founding a city to be called after him Batmania, the adventurer returned within a few months to Tasmania, leaving as settlers some of his friends and servants in token of possession. But during this period, when the colony apparently as yet contained no more than the personal adherents of one man, the latter dis- covered to their amazement that they were not the only white inhabitants. An Enghshman of gigantic stature, Wilhani Buckley by name, had escaped into the bush from the un- fortunate penal expedition of 1803 ; and, being pitied or perhaps admired by the natives, he had made his home among them during thirty-two years. On his rediscovery, he had forgotten the use of his mother tongue ; even when association with the new settlers brought the long unac- customed accents again to his hps, he was silent and reserved concerning his strange experiences among the savages. As a convict, he was still Uable to punishment for desertion ; but in consideration of the exceptional nature of his case, the Government gave him a free pardon, and he Uved quietly among the whites for the remainder of his days. But meanwhile the Port PhiUip Association, as Batman's venture was called," had encountered so many unexpected difficulties that it was at length overwhelmed, xiie Port There was some imcertainty at first whether the ^^^^^^v . , , ,..,.. , ,, Association new colony came under the jurisdiction of New dissolved, South Wales or Van Diemen's Land ; and when ^^^'^• that point was settled in favour of the former, the settlers' title to the soil was pronounced irregular. _The Imperial^ (Invp.rnTn Pint repudiat ed t.h p. trf>fl.ty _wif,b the aborigines ; ac- cording to British common law and immemorial observance t he land be longed to the Crown and not to the natives, and therefore Batman and his fellows must acc[uire it from the Crosm. The British Colonial Secretary at that time was Charles Grant, Lord Glenelg. Rarely has even the Colonial Office 112 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS been under a weaker man ; his very friends could only praise him for a philanthropist, while his enemies openly derided y him as a fool. He vetoed an extension of dominion in South Africa ; he opposed a similar extension in New Zealand ; his vacillation in the Canadian crisis of 1837 was con- demned on all sides : ^ and when the Port Philhp question was referred to him he gave another characteristic exhibition of ineptitude. His point of view is shown by a despatch dated 23rd January 1836. ' All schemes for making settle- ments,' he wrote, ' by private individuals or companies in the unlocated districts of Australia have of late years been discouraged by His Majesty's Government, as leading to fresh estabHshments, involving the mother country in an indefinite expense, and exposing both the natives and the new settlers to many dangers and calamities.' A later official paper admitted that, although the Port Phillip settlement might * in the end be advantageous,' it would form ' a most inconvenient precedent ' ; and finally Governor Bourke was instructed ' to discourage any projects of the hke kind.' The Port Phillip Association appealed against Glenelg's decision, on the ground that the promoters were men of character and substance ; but although the Colonial Secretary admitted the hardness of their case, he was too fearful of infringing the unwritten law of precedent to permit any exception to the official rule. His narrow, timid mind could not grasp the fact that official regulations were made for the Empire, and not the Empire for official regulations. The Association was therefore necessarily dissolved : but y^ the adventurers did not quit the country they had occupiedT After further thought, Glenelg grudgingly permitted them to -remain, on condition that they purchased frdmTEeTTfownTheir right to the land they had discovered, and submitted them- ^ See vol. iii. bk. xi. ch. iv. for Glenelg's action in Canada. For his opposition to the colonisation of New Zealand, bk. xxi. ch. ii. ; and for his disastrous action in South Africa, vol. vi. bks. xxiii. and xxiv. THE PUEIFICATION OF AUSTRALU 113 selves to the authority of New South Wales. This decision was perforce accepted ; and in March 18 38 Governor Bourke, who had proclaimed the settlers trespassers in a proclamation of 26th Aug ustl835, arrived in the bay to inspect his new prov ince^ " ~ A county was n amed in his honour ; and at his suggestion, the propose d capi tal, which at that time coiisrstedT oF But a few primitive huts and drinking saloons, was called The City of a fter the British Prem ier, Melbourne. Evidently j^^^^^® well satisfied as to the prospects of the district, 1836. Bourke did not wish it to be separated from his ow^. |))'ovince of New South Wales ; he recommended tEat a lieu- tenant-governor should be appointed to administer Port Phillip under the control of the Sydney authorities. - That step was taken : and some months after Bourke's departure, a superintendent arrived at Melbourne equipped with the power of a heutenant-governor. On his reception by the settlers he told them in manly words that ' it will not be by individual aggrandisement, by the possession of numer- ous flocks and herds or of costly acres, that we shall secure for the country enduring prosperity and happiness, but by the acquisition and maintenance of sound religious and moral institutions, without which no country can become truly great/ But the moral institutions w hich he rightly recom- ip ^nded were harflly roTnpatJhle..-witL.the..siJLaerainty" exercised by a convict colony over a free state : and already an agita- tion had been^seto n foot for complete separatio n. The original opposition of the Government at Sydney to the Pnrt Phillip sp.t.tleia had not made for cordial relations ; and^ apart fr om the transportation question, the great distance of the colo ny from the capital of New South Wales, and the tedious an d occasionally dangerous voyage thither — for a legular overland route was not yet practicable — would jp any case have predisposed the younger colony to separation. Iti people had few common interests and no mutual VOL. v. H y 114 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS sympathies with Sydney ; and when in 1843 they were granted the right of electing six members to the New South Wales Legislature, which had just been established, the absurdity became too apparent to be of long continuance. There was no leisured. class in Port PhiUip that could afford ^ffie luxury of representing its fellows at Sydney ; even had" there been, the six members would have been in a permanent minority. Mock elections were therefore held at Melbourne, and the whole procedure was reduced to a farce when leading members of the British Imperial Parhament were nominated and duly elected to sit as the representatives of Port Phillip in the Legislature of New South Wales. The agitation continued till 1st July 185]^, when it attained success. On that day, Port Phillip, which had hitherto been The Colony officially known as the southern district of New of Victoria, South ^ales, was created an independent colony under the name of Victoria ""^ and henceforth "the X jsalousy of Sydney was an incentive to progress rather than a handicap. Unhappily Batman, the original founder of the settlement, had not lived to see its success. Some ^\ of his fellow-adventurers in the defunct Port Philhp Asso- !^«»^'^>5iation were by now prosperous, if not wealthy ; but -jy\^ the Batman family had been hit by a series of misfor- * tunes, from which it never recovered. Its possessions had r vanished, its members had died prematurely, its very name 4 was almost forgotten : and others, whose ambitious imagina- tion ran away with their veracity, laid claim to the title of , tX ^ father of the colony — a claim that was at once clearly dis- proved by the combined evidence of documents and local tradition. Port Phillip was thus the daughter of Tasmania ; the neighbour colony of South Austraha, which was founded almost simultaneously, sprang directly from England : and_both its in ception ai^<^ its origin al character were due solely. to one man. ^ r THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 115 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the extent of whose influence on British colonial history it would be difficult to exaggerate, was a Londoner by birth. His career began Edward inauspiciously enough with two runaway mar- Wakefield riages, the second of which caused some scandal. i796-i862. The invalidity of a ceremony performed at Gretna Green was questioned and maintained ; what Wakefield called an elopement the law stigmatised as seduction, and he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment. His release was the signal for a book on the legal penalties of the age, in which he set forth the old truism, then still unrecognised by English jurists, that certainty and not severity of punishment was the true deterrent of crime. But Wakefield had other work to do than reforming the chaotic English criminal law. It seems likely that while still in prison he had contemplated the possible advisabiUty of emigration at the expiry of his sentence ; but his thoughts soon went further than his own personal advantage. He sa w that a large proportion of the English working classes were 'without work, without resources, existing from v hand to moutE, Eoni day to day, from year to His Theory year, in misery and want. Continuous commercial of Coionisa- depression had brought wages down ; the amount *^°°' of available work had not greatly increased : yet the popula- tion of Britain was growing steadily, there was a large surplus of labour, and the * Condition of England Question,' as Carlyle called it, had long been a serious one.^ Wakefield beUeved that a way out from the poverty and overcrowding at home ^ might be found in the potential 1 In Paisley, for instance, a typical industrial to^ni, 11,000 people out of 44,000 were out of work ; and many hundreds of those in work only earned miserable wages of a few shillings a week. '^ Britain was not, of course, actually a poor country in the aggregate, nor was its population half as large in Wakefield's time as fifty years later ; but the wealth was unevenly distributed, and the industrial basis of the country thoroughly insecure. I doubt if Wakefield realised this ; at least there is no sign of it in his writings or speeches. o m THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS / wealth and emptiness of the British colonies abroad. He laid ^ it down as an axiom that ' Colonisation is a natural means of /Seeking rehef from the worst of our social ills, and of thus averting formidable pohtical dangers. My fancy pictures/ he wrote, ' a sort and amount of colonisation that would amply ^ , repay its cost, by providing happily for our redundant people ; ,AjJ'* by improving the state of those who remained at home ; by r> supplying us largely with food and the raw materials of T V>^7 nianufacture ; and by gratifying our best f eehngs of national ij^iN / pride, through the extension over unoccupied parts of the earth of a nationahty truly British in language, religion, laws, institutions, and attachment to our Empire.' Nevertheless colonisation, as Wakefield candidly admitted, had often failed in its aim. He saw and deplored the mis- fortimes of West Australia and the criminal taint ^ New V^South Wales ; and it became his dream, and that of those whom he interested in his project, to found another anti- podean colony on a more stable and more honourable basis. The causes that ruined the Swan River settlement were clearly discerned by Colonel Torrens, one of the chief associates of Wakefield ; the new theory of colonisation sought to avoid those pitfalls altogether. He determined that in all cases the land^must be sold to _fcheJettlerJlt^faiMtIl^-.rfa80^abl^ ^ The enemies of Wakefield declared that he paid no attention to native rights to the land ; and he was often accused of unjust dealings in this respect by the Christian missionaries, particularly in New Zealand. Missionaries as a body are rather apt to bring charges against other white men without due inquiry or suflScient evidence, although no doubt there is often much reason in their condemnation of the white man's dealings with the coloured. And unhappily in New Zealand the record of the mis- sionaries themselves was not altogether blameless. See bk. xxi. ch. ii. But while Wakefield was very astute, he was not a robber. He purchased the title to the land from the natives wherever an aboriginal owner could be found with a valid claim ; the fact that he or his agents bought land at a very low price and sold it to settlers at a high price only showed that he was a practical man of business as well as a political theorist. It may prove him a speculator ; it does not convict him of injustice, far less of theft. THE PUKIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 117 would do away, he believed — incorrectly as the event proved — not only with the huge unproductive estates that had been granted free in West AustraHa,^ but also with a lucrative source of patronage to the Colonial Office.2 The money thus obtained by the sale of the land was to be used to further the emigration from Britain of respectable labourers and mechanics, whose departure from home would reheve the congested labour market there, and whose presence in the antipodes would hasten the progress of the colony, and furnish themselves with more profitable employment. In addition, it was wisely laid down as a principle that, since ' an equal emigration of the sexes is one essential condition of the best colonisa- tion,' no married man should emigrate unless he took with him his wife and family. The colony, too, was never to be a charge on the mother country, but independent from the beginning ; it was to contain no convicts or emanci- pists, and none were to be imported ; and there was to be no State Church, although the Church of England was to be ^ The regulation certainly prevented them from being granted free. But it did not prevent enormous areas of land from falling into individual hands, and being held by absentee owners as a speculation against a possible rise in price, for the simple reason that no limit was put to the amount which any applicant might purchase. The evil consequences of this mistake are written large all over Australian history and land legislation. See bk. xxi. chs. ii. and iii. and bk. xxii. '■* Wakefield was a steady enemy of the Colonial Ofl&ce, which always did its best to thwart his schemes. He was an effective controversialist, however, and was able to cite many damaging cases of misconduct among olficials appointed by the Colonial Office. Among others he instanced examples or men who had been appointed to colonial governorships when heavily in debt, and who had to take precautions against being arrested even when swearing the oath of allegiance ; he might have added the case of Rawdon Crawley, appointed to the Governorship of Coventry Island in Vanity Fair. But there was no need to go to fiction. Wake- field knew of other cases of colonial judges who were heavily in debt, and only saved by their office from being lodged in gaol — a sufficiently Gilbertian situation. One colonial treasurer had been a defaulter ; another resigned after he was discovered forging public documents ; one fled the country after cheating at cards ; another, who was supposed to have the private ear of the Colonial Secretary, was said to swear ' by the hind leg of the Lamb of God ! ' A pretty crew 1 118 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS asked to send out a bishop, and all religious denominations were to be encouraged.^ A National Colonisation Society was founded in 1830 to propagate T;hese vieWs"; but"1ts aims were balked By'the enmity of the Colonial Office and the indiSerence of the pubUc. For the time the Society failed ; but a similar body, entitled the South Austrahan Association, obtained the sup- port of rising politicians and influential men such as Charles Buller, Grote the historian, and Colonel Torrens. Yet the Bill for a South Australian charter only passed through ^Parhament with difficulty ; had it not been, indeed, for the Duke of WelUngton's interest in the measure, it would prob- ably have been blocked successfully. According to Wake- field, ' A Prince of the Blood asked, " Pray, where is this South AustraUa ? " and the Lord Chancellor, renowned for the surpassing extent and variety of his knowledge, answered, " Somewhere near Botany Bay." ' The Bill finally passed on 2nd August 1834 ; and the road was free for colonisation. But practical work brings many a promising theory to the ground ; and the early days of the new settlement in South South AustraHa were hardly more happy than those of Austiraiia, West AustraHa itself had been. The first parties ^^' ■ of emigrants arrived towards the end of 1836 ; and on 20th December of that year Captain Hindmarsh, the Governor, landed in South Australia. Eight days later the ^ Wakefield had little belief in the Church of England as an effective force in the colonies, since it was ' subject to the Colonial Office, and therefore devoid of any energy or enterprise.' He was glad enough to obtain its support in the Canterbury Settlement of New Zealand, but by that time the Anglican Church had revived, largely under the stimu- lating influence of the Oxford Movement. Wakelield rated the Presby- terian Church of Scotland higher than the Episcopal Church of England, but highest of all he classed the Wesleyans, who possessed, he said, 'a profound and minute system of government, and did not wait, as other Churches did, until there was a call for its services in the colonies, and then only exhibit its inefficiency ; but it went before settlement, it led colonisa- tion ; it sent men of devoted purpose and first-rate ability ; it selected its missionaries with as much care as Rome, and ruled them with authority.* There was far more truth than error in these statements at the time. THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 119 colony was proclaimed at Glenelg, a watering-place on the Gulf of St. Vincent which had been named after the British Colonial Secretary ; and disputes at once took place as to the location of the capital. Eventually the original site chosen by the surveyor was decided upon, and the city of Adelaide — named in honour of the queen — was laid out. The promoters had intended to call the new capital WeUington, in gratitude for the assistance which the duke had rendered in passing their Bill through Parhament ; but the idea, said Wakefield, was ' shabbily frustrated,' and that name was given a few years later to the New Zealand city which was thought at the time * most likely to become the metropohs of the south.' The first buildings of Adelaide were not more imposing than those of any other colonial capital in early days. The Government House, it was said, consisted ' of Adelaide, mud put between laths, supported by uprights of native wood, and covered thickly with thatch. . . . Fire- places were forgotten in the plan ; and a simple fireplace and chimney were afterwards put down close to the front door. . . . The architect was a sailor, and the workmen were seamen.' The city itself was laid out on a rectangular plan, but for years it was Uttle more than an imposing skeleton ; and Port Adelaide lay on a swamp in a creek that needed draining and a miUion tons of salt cast upon it before the foundations were fit for building. By the charter of the Association, land was to be sold at twelve shillings an acre, that price being subsequently raised to a pound ; the proceeds were to be spent in MisfortuneB emigrating labourers of good character. And in and the meantime the commissioners were empowered ^ ^^' to borrow £50,000 for emigration purposes until the money from the land sales was in their hands ; in addition, i^ey could raise £200,000 on bonds, which were to be a charge on the colonial revenue. But Wakefield's theories had been 120 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS clipped and modified to conciliate various opposing interests ; the scheme as finally approved Jiad the radicaliaidtJtlLatit tended to -encourage speculation in land and bloated ^icep in leaLjeatate^ one of the worst handicaps a young settlement ^an possess : and above all, the administration of the colon}^ remained chiefly in the hands of the Colonial Office, which Tooked on the whole scheme with indifference, if not with . actual hostihty. The Wakefield project was thus frustrated : its good points were rejected, its faults exaggerated ; and in five years South Australia was on the verge of disaster, a_ bankrupt state with heavy debts and much social discontent.^ The soil seemed unpromising, and little effort was made to cultivate it. Produce was imported, and prices were therefore high ; flour was at one time sold in Adelaide for £100 a ton. Labour at first was scarce, and consequently expensive ; it was even suggested by some of the capitahst settlers that convict labour should be imported to supply the want — an idea that was fortunately suppressed. And later, when agriculture still languished but the population increased beyond the resources of the colony, a pohcy of public works construction was introduced by the Governor to tide over the immediate distress. It succeeded temporarily, but a long price had to be paid for the accommodation. The inevitable effect of the Government employing surplus labour was that the cost of private labour rose higher than ever, and agriculture was again set back ; while the Governor, having no other resources from which to pay wages — for it is useless to tax a penniless employer to pay a penniless labourer — drew bills on the British Treasury, which were promptly returned dishonoured. ' A sensible comment on the Wakefield system was made by D. Monro in the New Zealand Ndson Examiner, 1844 : ' Here the same system has been tried. The means of the settlers have been crippled by paying large sums of money for land, and everything at present seems to point to the same consummation as in South Australia — total exhaustion and then health, from necessity and the contact of starvation ; a system like that of Dr. Sangrado, who cured his patients by bleeding.' THE PUEIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 121 Utter disaster was thus within measurable distance when, on 10th May 1841, Captain, afterwards Sir George Grey, walked unannounced into Government House, sir George Adelaide, charged with the duty of superseding ^^y- ^8*^- the existing Governor, and rescuing South Australia from its untimely difficulties. The new Governor, a young man of twenty-nine who had spent the two preceding years in exploring the coasts of West AustraUa, was destined to be one of the great proconsuls of the age, and to serve the Empire in the southern hemisphere faithfully if not always wisely during forty years. Explorer in West AustraUa and Governor of South AustraUa, twice Governor and once Premier of New Zealand, and High Com- missioner of South Africa, Sir George Grey had a long and laborious hfe ; a difficult administrator to work with, he had always a difficult part to play, that of an essentially autocratic man charged with the rule of essentially democratic com- munities. Silent and reserved, a man with few confidants, unhappy in his home hfe — he was separated from his wife for years, and his only son died when five months old — Grey found his one pleasure in work. His creed was summed up by himself in one of his last speeches as Premier of New Zealand : ' What we have in this world is Mke so much stage property lent to us to play our parts with — lent to us to see what good we do with that entrusted to us.' And Grey had been true to his word, for he had spent his private means hberally in the service of his country. When his httle son died in AustraUa in 1841 he wrote : * The voice within me said — cease grieving for the child, weep not for the child, but rather weep for those who Uve or are to Uve. Arouse thee, .rise up and. struggle to ease the .sufferings of the countless milUons of thy countrymen who are npwjiere or are to come — to endure the miseries \chich fooUsh men have prepared for them in this life.' The man who could say that was an ideaUst, yet an idealist who would 122 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS not suffer Ms sorrow to blind him to the practical duties of life. And the immediate practical duty before him at the moment in South Australia was clear, if neither easy nor likely to be popular. The last two considerations weighed nothing with Grey ; he saw that there must be drastic retrenchment in expenditure, that gambhng in land must be stopped, and that cultivation and settlement must be encouraged ; and he proceeded to act. Official salaries were at once cut down, and certain posts were suspended or abohshed altogether. Duties to provide ' Economy \ revenue were imposed on all goods except those F?08p"my ^ imported from the United Kingdom. A searching 1841-5. enquiry was instituted into the Public Works Department, and many abuses were quickly discovered. One man, for instance, who was receiving reUef was found to be the owner of four cows. He protested that they were not his property ; investigation showed that they nominally belonged to his five-months-old son. In another case, two labourers admitted leaving their employers on the land because * higher wages could be obtained from the Govern- ment in Adelaide, and the work was not so hard.' The evil results of his predecessor's policy were thus exposed, and Grey at once cut down both state employment and the scale of pay for those who were not dismissed. The youthful press of the colony violently denounced the Governor, and his effigy was pubhcly burnt. But the latter Grey disregarded ; the effusions of the former he refused to read. Slowly the crisis grew less acute, and the colony turned the corner to prosperity. The people were forced out on to the yland when state employment in the town was checked, and / agriculture began to flourish as labour grew more abundant ; it was discovered that with a httle care the soil could be made to pay, and that the second crop was larger than the first. The chief business of the settlers ceased to be that of specula- THE PUEIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 123 tion in land ; wheat-growing was encouraged, and industry- was found more profitable than gambhng. In 1840 there had been but 2503 acres under cultivation ; the number grew steadily year by year, until in 1846 there were 33,292, And the population, which in 1840 had consisted of 14,610, of whom 8439 were congregated in the capital, had in three years risen to 17,366 ; but of these only 6107 remained in Adelaide, and the rest were on the land. ' My great object from the beginningj,' said Grey, 'was to give the labourers no inducement to remain in town, or upon public works ; "but to make them regard the obtaining a situation with a pettier as a most desirable event.' ^ The statistics speak emphatically of his success ; and the JXy very people who had burnt an effigy of Grey in the streets of Adelaide thanked him pubUcly on his departure for New Zealand in October 1845. ' You have with great abihty,' ran the signed memorial, ' pursued an uniform and difficult course in your administration ; and after years of great labour, and close attention to pubhc affairs, have the satis- faction of quitting your duties here with the assurance that the difficulties which impeded our progress have been over- come, and that prosperity can be confidently predicted and easily secured for the future.' The memorial expressed the simple truth ; but it is characteristic of Grey that, towards Jbhe close of his hf e forty-nine years later, he ascribed the credit for th e emergence of South Australia from its early misfortun e s to t he colonists themselves. ' The cahbre of the early settlers there,' he said, * gave me trust in the new Anglo-Saxondom in the southern hemisphere. . . . There was a worth, a sincerity, a true ring about them, which could not fail of great things.' He did not add that only the bom leader could make those quahties fruitful. One great man had founded South Austraha, and anotiber had saved it f rom disaster i, but no such conspicuous names adorn the early annals of the colony of Queensland. What y: 124 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS was known until 1859 as the Moreton Bay or northern district of New South Wales had indeed been discovered by Cook ; Queensland ^^^ *^® approach to the coasts was dangerous — (Moreton Cook himself had been nearly wrecked at Cape ^^y^'""'"®- Tribulation on his first voyage in 1770, and for thirty years the north-east of Austraha was totally neglected. Later a few explorers had added a little knowledge ; but not until after Lieutenant Oxley ^ left Sydney for Moreton Bay on 23rd October 1823 was there any attempt at colonisation. He discovered two half-wild Englishmen, the forlorn and forgotten rehcs of a former expedition, in the vicinity of the bay ; from these he obtained much dubious information, and after a perfunctory examination of the district he returned to Sydney, and gave premature birth to an exagger- ated report, A few months later a convict colony was estab- hshed, and the rough beginnings of the city of Brisbane were presently seen on the river. The convicts sent thither were a class of whom even a humanitarian would have despaired ; the habitual criminals, outcasts among their very fellow-criminals at Sydney, were relegated to Moreton Bay, and there kept in strict and ^absolute isolation from the outer world. During its early years Brisbane was proclaimed a closed town, and free men were forbidden to come within fifty miles of the place. But th^ magnificent country -of the inteajor. was not to be allowed to lie idle because a thousand convicts were kept in Auan durance on the coast ; and the spirit of unrest was ^'^d^^^*™ again calling British explorers to do pioneer work Darling m the unknown wilderness. On 27th April 1827 Downs, 1827. Allan Cunningham started from New South Wales with a few companions and servants to force his way through the northern bushlands ; and after many hardships bravely borne in crossing desolate and waterless countries, they sighted ' For Oxley's previous exploration in the interior see bk. xix. ch. i. THE PUEIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 125 what are now known as the Darhng Downs.^ It was ' exceed- ingly cheering to my people/ wrote Cunningham, ' after they had traversed a waste, often of the most forbiddingly arid character ... to observe from a ridge that they were within a day's march of open downs of miknown extent.' A clear pastoral comitry, with deep ponds supphed by streams from the neighbouring high lands, was discovered ; and ' the lower ground thus permanently watered presented flats which furnish an almost inexhaustible range of cattle pasture at all seasons ; the grasses and herbage generally exhibiting in the depth of winter an extraordinary luxuriance of growth.' The downs themselves were of ' rich black dry soil, well watered, but beyond the reach of floods,' and all around were hills clothed with the densest underwood. Cunningham returned to Sydney with the report of so goodly a country, and the tide of settlement soon turned thither ; but he and others again followed up the work of exploration. One of the enthusiastic pioneers in the Beagle, who named his discovery in the far north the Plains of Promise, breathed a * prayer that ere long the now level horizon would be broken by a succession of tapering spires rising from many Christian hamlets, and pointing through the calm depths of the intensely blue and gloriously bright skies of imperial AustraHa to a still calmer and brighter and more glorious region beyond.' His aspiration for the north of Queensland has yet to be fulfilled : y^ t within a few years of Allan Cunningham's _Journe^_£ermBnent jtatipns had be en made o n slow but ^^►arUng^owns. In 1840 Patrick LesUe, the aetuement, first of the great" Queensland squatters, appeared i840-60. in the district ; and he was followed by a slow but steady influx ^of farmers. Two years later the place was opened for free settlement by the Government ; in another four years the population of the Moreton Bay district was reckoned at ^ The Downs wero uamed from Goveiaor Darling. 126 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS 1122 males and 477 females, of whom 538 could not read. The colony was as yet in too primitive a state to manifest any real desire for education, although a School of Arts was opened at Brisbane in 1852, which was premature, and there- fore unsuccessful. A far more important matter for the time being was the estabhshment of a bank in 1850, which relieved both squatter and merchant from the costly delay of com- municating every commercial transaction to Sydney. The discovery of the Victorian gdld field s^ in_ 1851 had temporarily an adverse efiect upon the northern district, 'a Shortage for many workmen and some squatters abandoned of Labour. Moreton Bay in the hope of sudden wealth at Ballarat. The crying need of the place was labour, and labour seemed now almost impossible to obtain. The British Colonial Office was indeed ready to supply convicts in any number ; but though the squatters were not averse from a gratuitous supply, they revolted at the idea that eventual emancipists should receive land grants, and transportation was not regularly resumed. Some Chinese were imported ; but in order to counteract the dangerous possibihty of criminal and coloured labour becoming the basic population of the colony, the Presbyterian minister, Langjof-^ydaey,^ advocated a pohcy of free immigratiMi.^ The first British em igrant sh ip^ arrived in 1848 ; and, in addition to the supply from the mother country, over a thousand Germans were brought in subsequently. But the total white population had only risen to 19,321 in 1855. A few industries had, however, already been established, as well as the main business of stock-farming, which augured '^nerai well for the future of the colony. An experiment ProgreBs. j ^q jg^g showed that sugar could be grown, but the ^fade languished for twenty years, until in 1865 the * Lang played a considerable part in the politics, and some part in the religion, of the day. The insistence on white immigration was his moat im|>ortaiit service to Australia ; some years subsequently he advocated its separation from the Empire. — Bk. xix. ch. iii. THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 127 Government gave special facilities for its cultivation. In 1849 coal was discovered on the Brisbane River ; two years later the first wool ship sailed direct from Brisbane to London. Gold was found in 1858, but in too small quantities to be profitable. In 1859 the colony contained 23,504 horses, 432,890 cattle, and 3,166,802 sheep. Cotton had been grown, and the first bale was shipped to England in 1850 ; in 1853 a brewery was established, as well as a candle and a soap factory. Since the latter industry, however, only had an output of five tons of soap a year we may assume that the personal wants of the community were not extravagant. The budding civihsation of Queensland is perhaps better shown by the early inauguration of a racecourse, and by the estabhshment of the first newspaper, the Moreton Bay Courier, on 20th June 1846. But as the proprietor of the latter at one time appealed to the subscribers ' to pay up their accounts before they become deeply stricken in years,' it may be deduced that hterature was as much an exotic as personal cleanliness. Every indus try was hampered by the lack of l abour. ; but ^ the most immediate subject of complaint was administrative. Small thougF its popuTatidnwa^ the colony had Queensland already a dis tinct state-consciousness, and it was a separate ^ galling in e very way to be treated as an appanage ° °^^' \^ of Sydney. There were likewise practical inconveniences in referring every question of government and law to officials some six hundred miles away, who could have little know- ledge of pecuhar local conditions, and who, in fact, had little sympathy with local aspirations. A vigorous agitation for separation f rom New Soutk..ffiales„was set on foot in"tlie Moreton Bay distri ct, which was not diminished when yictoria secured independence in 1851 ; and though it was denounced as weak, mischievous, and insane by prominent politicians in New South Wales — who reproached the northern settlers with ingratitude in wishing to desert the mother 128 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS colony after having been a burden for so many years — it made steady progress in public opinion. Amusing evidence of the fervour with which it was desired is shown in a grandilo- quent address presented by the citizens of Ipswich to Sir William Denison. He was told that ' superhuman qualities ' — which that excellent official was very far from possessing — were required to ' steer between the Scylla of Downing Street bureaucracy and the Charybdis of popular discontent and incessant grumbhng,' and that ' Her Majesty's representatives have been amongst us, but not of us.' But despite the opposi- V tion from Sydney, the division of the colony was admitted \»r to~I)e desirable in 1856 by the British Government. A j^^ ~boilhdary dispute caused some delay, but at length, on 13th M ay 1859, an Order in Council was issued, separating the Moreton £ay disirictiixffli N.ew-SQiuih,Hj^ and co nferrin g j)n it the title of Queensland in honour of jQueen Victoria.^ The capitalol tH^n ew colon y, which was named after Governor Brisbanej^had in its early years been a mere miser- Brisbane able collection of huts. It had no streets ; even c^^y- the commandant had only a wooden residence, and the minor officials Hved in rubble buildings. The river bar made navigation difficult ; the convicts made society impossible ; the mosquitoes made Hfe unbearable. When Governor Gipps inspected the place in 1842 he thought it could never be more than a provincial township ; and even after the country had been thrown open to settlement, and men gambled freely in urban land allotments, Brisbane did not for some time become a more desirable home. An old colonist, A. A. Hull, describing the capital as he remembered it in 1862, said that it had then only one street deserving the ' Not mauy years later, an agitation sprang up for the division of the northern part of Queensland from the southern. The good folk of Brisbane, with that disregard of consistency which we all of us show when our own interests are involved, reproached the northern settlers with ingratitude, in the very terms that Sydney had previously used towards Brisbane. THE PUEIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 129 name, and ' more tumble-down shanties than substantial houses/ while there was ' a foul marsh in the middle of the city, and the croaking of frogs prevented those who were staying at the Royal Hotel from sleeping/ Not for some years after the separation of Queensland from New South Wales could Brisbane be compared to the other great Australian cities. The lesser townships of the state were yet more primitive. Hull described Maryborough as possessing only a few yards of street, in which he had seen a drag with sixteen bullocks stick fast in the mud ; the EngUsh church was a slab building, tapestried with Indian matting. And the aboriginal blacks held their cannibal feasts only half a mile from the town, whence the chant of their corroborree floated through the white men's windows, and their quarrels often took place in the very settlement itself, to the terror of the women who were involuntary spectators. Patrick Leslie bought the site of Warwick for four pounds ; while, in 1848, Drayton, he said, ' consisted of a publichouse and a shanty or two, with only one well for the town ; and it was such a one, as to get a bucket full of water one had to go down with a pannikin and bale it into the bucket.' These, and many other cities which were then undisturbed bush, now possess substantial banks, hotels, and churches ; while there is hardly a township so small or remote but has its school, its local newspaper for the neighbourhood, and its direct tele- graph hne to the capital. The foundations o f another colo ny were thus well and truly laid by t he British in Australia. But there is a less pleasant side to the history of Queensland. In each conflict with Australian, as in practically all of the early *^« Natives. American settlements, there had been trouble with the aborigines. The convicts who thronged the districts around Sydney had quickly come into conflict with the blacks. In Tasmania the whole native race had been wiped out in two VOL. v. I 130 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS generations. West Australia was continually the scene of guerilla warfare. The precautions of Batman had not permanently availed at Port Phillip. And neither Gibbon Wakefield nor George Grey had been able to prevent mis- conduct in South Australia ; indeed, from that colony came the memorable justification of theft by one of the aborigines : ' Whitefellow kill blackf ellow's kangaroo ; all same blackfellow kill whitefellow's kangaroo.' But while Tasmania bears the palm for cruelty among the convict colonies, Queensland has the bad pre-eminence in the states that were mainly founded by free men ; and no honest chronicler of her history can pass over the racial struggle there in silence. The early relations between whites and blacks in Queens- land^ as in many other countries, had been peace^iBle and almost cordial. But when the British increased in number, and their flocks grew larger, the natives stole the latter ; and in revenge they were shot by the former. The victim was not always, or even often, the actual thief : ' The diffi- culty of detecting the real criminals,' said the Brisbane Courier, ' was obviated by a punishment of the whole . . . they are regarded as worthy of nothing but slaughter.' And matters became steadily worse year by year. The authorised correspondent of a Melbourne journal, who went to investigate the gold discoveries at Port Curtis in 1858, wrote that the relations between the two races were those of ' war to the knife. The atrocities on both sides are perfectly horrible, and I do not believe the Government make any effort to stop the slaughter of the aborigines. A native pohce force is indeed actively engaged, but exclusively against the blacks, who are shot down by their bloodthirsty brethren at every opportunity. I beheve the blacks retaHate whenever they can, and never lose a chance of murdering a white man, woman, or child. . . . The number of blacks killed is impos- sible to estimate. They are being killed officially by police, and unofficially by settlers and diggers every day, nor are THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 131 women and children by any means spared when murders are being revenged/ It was a war of despair on the one side, of extermination on the other. It is well to finish the shameful tale in one telling. Twenty years afterwards, when the outrages still continued unabated, the Queenslander newspaper denounced them strongly in almost identical language. ' On occupying new territory,' said that journal, ' they (the blacks) are treated in exactly the same way as the wild beasts or birds the settlers may find there. . . . Their goods are taken, their children forcibly stolen, their women carried away entirely at the caprice of white men. The least show of resistance is answered by a rifle bullet ; in fact, the first introduction between blacks and whites is often marked by the unprovoked murder of some of the former. . . . The majority of settlers have been apparently influenced by the same sort of treatment as that which guides men in their treatment of the brute creation. Many, perhaps the majority, have stood aside in silent dis- gust, . . . and a few have always protested in the name of humanity against such treatment. . . . But the protests of the minority have been disregarded, and the white brutes who fancied the amusement have murdered, ravished, and robbed the blacks without let or hindrance. The government of the colony %ave always been at hand to save them from the consequences of their crime. The native pohce, organised and paid by us, is sent to do work which its officers are forbidden to report in detail ; and . . . when the blacks, stung to retahation, have shed white blood, or speared white men's stock, the native police have been sent to disperse them. What " disperse " means is well enough known — a con- venient euphemism for wholesale murder.' And that this was no imaginary accusation was proved by a long list of outrages, in which were mentioned the ' nameless deeds of horror discussed openly by many a camp fire,' and the specific instance of the killing of many aboriginal families by putting 132 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS arsenic in the food with which they had been supplied under false professions of friendship — a dastardly act for which white humanity may well blush. There were some, indeed, who defended such cruelty on the ground that there was no room for both races in Queens- land, and that ' the sooner the weaker is wiped out the better. ... A useless race, what does it matter what they suffer ? ' Even in the Queensland Assembly in 1880 it was said that ' the black race have got to go ' ; and a commission of enquiry into the outrages and their causes was refused. The Colonial Government had been too weak to interfere actively, but at least part of the blame must be laid at the door of the imperial administration. An Act was passed in 1839 ' to allow the aboriginal natives of New South Wales to be received as competent witnesses in criminal cases ' ; but it was disallowed by the British Cabinet. Had the AustraUans been as earnest to do justice to the natives of their own continent as they were to protect themselves against the immigration of coloured races from other lands, they would have reintroduced the Act again and again until the British Colonial Office gave way before their persistence ; but, at any rate, their one effort to secure the competence of non-European witnesses in British courts of law — which would have done much to render racial crime mor6 easy of detection, and thereby eventually more difficult to commit — was defeated in Downing Street and not in Sydney.^ The most exquisite flowers of the tropics grow spontan- eously from the rotting soil of their own vegetable ancestors. The White ^^ ^^® same way, from such deeds o f shame and Australia violence to the antipodean aborigines sprang the ** °^' noble ideal of a White Australia in the next genera- ^tion. T he crude and cruel germ ofthe creed lay in the * A similar example can be cited from West Australia, where the abo- rigines were better treated by the Colonial Parliament, after the grant of responsible government in 1890, than they bad been by the Imperial Parliament. THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 133 excla mation that there was no room for two races in Queens- land, and in the policy which went far to secure the sole possession of the whites by the slaughter of the blacks. And the later humanitarian view, which in America as in Australia worked for the same end by the more merciful means of isolating the fast diminishing aborigines in special localities, was in efEect merely a refinement of feeling that touched but the higher elements among the whites, and that only when the blacks were objects no longer of danger, but of pity. CHAPTER IV THE VICTORIAN GOLDFIELDS : 1851-601 When the world rested after the titanic struggle with Napoleon, and Australia finally passed quietly under Enghsh rule, the southern continent ceased to be an object of much interest beyond the British Empire. Whatever colonial ambitions the French might have had in the antipodes soon vanished. Other European nations had more pressing occupa- tions at home. And there was as yet no fear of an Asiatic invasion to haunt the imagination of the new English settle- ments to the south. To the rest of the world, in fact, 1 Authorities. — The same as for Port Phillip in the preceding chapter, together with the oflBcial correspondence and the newspaper files of tlie period. There are many descriptions of Victoria at this time : Wathen's Golden Colony contains much information ; Howitt's two works, his Iviprexsions and Land, Labour and Gold, are lengthy and tedious, but occasionally useful. Clara Aspinall's Three Yearn in Melbourne is the light and amusiug writing of a literary novice. Bonwick's Notes of a Gold Digr/er is a contemporary work ; Bradford's The Ballarat Field is also worth consulting, flaydon's Five Years' Experience is of little value. The opposition view may be seen in a pamphlet, whose portentous title sufficiently explains its contents, headed, Does the Discovery of Gold in Victoria, viewed in relation to its Morai and Social Effects, a« hitherto developed, deserve to be considered a National Blessing or a National Cur«e( 1853).? 134 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Australia seemed merely a distant province, of enormous extent, indeed, but probably of exaggerated value and of small real importance, at any rate for several centuries to come. The hunger for land had not yet reached such inten- sity that the possession of territory was worth disputing at the cost of war. So the position stood for thirty years ; so it might con- ceivably have stood for another century. But an event TheBaUarat Occurred in 1851 which turned the eyes of the ooidiieid, whole world on the colony of Victoria. The ^^^^' treasure that had been sought in so many wild expeditions, the secret of the southern seas for which so many men had risked and lost their lives, was discovered at last by a mere accident. On 9th August 1851, eighty miles from the small provincial capital of Melbourne, gold in large quantities was discovered at Ballarat. That gold existed in Austraha had already been foretold — >' it would be difficult to name the British colony in which its presence has not been proclaimed — and gold had indeed actually been found in various other districts only a few months previously. Count Strzelecld declared in 1839 that the Australian Alps were auriferous. Other travellers had pointed out the similarity between the soil and configuration of Australia and the gold districts of Cahfornia. And in February 1851 gold was discovered a few miles from the quiet township of Bathurst in New South Wales ; but those who hastened thither from Sydney soon returned home dejected. The field was not rich enough to repay the labour of digging ; and the disappointed seekers after wealth, who had been misled by their creduhty and cupidity, imagined as they returned empty-handed that the very laughing jackasses of the country jeered at their discomfiture. But at Ballarat there was a very different story to tell. The gold deposits there were alluvial ; the gold had only to be dug up, washed, and stored, or taken down to the coast and THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 135 sold. In many cases it lay about on the surface in nuggets, which varied in size from a few ounces to a soUd block of 184 pounds troy, 9 ounces, 6 pennyweights — the largest ever found in Victoria. Labilliere the historian, who visited Ballarat as a boy, saw a man picking the nuggets out of a lump of earth as a schoolboy picks plums out of a pudding ; nor was this at all an exceptional case. Scarcely had the news of the discovery of gold at Ballarat been received in Melbourne before other deposits were found at Mount Alexander and Bendigo. The whole ^^j^^^gQ and land now seemed suddenly to have become one Mount vast goldfield. And forthwith everybody that ^®^*'''^®'^- could do so deserted Melbourne and Geelong ; peaceful and regular industry was no longer attractive when there was the chance that wealth enough for a hfetime might be picked up in a morning. The master and the man both took the road to the mines ; Government officials and pohce hurriedly deserted their posts. The crews of inward-bound vessels disappeared on shore and into the interior within a few hours after their arrival. One man who came from Albany in West Australia to Melbourne on business could not return because the ship he had specially chartered for the double voyage was left derelict in Port PhilUp. In four months the population of Geelong fell from 8291 to 2850 ; and other townships probably diminished in like proportion. Nor was the exodus confined to the people of the colony. The news quickly reached Sydney and Van Diemen's Land, and a less desirable class of diggers now began to appear at the fields. Among the free settlers arrived escaped convicts and emancipists ; and crime in the goldfields, which had been rare, became usual. A drastic Convicts Prevention Act was at once passed, which reduced the evil ; but many equivocal characters still made their way by devious routes to the source of riches. 136 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Even from West Australia a few men set out to walk the three thousand odd miles to Ballarat through the barren wilderness. From every quarter of the globe settlers poured into Melbourne at the rate of ten to twenty thousand in a month. The town could not contain them all, and the harbour became congested with shipping ; a temporary city was erected in the suburbs, whose name of Canvastown sufficiently describes its character. Still all could not find accommodation ; and memories have been preserved of eager miners, who failed to find a resting-place on land, sleeping in the discarded boilers of a steamer till they could go up-country. Before a month had passed from the first discovery of gold an armed escort was provided by the Government to bring the treasure down to Melbourne. Within a few weeks there were ten thousand diggers at Golden Point, Ballarat, which a year before had been the silent and unnamed pasturage of a squatter's sheep. The cost of goods, of labour, and of transit went up enor- mously ; the most extraordinary prices were charged and High Prices obtained. At one time hay was dearer than wheat, and Scarcity A skilled workman in Melbourne could obtain a our. £2 ^ ^g^y. ^^ j^jg ordinary work : his competitors were all at the goldfields. No carrier would transport goods under the rate of £1 a ton the mile : and a ton of flour, which cost £25 at Melbourne, could not be bought at Bendigo under £200. A single cabbage, which cost half-a-crown in Canvastown, sold for five shilhngs at the mines.^ Many a long-headed man saw the promise of a far easier and more certain road to wealth in setting up a store near the goldfields than in digging for himseK ; and the foundations of several respectable fortunes were thus laid. The lusty crowd of miners were improvident if they had httle luck, for their gains were then not worth hoarding ; they were reckless ^ Even this price was exceeded a few years later in South Africa, where a cauliflower fetched twenty-five shillings at Kimberley. THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 137 if they ' struck it rich/ for then a little additional extravagance made no difference. And the storekeeper drew a sufficiently large profit from both. The Government had wisely refused to allow licences for alcoholic liquors to be sold on the goldfields ; and although no doubt a certain amount of ilhcit trade went on, there was little actual drunkenness. But in Melbourne, and on the road from the capital to the diggings, things were very different. Inns and drinking-saloons lined the whole way : the miners going up to Ballarat or Bendigo drank for luck ; those coming back drank from exuberance or despair. Prices were high, and one may be sure that the Uquor was vile. But the demand seemed as unhmited as the supply. Champagne was drunk from a bucket, and a nugget or a handful of gold dust given in exchange ; money had lost its real value for a time, but not alcohol. At the goldfields themselves, despite their large popula- tion and the diversity of nationalities, there were few scenes of disorder, if we except the great riot of 1854, which arose through dissatisfaction with the conditions laid down by the Government. Those conditions were modified after enquiry by Sir Charles Hotham, and steady work was at once resumed. A few of the miners amassed substantial fortunes. A few of those few kept them. Many more obtained a competence. The majority made less than if they had remained xne Miners' at their regular work. Everybody had to pay a ^°^^^- monthly digger's fee of thirty shilhngs to the Government ; everybody had Ukewise to pay exorbitant prices for food, fodder, and utensils ; and the average yield of gold per head in 1852 was not more than £233, while in 1864 it had sunk to £70. As the alluvial goldfields at Ballarat became worked out, and the quartz mines of Bendigo rose into greater prominence, the search for gold became more of an industry and less of a 138 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS gamble. The results were less precarious ; but capital was now required, and the old type of independent prospector no longer had a chance. If he had succeeded previously, he might now become part proprietor of a mine, or employ others to work a reef ; if he had failed, he left the country or drifted into other occupations. The gold fever thus died down gradually ; but it left permanent marks on Victoria. If we cannot echo Wentworth's J TheEffecton grandiloquent phrase, that by the discovery of Victoria. gg}^ ' ^]jg colony was precipitated into a nation,' we can at least reckon in solid figures the progress of the place. The population had been 77,345 in 1851 ; in 1855 it was 333,000. And of these the great majority were Englishmen : the alien inhabitants were calculated at ten per cent, of the whole, of whom half were Chinese and a fifth German. The general trade of the colony had risen from £2,000,000 sterling to £25,000,000. In ten years altogether £110,000,000 of solid gold was exported, nearly all of it to England. And in place of the old irregular and slow-sailing vessels the Peninsular and Oriental Company had introduced a steam-packet service to Port Phillip. Some few of the original settlers affected to regret the old days of peaceful pastoral pursuits, when their business made steady but slow progress, and no abnormal conditions dis- turbed prices or industry from year to year. In the case of some of the squatters, perhaps, the grievance was real : for those colonial aristocrats were treated unceremoniously by the new-comers, and scant respect was paid to the rights of a sheep-run when gold was found upon it. But enhanced prices for their meat gave the squatters greater profits than they had dreamed of before ; there was no more talk of tallow-value when mutton was wanted by a thousand hungry miners. And the fortunate owners of original land allot- ments in the capital soon found themselves millionaires without exertion. THE PURIFICATION OF AUSTRALIA 139 In the early forties, the boys of Melbourne had chased the goats which browsed on the grass that still grew in the main streets. Ten years later, the kangaroo and cockatoo had possessed the place in solitude. A few years later, seven hundred guineas a foot was demanded and perhaps paid for a frontage; and strips of soil which had been purchased for thirty or forty pounds in Governor Bourke's time fetched forty thousand pounds within a generation. John Pascoe Fawkner had described the site of Melbourne as being possessed of a ' velvet-Uke grass carpet, decked with flowers of most Hvely hues, most hberally spread over the land, fresh water, fine lowlands, and lovely knolls around the lagoons on the flat or swamp, flocks almost innumerable of teals, ducks, geese and swans and minor fowls ' ; but in his time the city contained only some half-dozen huts and one or two drinking-saloons and stores. A local branch of the Van Diemen's Land Bank was soon added. A church was built, which was at first no more than * a small, square, wooden building, with an old ship's bell suspended from a most defamatory-looking gallows-hke structure ' ; a bishop was appointed, and arrived in 1848. The first manuscript newspaper, entitled The Melbourne Advertiser, was pubhshed on Ist January 1838 ; a printed successor soon appeared, but for some months it was only produced under great difficulties. These, however, were the days before the gold boom, when there was little to distinguish Melbourne from any other newly-founded colonial township. A mighty change occurred after 1851. On the first discovery of the mines, indeed, property had depreciated, since everybody was selling houses, furniture, and stock for whatever price they could obtain in order to raise supplies wherewith to reach the diggings. But when men and money again flowed into the capital, Melbourne became one huge fair, the centre of eager expectant life, the temporary home of men of every rank and of none — mammon- hunters all — rough, barbarian, strong. 140 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS The population doubled and trebled, and doubled again. Nearly all the gold found up-country — which was assayed at twenty-three carats fine, a far purer quality than the Californian, and more generally useful than the gold alloyed with silver that New South Wales produced — was sent down through Melbourne to the European market. Much of the goods transported to the diggings went through Melbourne ; and the insistent rivalry of Geelong, a place far better suited for landing passengers and supplies, only stimulated the merchants of the capital to further enterprise. Some enthusiasts even compared that city, which stood upon seven hills, to a new Rome ; others more truly prophesied that it would become the largest place in the southern hemisphere ; still others, more prosaic and practical, bought land. They were wise in their generation ; for the goldfields had secured the future, not of Melbourne and Victoria only, but of all Australia.^ ' By 1910, Victoria had produced altogether gold to the value of £285,100,389 ; New South Wales, £57,189,282 ; Queensland, £70,224,573 ; South Australia, £2,840,206; Tasmania, £6,956,504 ; and West Australia, £91,780,563 : grand total value, £514,091,517. The great Kimberley goldfield in West Australia was discovered in 1886, and Kalgoorlie in 1893. The Coolgardie field had been found in 1892, and in a single afternoon the lucky discoverers secured five hundred Book XIX THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION: 1850-1901 CHAPTER I THE EXPLORATION OF AUSTRALIA » On an old French chart of the year 1807 the southern shores of Australia for a distance of some thousand miles from Bass Strait to the great Bight are clearly marked with ,j^^ prencii the name of Terre Napoleon. And as though to and remove any possible doubt of the meaning of the ^^ ™ ^ words, the two considerable breaks which the southern ocean * The original authorities are clear and trustworthy ; the explorers of Australia were honest, able men, whose errors were, at most, blunders, miscalculations, and misjudgments, not lies. For once in a way travellers' tales may be received with less than the usual caution. The main sources of this chapter will be found in John Oxley's JotMiials of Two Expeditions ; Hume and Howell's Overland Journey of 1824, reprinted 1897 ; Sir T. L. Mitchell's Three Exjyeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia ; George Grey's Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-west and Western Australia ; King's Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Avstralia ; Eyre's Discoveries in Central Australia ; Leichhardt's Journal of an Overland Expedition ; Sturt's Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, and his \a.ter 2i^arrative of an Expedition into Central Australia, together with the excellent Life of Charles Sturt by Mrs. Sturt. Egerton Warburton's Across Australia, and his Diary of Explorations in the Parliamentary Papers of South Australia ; there are records of several other explorers in the Parlia- mentary Papers of this colony. Andrew Jackson's Burke and the Australian Exploring Expedition of 1860, with The Progress Reports and Final Reports of the ExplorcUion Committee of the Royal Society of Victoria (1872). Forrest's Eocphrations in Australia; J. W. Lewis's Journal of Lake Eyre Expedition, 1874-5 (Parliamentary Papers, South Australia) ; and (Giles's Travels in Central Australia, 1872-4. 141 142 . THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS makes in the otherwise regular landhne of the southern continent are named Golfe Bonaparte and Golfe Josephine ; while other names of pronouncedly Gallic origin — Montesquieu, Talleyrand, Descartes, and Rabelais — are scattered along the spacious coasts. All these names have long since disappeared. Napoleon Land is divided between the two states of Victoria and South Australia. Bonaparte and unlucky Josephine have been replaced by Spencer and St. Vincent on the waterway to Adelaide and the lakes of the interior ; philosopher Descartes, wily Talleyrand, serene Montesquieu must seek their fame in other spheres ; even Rabelais has been ejected. Practical British captains and heroes of common and even vulgar names — Jim Crow's Flat, Martin's Washpool, and Tilley's Swamp — have ousted more renowned rivals from the antipodean map ; but the old French chart may still recall the days when Austraha was known indifferently as New Holland and New South Wales, and when a successful French settlement might easily have fixed the mighty name of Napoleon on the continent in perpetuity. Whether or not the all-conquering Emperor had the desire or the intention of colonising Australia remains a problem which the industry of a century of biographers and historians has failed to solve. No shadow of a hint of a projected settlement in the antipodes is known to exist in the state documents of the first French Empire. No mention of such a scheme is recorded in any of Napoleon's conversations, yet Napoleon talked freely of his schemes to his intimates.^ And the voyage which the French traveller Nicolas Baudin made in 1801 to Austraha, when he named its south coast Terre Napoleon, and sprinkled Gallic celebrities freely over its ^ Negative evidence is not, of course, conclusive ; but no secrecy existed concerning Napoleon's other projects in Louisiana, in Egypt, or in India ; and it is hardly conceivable that a projected Australian bettlement would have been wrapped in impenetrable mystery. The subject is discussed in Scott's Tern Napoleon, au admirable work. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 143 uncelebrated coasts, was not accompanied or followed by any attempt to claim the land for France. The first Gallic possession in the antipodes, in fact, was not acquired until 1853, when the island of New Caledonia was annexed for a convict station ; and none of the names which Baudin gave to his discoveries were ever in ordinary use.^ Whatever hopes French statesmen and travellers may have cherished of planting a second New France in Austraha ^ to replace the older New France in North America that had been lost a generation since, the overwhelming sea-power of Britain, which was never questioned for a century after that autumn day in 1805 when Trafalgar was won and lost, pre- vented their fruition. The fleet of England stood between Britain and destruction while Napoleon planned his schemes of invasion ; not less effectually did its unseen influence protect the infant British settlements on the other side of the world against foreign encroachment. Thanks to the British navy, Austraha became British through and through, in a sense that neither the United States, nor Canada, nor South Africa could ever claim to be. But for some years after the planting of her first settlement in Austraha, England herself knew httle of the interior of the continent she had claimed. Bass ignorance and Flinders and other mariners explored the of the coasts, which were soon mapped out with fair ^^*® *"^" precision ; but inland the charts were blank. Occasionally a convict escaped into the interior, and either perished of ^ Another and earlier French traveller was more fortunate. The name of D'Entrecasteaux, who explored the coasts of Tasmania and West Australia in 1792, has clung to the point where the Darling Range finds its uttermost limit in the ocean ; and a few other French names in those countries — Recherche Archipelago and Esperance Bay — still attest the work done by his expedition. - Sereral instances are mentioned in preceding chapters of supposed French schemes of settlement in Australia, which alarmed the British colonists from time to time. Probably France would have occupied Australia had England not forestalled her ; in the case of New Zealand she certainly would have done so (bk. xxi. ch. ii.). 144 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS starvation or thirst, or made common cause with the abo- rigines ;^ but these brought back no knowledge of the country. And time after time the path of the first explorers in New South Wales was barred by the chasms, ravines, and gorges which formed the seemingly impassable chain of the Blue Moimtains ; yet until the long range which parts the vast interior from the coastal strip was pierced, no real knowledge of Austraha could be obtained. Sharp necessity at length pointed the way. In the year 1813 the English settlers experienced the first of those The First recurrent droughts which are the curse of the GsJned Australian chmate. New pasture lands were 1813, urgently required to save the increasing stock of the colony ; but on the maritime side of the Blue Mountains no such lands could be found. Once more an attempt was made to explore the forbidding range by a small party of explorers, one of whom was Wilham Charles Wentworth, at that time no more than a clever youth whose future political fame was still unsuspected.^ Success crowned their efforts when they rounded a spur of the hills and saw open country beyond, and the immediate problem was solved ; but shortly afterwards a large river was discovered flowing westwards, and the question was at once raised whither this river led, and where was its outlet in the ocean. ^ In 1842 Stuart Russell the explorer found an escaped convict who had lived fourteen years among the aborigines. A somewhat similar case is mentioned in bk. xviii. ch. iii. ^ For Wentworth's talents as a writer see the following chapter ; as a politician, chap. iii. He was perhaps the most considerable figure Rafter Macarthur in early Australia. Born at Norfolk Island in 1793, he was of Irish extraction, the son of a surgeon, and, like a good Irishman, spent most of his life opposing the Government. Educated in England, where he wrote the poem Australia, from which I have quoted in chap, ii., he returned to New South Wales, and distinguished himself by leading the opposition to the transportation system. He declaimed against Governor Darling (bk. xviii. ch. i.) with the true fervour of Celtic youth, announcing his intention of pursuing that unhappy official to the gallows. The threat did not materialise, and Wentworth, who had conceived the idea of founding a new English nation in Australia — an idea of which he was the pioneer^^turned his attention to advocat- THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 145 The southern shores of Australia had already been well surveyed, and no great estuary had been found in that direc- tion ; it seemed in consequence certain that this stream, which if it flowed through the whole continent must be one of the great rivers of the world, must either empty itself on the uncharted western or northern coasts, or feed some great inland sea in the unknown heart of Australia. On the answer to that question hung much of the future development of the continent ; and in the search for that visionary stream and phantom inland sea two generations of explorers spent their energies and sometimes sacrificed their lives in vain. It was to solve this problem that Lieutenant John Oxley set out from Sydney in 1817 on an official expedition of dis- covery. His party followed first the Lachlan Oxiey seeks River, then the Macquarie, as those streams flowed Itw^^an through a wilderness plain to the west ; but the River, 1817. report they brought back was evil. The explorers declared that a large part of the country consisted of ' deserts aban- doned by every living creature capable of getting out of them ' ; the more north-westerly they went the more con- vinced was Oxley that ' for all the practical purposes of civihsed man the interior of this country, westward of a certain meridian, was uninhabitable, deprived as it was of wood, grass, and water,' while there was said to be an inexpres- sible weariness in the uniformity of its barren desolation. Generally the soil was ' a poor and cold clay,' and ' the flats ing a free constitution. After assisting in the foundation of Sydney University, he risited England in 1854, at which time the expected con- stitution was granted, largely through his efforts. He died in England in 1872, and by his direction his remains were taken to Australia and buried there. The first exponent of Australian nationalism, Wentworth lived fifty years before his time. A representative of the squatter interest, his name is rather unfortunately associated with land speculation in New Zealand, where his purchase was disallowed by Governor Gibbs (bk. xxii. ) — a fact which, if it increased his hatred of the Government, certainly did nothing to increase bis reputation. VOL. v. K 146 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS were certainly not adapted for cattle ; the grass was too swampy, and the bushes, swamps, and lagoons too thickly intermingled with the better portions to render it a safe or desirable grazing country.' Yet on those plains which Oxley too hastily condemned millions of sheep and cattle have since grazed and fattened every year. A few miles further, and the stream, which had broadened and narrowed and broadened again, lost itself in an ocean of His Failure ^^^ds. Oxley, embarrassed and surprised at this andDisap- unexpected discovery, hazarded the opinion that pom men . ^j^^ shallow inland sea might be the end of the river's course, and retraced his steps with some difficulty, convinced that both land and water were useless — an opinion which later and more extensive explorations gave him little reason to alter. Austraha still had hid her face as of old from the explorer ; and it was the misfortune of Oxley, who was not naturally of a very sanguine disposition, to enter the interior when much of the country was in flood. Those who followed in his footsteps speedily corrected his mistaken conclusions. The rivers had shrunk, the floods The Pioneer subsided, the shallow inland sea had vanished ; Squatters, ^nd in their place was a country, marshy and boggy indeed, but generally rich and fit for pasture. It improved with occupation, for the soft pad of the grazing cattle kneaded, fertilised, and trod down the shaking soil ; and the flocks of the pioneer squatters soon throve on the vast plains which Oxley had discovered and condemned. The squatters themselves pushed further and further inland as their flocks increased, and many a stretch of virgin bush and scrub owes its discovery and its name to long-forgotten prospectors who drove their cattle onwards to new country. Some of these pioneers prospered and grew rich ; some perished of starvation ; some were killed by aborigines, or drowned in sudden overwhelming floods after long rainless THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 147 months in which their stock died by the thousand ; and some, too, were still forced onwards in the hope of green pastures. The squatter's life was all a gamble ; but a gamble in which the best man usually won, and the man who won often found a fortune as the prize. But the mystery of the westward-flowing river was yet to solve. Another stream had meanwhile been discovered, the upper reaches of the Murrumbidgee ; ^ but none had followed its downward course to the sea, and no outlet west or south of the continent had yet been found. It was not long, however, before an attempt was made to solve the riddle that had perplexed Oxley. In the year 1824 a party set out under the lead of Howell, a retired Tiie HoweU- shipmaster who had settled in Australia, and Expedition, Alexander Hamilton Hume, a lad who had been 1824. bred in the Austrahan bush, and who had therefore an enor- mous advantage over his predecessors in this work of explora- tion. They crossed the Murrumbidgee while in flood, and turning south-westwards, passed through a rich country of green grass and running water before striking a range of mountains whose tops, even on the hot summer day when the expedition first sighted them from afar, were covered with snow. These they called the Australian Alps. Eight days afterwards the travellers came upon a noble stream which they called the Hume, in memory of the young explorer's father. Had they followed its course instead of crossing it, they would have added the greatest river in Austraha to the maps ; for this river was that which is now called the Murray. Instead, they pushed on towards the south, crossing in their path other streams, one of which, now known as the Goulburn, at first bore Howell's name ; and in time they reached the coast near the spot where the city of Geelong has since been an ineffectual rival of Melbourne. Turning back upon their ^ Murrumbidgee was its native name. 148 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS track after a short rest, they retraced their footsteps, and reached Sydney early in 1825. The journey had been marked by frequent quarrels, which at one time became so serious that it was agreed to divide the single tent that accommodated the party into two equal halves, while the one frying-pan which Howell and Hume could boast for cooking their food was broken by the two leaders struggUng for its possession. Despite their quarrels, Hume and Howell had added many hundred miles of good pasture country to the vacant map The great of inland AustraUa ; but still no outlet to the west Desh^e^d ° °^ south of the continent had been found ; nor Blessing. had they solved the vexed question of the west- ward-flowing river in the interior. And there were many who still maintained a firm behef in the existence of a mighty stream draining the whole of central Australia, fed perhaps from some vast chain of inland mountains ; one enthusiast even went so far as to say that he ' felt the strongest con- viction, a kind of second sight, that a river of the first magni- tude would be found. It was impossible,' he thought, * to contemplate the works of a Bounteous Creator, and beUeve that any imperfection could exist on the face of our planet, as would certainly be the case if no outlet existed ' for the waters of Austraha. As to the idea that ' such a sea of water ' as the explorers had discovered when the interior was in flood ' could be evaporated or absorbed, it was too pre- posterous an absurdity to be entertained for a single moment.' And it was suggested that this important stream, which was still beheved to empty itself into the unexplored north-west of the continent, should be called emphatically the Great River or the Desired Blessing.^ * The Friend of Australia, by a Retired Officer of the Hon. East India Company's Service, 1830. I owe thanks to Mr. Lewin, the energetic librarian of the Royal Colonial Institute for drawing my attention to this, and indeed to many other works which I might otherwise have overlooked. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 149 But the hopes of men are often futile, and the things they spend their lives in seeking no more than dreams and shadows in a world of disappointment. Another generation of ex- plorers sought that colossal waterway in vain before they ad- mitted that an imperfection did indeed exist in the work of the Bounteous Creator, and that the Desired Blessing which they had marked upon the map of expectation had no place in fact. But while these high hopes were in men's minds, the work of exploration still went forward. In the last years of his life the pessimistic Oxley was discovering the Brisbane River, where a penal station was shortly afterwards founded ; ^ another convict colony was established in that land of dis- illusion, the Northern Territory ; ^ Allan Cunningham was on the Darling Downs in 1828, the year that Oxley died ; * and a few months later the name of Captain Charles Sturt, one of the great heroes in the annals of Australian discovery, comes prominently on the scene. Unhke Wentworth and Hume, Charles Sturt was not a native of Australia. The second child in a family of thirteen, he was the son of a puisne judge of Bengal in the pj^j^j-igg days of the East India Company. Born in 1795 sturt, in the province that Clive had conquered, the ^''^^'^^^ • future explorer received his education in England, and had some short experience of miUtary service in the Pyrenees and Canada before his regiment — the 39th Foot — was ordered to New South Wales in 1827. A soldier's life in the antipodes in those early days of convict settlers, stern discipline, and military governors like Brisbane and DarUng, was usually thought an unwelcome exile from the comforts of home and the chance of promotion on active service abroad. But to Sturt it opened out a career which, if poor in results when measured by the low standards of worldly prosperity, was yet rich in fame and honourable achievement as an explorer. 1 Bk. xviii. ch. i. ^ g^ j^ gh. ii. ^ Bk. xviii. oh.iii. 150 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS The immediate occasion of Sturt's first journey was a misfortune that was no longer novel in the southern colonies. His First A drought as prolonged and disastrous as that jou^ey which had gripped Australia in 1813 again afflicted 1828. the country in 1828. Men whose stock was dying for lack of pasture, squatters who sought in vain for water to refresh their flocks and herds, told each other in desperation that it seemed as if the blue sides of the antipodes would never again be swept by clouds. General ruin was in sight if the drought continued ; but the days passed and the weeks passed and the months passed, and the pitiless sun shone down on parched cracked earth, on dead and dying cattle, and on men whose hearts were gnawed by black despair. At such a time the most desperate chance will be seized. And the old belief in a westward-flowing river and an inland sea — either of which would have saved the colony — was now revived by a report that Allan Cunningham had brought back from one of the aboriginal tribes in 1827, of great sheets of open water further west ; and although aboriginal traditions are notoriously untrustworthy,^ the colony was in such extremities that it was determined to seek at once the promised boon. Sturt, who was himself a convinced believer in the existence of an inland sea, was placed in charge of the expedi- tion ; and Hamilton Hume, with whom a lifelong friendship now sprang up,^ accompanied the small party into the interior. But as they marched the terrible effects of the drought ' The early explorers in Canada were constantly misled by the reports of the redskins (vol. iii. bk. x. ch. iii. ), and the same difficulty occurred with the aborigines in Australia. Sir John Forrest, for instance, relates (Explorations) that he was told by the aborigines that another tribe had reported the murder of himself and all his party, during one of his journeys in West Australia. - Hume lived to a good old age, dying in 1873, four years after the death of Sturt. On the tomb of Sturt was engraved the beautiful verse of the Hebrew Psalmist, never more suitable than when applied to the explorer who had faced so many perils without flinching : * Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.' He was buried at Prestbury, near Cheltenham, is England. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 151 were everywhere seen. The Macquarie River abruptly ceased to flow ; the sea of reeds that had checked Oxley's progress was bare and dry ; such small pools and creeks as were found from time to time yielded nothing save bitter and scarcely drinkable water, in which were found occasionally the decaying and disgusting remains of putrid frogs. A noble river was at length descried, seventy or more yards broad, and covered with swarms of peHcans and wildfowl that had flocked thither for refuge and refreshment. Involuntarily Sturt and his companions thought of the westward-flowing river which they sought, the Desired Blessing of their dreams. All difficulties seemed now at an end ; the party eagerly descended the steep banks to quench their thirst in the ample waters ; but at the first draught of the clear liquid a cry of amazement and horror burst from their parched lips. The stream was salt, its taste hke that of the ocean. But even the sore disappointment of the travellers nursed the delusive hope of an inland sea. That hope likewise failed when springs of brine were found in the bed of the stream ; and Sturt turned back to save the lives of the expedition, first naming the river which had promised so much and given so little the Darling, after the stern Governor of New South Wales. The return journey was a race with death by thirst. Drought still cursed the unhappy country ; the Darhng, which they struck again ninety miles nearer to its source, was as salt as before ; the Macquarie was now no more than a chain of ponds. * Rivers ceased to flow,' wrote Sturt after- wards, ' and sheets of water disappeared. Vegetation seemed annihilated ; the largest forest trees were drooping, and many were dead. The emus, with outstretched necks, gasping with thirst, in vain searched the river channels for water ; and the native dog, so thin that it could hardly walk, seemed to implore some merciful hand to despatch it.' The retreat to Sydney was at length accomplished, and 152 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Sturt summed up the results of his journey. He had found good land parched with drought, he had shown that the Macquarie was a tributary of the great new river which he had discovered and called the DarHng ; but the further course of that mighty stream was a mystery. Did it lose itself in swamps, as Oxley had thought was the fate of the Macquarie ? or was it indeed the Desired Blessing that should make its way at last to the wide ocean or feed some unknown inland sea ? Sturt 's second journey a year later into the interior was an attempt to solve that question. Experience had taught him sturt'3 that it was difficult and of little use to follow the Jouraey Macquarie, and he now decided to track the 1829. Murrumbidgee to the junction which he believed it made with the DarUng, and then to follow the main stream to the end of its course. The country he crossed at first surprised him by its richness ; the Murrumbidgee he found ' a stream with strong current, whose waters, foaming and eddying among rocks, gave promise of a reckless course.' The scene was fair and even beautiful, the prospect hopeful ; the aborigines hereabouts spoke of another and far larger river further west, in comparison with which even the Murrumbidgee, no insignificant stream, was as a puny creek. Sturt did not discredit the report, which became more probable when he passed the junction where the Lachlan, Oxley 's river, emptied itself into the Murrumbidgee — a proof that he was heading for some mighty watercourse that united all the rivers of south-eastern AustraUa. But now the navigation became dangerous. The channel narrowed, the river increased in speed, and its course was obstructed by snags and fallen trunks of trees ; more than once the boat was nearly wrecked. Yet after some miles of this precarious passage they were suddenly shot into a broad and noble river, which Sturt could not doubt was the great waterway of the south-east part of the continent. It yet THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 153 remained to discover its destination, but he was convinced that this new tributary was the Darhng. The Union Jack was now hoisted amid the cheers of the whole party, on a spot which no white man had ever trod before ; and the great united body of waters brought down by the DarUng and the Murrumbidgee was named the Murray, after Sir George Murray, the Colonial Secretary of the day. Trouble with the aborigines now threatened ; but Sturt, who was able to boast in later years that all his great journeys had never cost a life, saw with relief that the purpose of the hostile blacks was frustrated by the urgent remonstrances of a friendly chief who had preceded them down stream. As they descended the noble river, the character of the country more than once changed. ' The banks assumed the most beautiful columnar regularity as of Corinthian pillars and capitals ; elsewhere they resembled the time-worn battle- ments of a feudal castle, or showed like petrified waterfalls ; in other parts the cliffs towered above, and against their base the water dashed like sea waves. They shone like dead gold in the sun's rays, forming for a mile or two an unbroken wall on both sides of the river. In these cliffs the eagle found a sanctuary, and eagles, cockatoos, and other birds soared as mere specks ' above the eager party, which now pushed forward in the expectation of a speedy and successful end to their journey. Lower down, the river, which had been flowing steadily westwards, suddenly turned almost due south ; seagulls were now seen, and a south-west gale sent a swell up the river which drenched the party with spray. The sea was near. It was clear that the river had a southerly outlet, yet the south coast of Austraha had been carefully charted, and no great outflow of water found. Here then was a mystery ; but it was solved by the river broadening out into a lake, — which Sturt named Alexandrina, in honour of Alexandrina Victoria, the young heir to the British Crown — and from that 154 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS lake, which again broadened out into a long bay, there was no practicable channel to the ocean. Thus the end of all was disappointment ; but disappoint- ment tempered with the thought that thousands of miles of good new country had been found, and that one of the problems which puzzled Oxley and Hume had been solved. Another problem, the question of a second river basin in the far interior, and the existence of an inland sea, had been raised by the sudden descent of the Murray to the south ; but that problem could wait awhile. But Sturt had now to consider his return to Sydney. To go back by the ocean he had so nearly reached was plainly impossible, for they could not get their boat across the bar that blocked the entrance of the Murray to the sea, and in any case the boat that had brought them safely down the river was not strong enough to battle with the long swell of the southern ocean. To wait until their Uttle camp was sighted by a passing ship on its way to New South Wales might have meant years of delay and even possible disaster, for the aborigines of South Australia were none too friendly ; and Sturt was therefore faced with the tedious necessity of retracing his original course. On that long and wearisome and dangerous retreat the great explorer records that his nerves gave way under the stress of continued hardship and anxiety, that he became captious, and at times found needless fault with his men, whose constitutions had already been severely tried by privation ; ' their arms were nerveless, their faces haggard, their persons emaciated, their spirits wholly sunk. From sheer weakness they frequently fell asleep at the oar.' But the men murmured not, for they loved their leader well ; so careful, indeed, were they to add nothing to his distress that only when he was thought to be asleep did they complain of their pains and exhaustion. It is at such moments of crisis that the true leader reaps the reward of his past consideration. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 155 One touching instance of devotion has been preserved. When rations were short, and even starvation seemed near, Sturt's men proved their affection by giving up all claim to the small stock of sugar which was one of the most valuable of the diminishing stores. The commander who can inspire such love deserves his success. At last the party reached Sydney, and the news of their discoveries spread far and wide. Pioneer squatters again followed with their flocks and herds in the tracks of the explorers, and within six years the colony of South Australia was founded near the spot where Sturt had stood with his followers, a soUtary party of white men at the useless and misshapen mouth of the greatest of antipodean rivers. But to its discoverer, as to others in New South Wales, it was not yet certain that the Murray was the greatest of antipodean rivers. Sturt was yet to lead another expedition in search of the visionary waterway of the Desired Blessing and the phantom inland sea that haunted his imagination, only to find that imagination and desire had played him false. And meanwhile other explorers were pushing forward with the work of discovery in other parts of the still unknown continent. Between 1831 and 1836 Major Mitchell other had captained several official surveying expedi- Bxpiorerg. tions which mapped out a large part of the country watered by the Darling and much of the future colony of Victoria ; George Grey, the future Governor of South Australia and New Zealand, had explored part of the west coast in 1839 ; and Edward John Eyre, a man of strong character, whose firmness of purpose was shown in his suppression of the Morant Bay rising in Jamaica many years later,i had struck up country from Adelaide in 1838 on a pioneer journey of explora- tion into the unknown territories of central South Australia. * See vol. iv. bk. xii. ch. ii. 156 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Two years later Eyre again made his way into the high lands of the interior from Adelaide. But as he pressed further Eyre ex- north he found that here was naught save dis- Oreat"*^* appointment. The great Lake Torrens, named Bight, 1840. after one of the promoters of the South Australian Company, was no more than a ' dry bed covered over with a crust of salt, forming one unbroken sheet of pure white, and glittering brilliantly in the sun.' Such waters as it had were only mud and salt, the surrounding desert bare and dry, the rocks and stones the ' scorched barren withered scoria of a volcanic region.' At one point, where Eyre hoped to find the water his party now sorely needed, he was again repulsed by dry bare hills ; and naming the spot Mount Deception he turned back. Other travellers were to explore the dreary region of the Stony Desert and Illusion Plains which lay beyond,^ and to bring back no better report than Eyre. But Eyre was not of the stufi that is easily conquered. If he could not get further north, he could at least go west ; and sending all his party save one white man and three native boys back to Adelaide, Eyre started on the long ride to King George's Sound in West Australia. The enterprise was perilous and even foolhardy, for the country before him was unknown, and the httle band had hardly any provisions. And almost at the outset they were forced to travel across a hundred miles of desert, without a drop of water in its whole extent ; during this initial march the sheep accompanying the expedition went six, and the horses five, days without water, and both almost wholly without food, for the httle grass they found was so dry and withered that the parched and thirsty animals could not eat it after the second day . A few days later they drank the last drop of stored water ; for the remainder of the journey they were forced to rely on chance supplies obtained from holes dug in the sand — a terrible predicament in that droughty country. ^ Illusion Plaina were so named bj the explorer Parry in 1858. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 157 But now an even worse disaster menaced Eyre. His single white companion was shot by one of the native boys, who deserted with another of the party ; and Eyre was left alone, * at the dead hour of night, in the wildest and most inhospitable waste of Australia, with the fierce wind raging in unison with the scene of violence/ No white man had ever set foot in the country that lay ahead ; and Eyre's previous journeys had taught him something of the perils and privations of pioneering work in that continent. Yet he would not turn back to Adelaide. Six hundred miles of unknown country lay ahead ; Ejrre had only a single rifle, four gallons of water, forty pounds of flour, and some tea and sugar as provisions for the journey, which he had to make with one native follower whose fidelity could not be rehed upon. The remainder of his small supplies had been stolen by the two deserters. The murderer and his companion dogged the solitary white man and the black for a time, and then disappeared into the desert ; and for days on end Eyre now pushed forward through an unchanging wilderness. No water was found for a week, and the wretched horses suffered agonies of thirst, while Eyre himself could only drink sparingly of his own small and irregularly replenished store. In time the country improved a little, and water was found here and there ; but the weary traveller was now forced to follow the coast-hne along the full length of the high clifEs that form the shores of the Great Austrahan Bight. But therein lay salvation. In Thistle Grove a ship was descried at anchor, and provisions were obtained to replenish the explorer's stock, now absolutely exhausted. The Refreshed and somewhat strengthened, Eyre q**^*J^ pushed on again ; and, on 8th July 1841, after a Route corn- six weeks' journey across an unknown and in- p^«***» ^^ii. hospitable land, Eyre reached the city of Albany on King George's Sound. Three years earher he had marched from 158 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS ^ Port Phillip to Adelaide ; he could now claim to be the first white man who had performed the great feat of crossing the wide continent from east to west. Eyre's wonderful ride had thrown no light upon the great river of the Desired Blessing, except to prove beyond a The doubt, what was already generally believed, that Northern ^q such stream emptied itself from the southern explored, shores of Australia. There still remained the 1845-8. northern and north-west coasts, and much was done to explore those parts during the next few years. In 1845 Ludwig Leichhardt, a German naturahst, made a great journey from the Darling Downs around the Gulf of Car- pentaria to Port Essington on the Northern Territory, in which for a long distance he followed the coast closely, discovering much good country and many fine rivers ; but none of these was great enough to foster the delusive hope that any main artery into the interior had been found. Along the route which Leichhardt had mapped out pro- spectors and squatters soon made their way to new country ; but Leichhardt himself perished in a subsequent and more ambitious journey two years later. It was his expressed intention to cross the continent to Perth in West Australia ; but neither he nor any of his companions, nor any trace of their route through the interior, were ever found. They disappeared from human ken as absolutely as if they had been snatched up into heaven, and one traveller after another sought them through the vast spaces of the central Australian deserts in vain. Their fate is one of the unexplained mysteries that haunt the page of history, i Less mysterious was the equally tragic end of Kennedy, ' It has been suggested that the whole expedition was swept away by one of the floods that rush down from Queensland towards Lake Eyre with irresistible force after heavy rains. But even a flood that destroyed them would probably have washed up some remains of their very con- siderable equipment. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 159 speared by the aborigines as he made his way towards Cape York on the extreme north of the continent in 1848. Others who traversed the shores of the Northern Territory and tropical Queensland had better fortune ; but their travels definitely determined that the great river of the Desired Blessing was not here. The Daly and Victoria Rivers, which flow into the Indian Ocean south of Melville Island, and which some sanguine spirits had thought to be the stream they sought, proved only local rivers ; it was clear that the Desired Blessing must be found, if found at all, in the narrow- ing spaces of the unknown west. In the year 1845 the great maritime survey of all the coasts of Australia was completed, and no large estuary was any- where discovered ; but this did not dissuade those who remembered that the first survey of the southern shores of the continent had yielded no sign of the Murray River. And Charles Sturt, the discoverer of that great stream, had already set out on his last and most wonderful journey through the interior, in search of the greater waterway and vast inland sea whose existence was still the first article of his geographic faith. When Sturt left the young city of Adelaide for the interior, on 10th August 1844, he hoped that the short space of two years would sufiice for the exploration of the sturt's Last greater part of the continent. Little did he realise Expedition, the difficulties and dangers ahead — difficulties so ^^**' serious that they robbed the expedition of nearly all save negative results, dangers so grave that the recital of only a portion of Sturt's fearful experiences turned his wife's hair white in a single night. That last expedition sufficed to show, as nothing else perhaps could have shown, the sheer terror and the silent cruelty of a great Australian drought — a terror and a cruelty that many another man unknown to fame had suffered through long months in which gaunt ruin had stalked beside him waking, and watched beside him sleeping, 160 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS a terror and a cruelty that left its marks deep on Australian life and literature.^ At first, indeed, all promised well on the journey. So far as the bend of the Darling at Cawndilla, Sturt and his company were on easy and familiar ground ; but once they struck away from the stream their difficulties began. * Prepared as I was for a bad country,' wrote the experienced leader of the party, * I was not prepared to find it so bad.' There was no water ; yet they pushed on, hoping that Lake Torrens, whose dreary saline marshes had killed Eyre's hopes years before, might yet communicate with some more central body of water — the phantom inland sea of which Sturt ever dreamed. Immense flights of bitterns, cranes, and other aquatic birds overhead encouraged the hope of a great lake further inland to the north-west. The explorers cast about for signs of better country to guide them on their way, but none appeared : rivers, creeks, and ponds were drying up ; and at length they came to rest at Rocky Glen, where was one of the few sheets of permanent water in all that desiccated land. Here they pitched their tents, unaware that advance and retreat were alike cut ofi. For six weary months, from 27th January 1845 until the 17th of the following July, the explorers were locked up in this desolate heated region in an oasis of the great desert of Central Australia. Around them in the wilderness of sand was the stillness of death ; no living creature but the ant dwelt in that fearful country ; and death itself was presently to visit the now helpless party that had pried into the hidden secrets of a dying land. Soon afterwards the thousands of birds that had made the glen their home flew away ; in a single day parrots, pigeons, bitterns, cockatoos all deserted the place, and a silence as of death now invaded the oasis as well as the surrounding desert. ' I need not refer to the many mentions of drought in preyious and subsequent pages of this volume. Its influence on Australian poetry is noticed in the next chapter. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 161 Some of the men had fallen ill, and scurvy appeared in the camp. James Poole, Start's chief assistant, was sick, hngered for months, and died ; his body rests in the desert to this day. Others seemed likely to follow him into the unknown, if no release came ; and of release there was no sign. The heat was now terrible, and there were no dews. One day the thermometer, which marked 137 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, rose to 157 degrees in the sun ; and for three months the mean temperature was over 101 degrees. Under the effect of this terrific heat all vegetation parched ; every screw in the boxes was drawn ; horn handles and combs split ; the lead dropped out of the pencils, and it was difficult to write or draw, so rapidly did the fluid dry in the pens and brushes. ' Our hair,' says Sturt, ' as well as the sheep's wool, ceased to grow, and our nails became as brittle as glass.' In the early days of their imprisonment a few poor natives crawled into the glen for refreshment, and assured the ex- plorers that nowhere else was water to be found ; but then for a long time no other human being was seen. Five months later, an ancient half-dead black man crawled into the oasis alone, quite exhausted with hunger and thirst. He took his fill, slept twenty-four hours ; ate, drank, and rested again ; and departed once more into the void — a living ghost in the dead wilderness. But before he left he told Sturt of a great sheet of water, whose waves were greater than a man's head, and whose fish too large to pass through the net. Sturt now dreamed again of the phantom sea ; but for the time there was no means of reaching it. Not until near the middle of July did the rain come. At first no more than a few drops, it increased the following day to a downpour ; and the sound of its ripple through the gully was sweeter music to the imprisoned travellers than the softest and most beautiful melody that ever moved a soul to tears. VOL. V. L 162 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS It was indeed the message of deliverance ; but deliverance to Sturt meant only the opportunity for further advance into the wilderness. But the demon of drought pursued him now, as ever through his career. This was no land of woods and water into which he rode, such as had greeted the pioneers in Canada a century before ; ^ but another dreary district of desert and desolation. For he had struck the fearful and forbidding region which has since been known as the Stony Desert. Twenty miles the travellers toiled over stupendous and almost insurmount- able sand-ridges of a fiery red ; these, ' hke headlands pro- jecting into the sea, abutted upon an immense plain, where, but for a line of low trees far to the north-east, and one bright red sand-hill shining in the sunlight, not a feature broke the dead level, the gloomy purple hue. Not a blade of vegetation grew on this forbidding plain, covered with stones from four to eight inches long, of indurated quartz rounded by attrition ^ and coated by oxide of iron — an adamantine plain on which the horses left no track.' When they had passed over this appalling place, they still found the surface rent and torn by the intense heat ; still there was no water, but only thick black mud where water had once been. By this time Sturt had at last given up all hope of the inland sea he sought ; it seemed indeed a phantom of the mind, a mirage of desire that fled before him as he struggled through a country than which Dante himself could hardly have pictured any worse for the torture of poor erring souls. Yet near them was in truth the inland sea, or what remained of it after a long cycle of continuous drought. For the travellers struck a creek which had not failed — Eyre's Creek 1 See vol. iii. bk. x. ch. iii. 2 Sturt believed, as did everybody else at that time, that this was the ^ bed of an ancient sea. Professor Gregory has shown { Tlie Dead Heart of Australia) that this formation is due to the absence, not the presence of water. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 163 they named it, but it has since been called the Diamantina — and this they followed till it too died away in a dead wilder- ness. Sixteen miles beyond was another region The inland of forbidding desert, gigantic ridges of blood-red |t^fg sand, clothed with the dreaded prickly spinifex, Desire, a miserable bush of grass which only thrives on desolation ; and all around them and beyond them were the salt snow- white beds of waterless lagoons and dry salt creeks like huge shining serpents writhing through the gloomy landscape. At this point, four hundred and seventy geographical miles north of Mount Arden, Sturt marked his furthest, and returned. Had the explorers pushed on through that fearful region in the hopeless hope of reaching the northern coast all would infallibly have been lost. But at the other end of the Diamantina lay Lake Eyre,^ the inland sea of Pliny's prophecy, of old-time fable, of native legend, ^ and of Sturt's desire. Yet this was no Desired Blessing, but a sheer curse ; its low and sunken swamps had but little semblance to the ' strange deep blue waters on which boat never swam, and over which flag never floated,' that Sturt had looked to find. ' Lake Eyre,' said a later traveller in that region,^ ' was terrible in its death-like stillness and vast expanse of unbroken sterility. The weary wanderer who, when in want of water, should unexpectedly reach its shores, might turn away with a shudder from a scene which shut out all hope. He could hide his head in the sand-hills and meet his fate with calmness and resignation ; but to set his foot on Lake Eyre would be like cutting himself off from the common lot of human beings.' From time to time vast floods rushed down the creeks from Queensland to Lake Eyre ; but even the waters abhorred its * The name Lake Eyre was first given to the lake in commemoration of the explorer Eyre, in an anonymous article in the South Australian Register in 1860. ^ See the first chapter of this volume. * Egerton Warburton. 164 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS surface, and vanished from that unfriendly basin. The lake had now no outlet,^ but evaporation drained it of its streams ; the whole place was a Dead Sea without water, a dumb land without man or bird or beast, or flower or tree, upon its treacherous swampy soil. And this was the heart of Australia ! Yet there were times when that ancient weary heart revived a Uttle, when it pulsed again with brief desire ; there were seasons, rare and brief and intermittent, when waters fresh and clear flushed those parched arteries and restored their living impulse. A few years after Sturt had turned away despairing from a land of desert the Lake Eyre district was the fertile home of streams and meadows, where sheep and cattle stations were founded and flourished, where the sur- veyor and the squatter were at work, and the busy hum of human industry was heard. But a few seasons more, and all this vanished ; the waters failed, the droughts returned, and the desert that had quickened with new Ufe was once more claimed by death. Sturt therefore failed at the last in his search for an inland sea and a passage across Australia ; but he pointed the way for others. Thirteen years after his despairing return from the middle Australian desert, one who had accompanied him thither, M'Dowall Stuart, decided to make another dash across the fearful sohtudes of the interior. Those who have once felt the passion for exploration seldom lose the fever of desire for fresh adventures into the MDowaU unknown ; and though Stuart was well aware of crosi^s *^^ "^^^ ^® ^^^' *^^ hope that he might be the AuBtraiia first to cross Australia from north to south sus- to^North*^ tained him throughout. Three several times did 1862. he face the silence of the Stony Desert, the weird Illusion Plains, the terrors of Lake Eyre, and the illimitable * Its original outlet is believed to have been by way of the Darling. But it has also been suggested that it emptied itself through Lake Torrens. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 165 rolling plains of sand and spinifex and salt beyond ; and three several times did lie return baffled and defeated. But at the last he conquered the desert that had conquered him and his master Sturt; in 1862 he reached the northern shores. The initials of the successful leader, J. M'D. S., were carved on the largest tree that could be found at the mouth of the Adelaide River, the spot where Stuart emerged ; he dipped his hands and feet in the sea, and on a place near by the Union Jack was hoisted, while the following record of achieve- ment was set up at its foot : — ' South Australian Great Northern Exploring Expedition. — The exploring party, under the command of John M'Dowall Stuart, arrived at this spot on the 25th day of July 1862, having crossed the entire continent of Australia, from the Southern to the Indian Ocean, passing through the centre. They left the city of Adelaide on the 26th day of October 1861, and the most northern station of the colony on the 21st day of January 1862. To commemorate this happy event, they have raised this flag bearing his name. All well. God save the Queen.' Stuart had his reward in the sudden revival of interest in northern Australia,^ and the overland telegraph line from Adelaide to Port Darwin followed near the track which he had made ; but he paid for his achievement in ruined health. A few years later he lamented that * eyesight and memory were so far gone that he was unable to compose a speech, or, indeed, to recollect many of the incidents that happened throughout the course of his explorations.' It was of little moment ; the memory that he had lost was kept alive by others. But Stuart was not actually the first to cross Australia. Two travellers, Burke and WiUs, had made the shorter journey from Melbourne to the southernmost point of the Burke and Gulf of Carpentaria in I860. They reached the wiusaiso . . cross district known as the Plains of Promise without Australia, disaster early in February 1861 ; but to them, ^^^^• as to many another before and since, the first promise of ^ See bk. xx. ch. ii. 166 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS success was a delusive mockery. On tlie retiirn journey supplies gave out, water was lacking, and the two brave men who were the first to cross the continent both paid for their victory with their lives. Wills perished of starvation in the Central Australian desert, after hardships cheerfully and even jovially borne ; ^ his companion outlived him but a few days. Burke * walked till he dropped,' recorded one of the few sur- vivors ; but even at the last extremity he begged that no grave should be made for him, lest the labour of digging it should lessen the failing strength of his comrades, and diminish their chance of escape.^ The work of Burke and Wills, the travels of Stuart, the explorations of Gregory along the north coast about the same Exploration ^™®' ^^^ ^^^ continuous trackings of squatters in West and overlanders driving their flocks and herds *■ through the interior had now practically com- pleted the task of exploration in the eastern half of Austraha ; but westwards of Lake Ejrre little was yet known of the interior. Apart from the coastal districts of West Australia, the enormous mass of that huge colony was still a blank upon the maps ; and the vacant space, which included hundreds of thousands of square miles of the earth's surface, was at ^ The very last entry in his diary contains a comparison between his own helpless condition and that of the luckless Micawber ' waiting for something to turn up.' ^ It is worthy of note that camels, which had been introduced in Australia in 1846, were employed in this expedition ; a few years later they were again used in laying the overland telegraph line. The horse was not well adapted for exploration in the Australian desert ; ' we ascertained by painful experience,' wrote Forrest in 1874, ' that a horse requires water at least once in twelve hours, and suffers greatly if that period of abstinence is exceeded. A camel, however, will go for ten or twelve days without drink, without being much distressed. The neces- sity of obtaining water for the horses entailed upon us many wearying deviations from the main route and many disappointments, beside great privation and inconvenience to man and beast.' In spite of their resources being greater than those of other expeditions into the interior, Burke and Wills hardly stand in the front rank as explorers. They owe their fame more to their tragic deaths than to their real achievements. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 167 once a direct challenge and an open incentive to the imagina- tions of men. There were some who still expected to find in this un- explored territory the great inland sea of old report, now sadly shrunken and diminished from the brave estimates of early days ; a few still hoped for the great river of the Desired Blessing, whose imaginary waters had eluded Oxley and Sturt and Stuart and the rest. And the squatter looked for ilUmitable pastures, great rolhng downs of grass hke the soft sweUing breasts of English Sussex by the sea ; the covetous expected gold or precious stones, the statesman thought of new and ampler homes for the cramped and crowded people of Europe ; while the adventurous — for the love of adventure survived the staid commercial spirit of the Victorian age, as the love of beauty survived the hideousness of its industrial cities — the adventurous looked, as of old, for strange accidents and happenings in the unknown. It was in the hope of realising some of these expectations that John Forrest,^ a young surveyor in West Austraha, left the capital city of Perth on 18th March 1874 on Forrest an official tour of exploration. Forrest had already ^°^^^^ from. \(r68li proved his mettle at such work on two occasions ; to East, he had headed one of the many search parties ^^'*- that sought the remains of the Leichhardt expedition, and he had performed that terrific journey across the full length of the Great AustraUan Bight which had nearly killed Eyre in 1840. On this occasion it was intended that Forrest, who was accompanied by his brother Alexander and a well-equipped party, should attempt to traverse the whole colony from Perth to the overland telegraph hne that had just been laid between Adelaide and Port Darwin — a feat that no other explorer had yet succeeded in accomplishing. ^ Afterwards Sir John Forrest, Premier of West Australia', and eventually a member of the Commonwealth Government. 168 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Some part of the country inland from Perth was of course abeady familiar to West Australian settlers, and Gosse, a South Australian traveller, had explored a fair stretch of country westwards of the telegraph line ; but the whole intervening space, to the extent of more than five hundred miles, was still entirely unknown. It was hardly possible that Forrest's journey over so enormous a district should prove entirely barren of results ; even less likely did it seem that good soil and permanent water, those most pressing needs of the Austrahan colonist, should be lacking throughout the whole vast span of the greatest of the divisions of the continent. During the first six weeks of their journey the explorers followed the course of the Murchison River up-country. The route thus far presented no difficulties ; much of the country was beautifully grassed and fit for settlement, and the progress of the expedition was generally rapid. But early in May, and about three hundred miles from the coast, the river shrank to the size of a small brook, and the mountain range in which it took its rise was passed ; and from that time the dangers of the journey began. The supply of water failed, and the travellers were forced to depend on stray pools formed by rain ^ in the hollows of the granite rocks with which the country was strewn. The route now lay through thickets and scrub, and the dreaded spinifex, that fatal sign of drought and desolation, was encountered by the expedition. To the south, however, good open land was seen, well grassed and wooded with clumps of immense white gum trees ; and later this stretched across the hne of march, while creeks and minor tributaries of the Murchison were found, which suppUed the animals with food and water. ^ No part of Australia is absolutely rainless. Even in the driest and most arid parts there is never less than six inches of rain per annum, according to Professor Gregory. But it soon evaporates. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 169 It was noticed, however, as an omen of misfortune that none of the streams were permanent, and in a year of drought it was clear that they would fail. But Forrest had better luck or better country than Sturt and Stuart ; for a few marches further on a number of shallow pools were found, and these were but the prelude to splendid springs welling up in the bed of a river twelve feet deep and twenty chains long — an excellent place for water. Here at the Kennedy Creek both water and feed were permanent and unlimited ; and equally good supplies were found at the Weld Springs, further east, ten days later. At this point the travellers rested for a week, and it was well they did ; for the country ahead was of very different character, mere barren desert, often as flat and level as the sea, and covered as far as the eye could reach with spinifex. An occasional salt-lake or sand-hill hardly varied the eternal monotony of sand and spinifex, spinifex and sand ; the horses fell ill, dropped, and were abandoned one by one ; the travellers themselves grew feeble and almost lost heart as they pushed on through the dreadful wilderness. The only thing that saved the expedition was the occasional discovery of water holes in the granite rocks ; but some- times two or three days would elapse and no such reservoir would reveal itself, and sometimes — what was far worse — those water holes were empty even when found. This was the terrible country that had driven Gosse back when he attempted to cross it from east to west. And now it seemed hkely to drive Forrest back also ; but a retreat had by this time become almost as dangerous as an advance. At the beginning of August the whole party was in grave peril, and even such chance supplies of water as were found from time to time were now drying up ; a drought had come upon the land, and there came a time when travellers and horses ahke were reduced to swallowing the salt mud that was the only substitute for water in this parched country. 170 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Long ranges of hills were passed, but everywhere was the everlasting sand and spinifex on all sides, a land hopeless, repulsive, dead. Mile after mile and day after day the party toiled onwards through the month of August ; September came, the antipodean winter waned, and ever as they marched the invisible electric line of the overland telegraph came nearer and nearer. . . . At last a river bed was reached. It was the Marryat, a stream which Gosse had passed ; but that stream, which some- times flooded the country for miles around, was low and feeble, a mere narrow broken thread, in that dreadful season. It was a sign, however, that Forrest's diflSculties were near an end. Yet it was not until the twenty-seventh day of September that a thin line of wire ahead told the explorers their work was done. Three days later they fell in with an ofl&cial station of the telegraph line, and thence the road to Adelaide was easy. The expedition, one of the longest and most memorable in the annals of Australian exploration, had shown what could be done by men and horses to cross the desert ; but it had also shown, in Forrest's opinion, what could not be done. From his experience of the country, he gave it as his view that the only part fit for permanent colonisation was the district from the coas't to the head of the Murchison River ; from that point to the eastern boundary of West Australia, a thousand miles, was useless. Even the springs, oases, and occasional strips of well-grassed country were so isolated that it would never pay to stock them. With Forrest's expedition and the laying of the overland telegraph line in 1872 the history of Australian exploration The Results °^ *^^ grand scale comes to a close. Other men ofExpiora- certainly followed, leaders often of great ability °°' and courage, who filled in the vacant spaces left by their predecessors along the coast and in the interior ; THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 171 among these may be mentioned Ernest Giles, the discoverer of the dreary mudflat which bears the too exalted name of Lake Amadeus. He, like Forrest, traversed the barren lands of Western Australia, lands where, in his own words, * the very sight of the country was enough to daunt a man and kill a horse ' ; and his track is marked by such depressing names as Desolation Glen and Mount Destruction. But in the main the work was done ; the bold outUnes of Australia were known, its hopes and disappointments certified upon the maps, its possibilities understood and in places reaUsed, its deficiencies noted and admitted. The old hope of an inland sea had long since vanished ; the great river of the Desired Blessing which every traveller sought had been sought in vain. Instead were sand and salt and spinifex, and spinifex and salt and sand over large areas — the hopeless horizon of a dreary desert stretched across the middle of a continent. Lack of water was the curse of the Australian interior, for the soil of the desert was often good, and after a heavy downpour the growth of grass and seeds was rapid and spon- taneous. But if drought had eaten into the heart of the continent as a sneer eats into the heart of a little child, if deserts had taken the place of fruitful gardens as indifference will take the place of love, there remained yet enormous terri- tories with manifold opportunities for the squatter and the settler to occupy. At most parts around the coast, in most parts of the eastern half of Australia, and in many fertile oases in the West Australian desert there was room for man and Coionisa- his flocks and herds ; and the pioneer squatters Expiora- soon began to follow the e]iplorers into the new tion. country. Oxley was the forerunner of pastoral settlement in the interior of New South Wales. Cunningham and Leichhardt showed the way to the north and south of Queens- land. A few years after Mitchell explored Australia Felix, 172 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS and Sturt made his way down the Murray to Lake Alex- andrina, the colonies of Victoria and South Australia were founded. The expedition of Burke and Wills led to the foundation of Burke Town on the Gulf of Carpentaria. Kennedy's tragic death in the far north led likewise indirectly to a small settlement at Cape York. And when Forrest passed along the track which Eyre had left thirty years before on the desolate coasts of the Great Australian Bight, he found, besides the bleached skeleton of one of Eyre's horses, a few solitary and isolated British homesteads already planted on those dismal and forbidding shores. Everywhere save in the Australian desert settlements, small or great, had been founded by the close of the nineteenth century ; the desert needed but water to make it habitable, and the settlements needed but time and tending to make them grow.^ CHAPTER II THE INDIVIDUAL STATES: 1850-80 2 While great explorers were daring danger and death in the Australian desert, some other men, as adventurous in thought if not in deed, were endeavouring to explore the equally barren ' There were vast deposits of subterranean water in Australia, and in the utilisation of these lay the best hope for the future. The inland sea, in fact, which Sturt and the rest had sought lay underground. The subject is discussed in Gregory's Dead Heart of Australia. "^ Authorities. — A number of writers, whose length is usually greater than their merit, discuss the Australian colonies during this period. Among others may be mentioned Pridden's Australia (1843), a poor com- pilation ; Mackenzie's Ten Years' Practical Experience (1845) ; Hodgson's Jteminiscences, a settler who was swindled in Australia and therefore pessimistic as to its future; Harris's Settlers and Convicts (1847) ; Hay- garth's Recollections of Bush Life (1848), an excellent little work ; Bryne'a Tijoelve Years' Wanderings (1848), of moderate interest ; Perils, Pleasures, and Pastimes of an Emigrant (1849), unredeemed rubbish; Angas'a Savage Life and Scenes (1850), occasionally useful; Melville's Present Staie of Australasia (1851) ; Mrs. R. Lee's Adventures in Australia (1851), an extraordinarily stupid book ; Lancelott's Australia as it is (1852), THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 173 spaces of the unknown future of the antipodes ; and where Sturt and the rest had sought their Desired Blessing in a great river and an inland sea that had no real existence, at least one political prophet of the day foretold the foundation of a type of society that the passage of time has shown few signs of fulfilMng. A remarkable but long-forgotten pamphlet, published in the year 1877 by Marcus Clarke, one of the first Australian writers to forsake the well-worn rut of common- a Prophecy place for the brambled path that leads to litera- of 1877. ture, contained a fantastic prophecy as to the future of the English people in the island continent. ' The Austrahans of the time were moulded,' said Clarke, * from the best bone and sinew of Cornwall, the best muscle of Yorkshire, the keenest brains of cockneydom ' ; and he foretold that they would grow into a self-reliant, healthy nation. So healthy, indeed, were the people in his opinion — in spite of bad teeth and ruined digestions — that they would foster no genius, for ' genius is to the physiologist but another form of scrofula.' Yet if they lacked that supreme alloy of mental power and physical decay, Clarke expected that the AustraUan nation of the future would be clever, but perverse and irritable. They would also be selfish, and prone to indulge in mercenary marriage, if not inchned to take an altogether material view of life. fairly useful ; Mundy's Our Antipodes (1852), light and superficial, but bright; Saunders's Our Australian Colonies (1853); Mossman and Bannister's Australia Visited and Revisited (1853), both mediocre; Sidney's Gallops and Oossips in the Bush (1854), of some interest; Willmer's The Draper in Australia (1856), as dull as its print is small ; Norton's Australian Essays (1857), and Rowe's Peter Possom's Portfolio (1858), both very poor ; Atkins's Wanderings of the Clerical Ulysses (1859), very stupid ; Mereweather's Diary of a Working Clergyman (1859), tedious but useful ; and Social Life and Manners, by a Resident (1861), moderate. There are several volumes of pamphlets relating to Australia in the Royal Colonial Institute, which are of greater value than more pre- tentious tomes ; and the early volumes of the Australian periodical press are full of information. 174 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Politically he anticipated that a republic would be founded in the temperate southern regions of Australasia, with its intellectual capital in Victoria, its fashionable centre in Sydney, and its administrative headquarters in New Zealand. In the northern territories he considered that a stupendous and luxurious tropical civilisation of the Asiatic pattern was likely to prevail. But the author appears to have become suddenly impatient of his dream-creation, for he declares that in five hundred years the Australian nation would be extinct ; and with that catastrophe the vision of the future abruptly closes. It is one of the minor functions of the historian to discredit the prophet ; and it must be admitted that Marcus Clarke was more successful in describing his adopted country than in forecasting its future.^ The development of Australia has proceeded, and seems Mkely to proceed, on different lines from those which he anticipated ; and at the beginning of the twentieth century hardly even the most dismal pessimist had any serious belief that the new English nation which had just succeeded in getting itself born need pay much heed to ^ Clarke has caught more of the true spirit of Australia in a few sentences than less gifted writers in a whole book. ' The Australian mountain forests,' he said, 'are funereal, secret, stern. They seem to stifle in their black gorges a story of sullen despair. No tender senti- ment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying leaf is mourned, the falling leaves drop lightly on his bier. In the Australian forests no leaves fall. The savage winds shout among the rock-clefts. From the melancholy gums strips of white bark hang and rustle. The very animal life is either grotesque or ghastly. Grey grass kangaroos hop noiselessly over the coarse grass. Flights of white cockatoos stream out, shrieking like evil souls. The sun suddenly sinks, and the mopokes burst out with horrible peals of semi-human laughter. . . . Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, or our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness. Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness, he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the hieroglyphics of haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the southern cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue. ' THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 175 the chances of an untimely death.^ It may therefore be useful to turn from the realms of imagination to those of fact, and to construct a picture of the past which can be verified, in place of a vision of the future which it requires an act of faith to credit. In the year 1861, when Australia had already been divided into the five political states of New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, and West and South Australia, each Australia independent of the other in local affairs, but all ^^ i^eo. alike acknowledging the British Crown, the total white population of the continent was calculated at 1,076,666. A few thousands among that million were convicts who had either served their term, or were still serving it in West Austraha ; but the majority were free immigrants, and the proportion was rising in their favour year by year. Of those immigrants a large number were poor men, with little or no capital beyond their health and the will to work ; but that capital of blood and backbone was a priceless asset in the forming of a new nation. Very many had been assisted to emigrate by charitable or philanthropic institutions in England, or by the various colonial governments in Australia. They left their native field or factory in England, usually while in the full vigour of young manhood : but few ever returned home ; and many who prospered in the new southern world had no wish to leave their adopted country for any longer period than to visit the well-remembered scenes of boyhood, and to greet old schoolfellows with the handshake that can bridge a separation of half a lifetime. The white population, as is usual in a country which is still in the early stages of settlement, showed a large excess of men over women. In New South Wales, the mother colony, there were fifty-six males to forty-three females ; the proportion was much the same in the four younger Australian states. And since more men than women arrived i But see bk. xxii. for the decliniug birth-rate. 176 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS every year in the colonies, the normal tendency of the birth- rate to restore the equaUty of the sexes was frustrated ; the proportion of males to females, in fact, was much the same at the end as in the middle of the century. The distribution of this population was mainly along the coast of Australia. The interior of the continent was not yet thoroughly explored, and no white settlement of any size had been founded more than a few miles from the sea. Thousands of acres of inland country were still utterly un- inhabited ; and most people passively accepted the idea that what Sir John Franklin had called ' the dreary and uncultivated regions of New Holland,' ^ would remain dreary and uncultivated for ever. None ventured to prophesy that the arid plains in the middle of the continent would ever resound to the hum of human industry ; none expected that they would ever be more than a dry forbidding waste, a southern Sahara surrounded by a belt of fertile and thickly populated territories. But even along the coasts of Australia the colonies of the white man were as yet little more than scattered settlements. They were situated mainly on the eastern side of the continent ; the south was uninhabited save in the districts around Port Phillip and, further west, in the neighbourhood of the capital city of Adelaide. The west coast was hardly occupied at all, except for a few miles in the vicinity of Perth ; and save for a remote and struggling outpost at Port Darwin, the vast northern territories were almost unknown and untrodden by Europeans.^ Practically the whole white population Uved in the temper- ate regions of Australia. The new state of Queensland could reckon no more than 30,000 inhabitants within its borders ; but these were located on the Darhng Downs and around Brisbane, in both cases many miles to the south of the tropic ' Franklin on 6th August 1804. Quoted in Traill's Life of Franklin. ^ See bk. xx. ch. ii. for Port Darwin and the Northern Territory. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 1 177^ of Capricorn. New South Wales, which totalled 357,978 inhabitants, and Victoria, with a population considerably larger but younger and less settled, both lay entirely within the temperate zone, and together contained the bulk of the Enghsh people in Australia ; and the state of South Australia — which was given control over the Northern Territory in the year 1863 — possessed 124,112 inhabitants in 1860, its population having doubled within the previous decade. Australia as a whole was thoroughly British in blood and race. More than ninety-three per cent, of its people were of British birth or ancestry. One man in four had been born in England. Fifteen men in every hundred were Irish ; ^ a large number of these had emigrated from that unfortunate island at the time of the potato famine in 1845. Five men in every hundred were Scots ; and Wales contributed a smaller quota, of one in every two hundred and twenty. There were a few Germans and others of foreign origin ; and a number of Chinese, whose increase soon Became an object of serious comment and legislation. Nearly half the white population of Australia was Australian bom, and the proportion naturally increased with every year, until in 1881 it was more than sixty per cent. The steady growth of a native white stock was not without its influence on the growth of a sentiment of national union throughout the continent, which eventually resulted in the foundation of the Australian Commonwealth in 1901. But during the next thirty years the five colonies were more intent on maintaining their independence of each other ' The Irish settlers wore often very successful in Australia, largely because, as Dion Boucicault the actor remarked (Hogan's Irish in Australia) ' they got a chance there ' of success, which they could hardly be said to have had under the old conditions in Ireland. But some Irish immigrants, who brought Fonian traditions across the water with them, occasionally caused trouble. An Irish Fenian organisa- tion that was domiciled in New Zealand announced that its members intended to assassinate the Governor of that country in 18H8 (Bowen's Thirty Years) apparently for no specific reason, but on general principles. The object of their attentions promptly had them arrested, VOL. y. M 178 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS than on cultivating any sentiment of political union. Each was jealous of the other ; and although a few of the wiser Provincial °^®^ ^^^^ ^^^* ' ^^ becoming confederates so Pouticai early in their career the AustraUan colonies would sxuuon. immensely economise their strength and re- sources,' 1 the majority of the people were strongly opposed to giving up those state rights which they had not possessed more than a few years. While far-seeing statesmen reported in favour of Austrahan union, the trend of pubhc opinion was more accurately seen in the popularity of Separation Polkas, Separation Inns, and other quaint but significant indications of a desire for divided authority and control. Another generation was to elapse before the prospect of federation gained any real support from the community ; and the three decades which succeeded the discovery of gold in Victoria were the high-water mark of antipodean provinciaUsm. Yet if each political unit distrusted its neighbour, and each provincial capital hated its upstart rivals, the real But Social differences between the various colonies were Differences shght and superficial. The fundamentals of ° ' union were present ; only the disposition to unite was lacking. No broad distinction divided the social life of Melbourne from that of Sydney, or the squatters and agriculturists of Victoria from those of New South Wales. All were derived from the same stock, and had advanced on much the same lines ; none had diverged much from the original pattern in the mother country. It was observed, indeed, near the close of the century, that the influence of the Scottish immigrants was very pronounced in proportion to their numbers, and that ' in all parts of the country, in many towns, and conspicuously in Melbourne and Adelaide they controlled affairs and gave ^ Papers relating to a Federal Union of the Australian Colonies, isaned at Melbourne, 1862. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION/ 179) the prevalent tone to the community.' ^ But in this matter Australia was only following the example of England, whose Government, Church, and commerce were very largely under the direction of Scotsmen during the same period. In another aspect Australia hkewise showed her likeness to Britain ; but on this point one can only regret the resemblance. In the year 1860 the EngUsh colonies of the y antipodes were essentially pastoral and agricultural. Three men in four were occupied on the land ; and although the cities were already large and flourishing, they were no larger than the needs of a well-balanced community demanded. But they now began to grow at the expense of the rural districts, as the great industrial quarters of England were likewise growing ; and this centralisation of population was a grave drawback to the development of Australia. The new settlers who arrived from England showed a preference for the town over the country ; and more than fifty-seven per cent, of the increase of population in New South Wales between 1887 and 1891 remained in the capital. By the latter year one-third of the total population of that colony was domiciled in Sydney and its suburbs ; and nearly half the total population of Victoria was domiciled in Melbourne. Some part of this reluctance to leave the town for the country may undoubtedly be ascribed to the difficulty of obtaining land, a difficulty which impelled one emigrant to complain that the land laws of Austraha were intended to let the rich man come in and keep the poor man out. But it is a significant fact that the tendency to congregate in the towns increased during the very years when the settlement of the small farmer on the land was rendered easy ^ by special legislation. And the growth of the manufactures in the larger cities of the antipodes at this time, which was encour- aged by a protective tariff, useful as it was for the develop- ' Article in Scr^mer'a Magazine, February 1892. . ^ See bk. xzii. 180 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS ment of the nation as a whole, undoubtedly did something to check the progress of colonisation in the interior. The terrible lonehness of bush and station life, ' the neutral tints of eucalyptic cloisterdom/ as Brunton Stephens described the monotonous existence on a remote Australian farm, had probably most to do with the growing preference for town over country life. It may not be true, as the same poet declared, that • Soul cannot march to the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cattle ; Oh ! for a touch of the palpitant world.' But at least there are hundreds of men to whom the silent company of nature is an irksome sohtude that is little better than a living death ; and for such men a few months' experi- ence in the wilds of the interior was enough to bring them back to Sydney or Melbourne for the remainder of their days.^ The contrast between town and country hfe was probably more striking in Australia than in any other part of the world. Life in the The capitals were centres of much gaiety and Bush, some immorality ; but in the bush a man was incessantly driven inwards upon himself. He was compelled to rely altogether upon his own resources ; and sometimes his best-laid plans would be wrecked by a drought, or an epidemic among his flocks and herds. His home might be anything from a well-built and extensive wooden mansion to a mere rough shanty, made of tree-trunks and roofed with galvanised iron, the whole structure being run up in a couple of days ; his furniture might come from the best cabinet-shops of London, or it might consist of old packing-cases roughly nailed together to make a chair, a table, or a bed. Access to the settler's home depended entirely on its ' The writer of an Australian pamphlet suggests that one of the reasons for leaving the bush for the town was the difficulty of finding suitable marriage partners. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 181 situation. If it was within a hundred miles of the capital, the roads were generally good and safe ; but in traveUing to some distant outposts the route became a rough track, and sometimes vanished altogether except for the indications afforded by a brand or ' blaze ' upon the trees ; while the danger of being attacked and robbed by bushrangers was an added anxiety. In the towns there were good cars and omnibuses, and the carriages of the wealthier folk could challenge comparison with any in Europe ; but a few miles beyond those Umits travelhng on horseback was the only method of conveyance for man and woman ahke. The horses of Australia were cheap and hardy, and a journey of thirty, fifty, or even seventy miles a day was not beyond their powers ; and their universal use made the English in the antipodes a race of horsemen second to none in the world. Without his horse, indeed, the pioneer in the bush was helpless. It was impossible to traverse the long distances of the interior on foot ; and the first AustraUan railway, a short length of fifteen miles from Sydney, was not opened until 1855. Five years later, New South Wales only con- tained seventy miles of railways, which earned £11,841 in the twelvemonth. By 1881 the length of lines open in the mother colony reached 1041 miles ; but even then mechanical locomotion had by no means superseded the older method of travelling. The stores that were necessary for the maintenance of the squatter or farmer with his household and employees were generally brought up once a year from the capital. Meat and bread could indeed be produced on the estate, and the AustraUans consumed much of both ; as much as twenty pounds of flesh was not considered an excessive allowance for a man, while the roughly baked ' damper ' of bread or the more luxurious loaf was washed down with copious draughts. Coarse, and generally badly cured tobacco was 182 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS also sometimes grown at home, but for other things the pioneer was dependent on the store at the nearest township, which was perhaps a hundred miles away, or on his agent, in Sydney or Melbourne. From one or other source he would buy enough chests of tea, bags of sugar and salt, and kegs of tobacco to last a twelvemonth ; while other items in the consignment would include saddlery, horseshoes, shears, knives, castor oil, Epsom salts, manilla hats, shoddy cloth for the men, and print calico and cotton dresses for the women.* The prices charged for this strange medley of goods varied considerably in different places and years ; but one store- keeper, who reckoned to make a profit of a hundred per cent., sold his tea for five shillings a pound, sugar at eightpence, and tobacco at six shillings. Boots cost anything from eleven to fourteen shillings ; shirts were half-a-crown each ; trousers from seven to twenty-five shillings ; and blankets thirty shillings a pair. Bottled beer exported from England was priced at fourteen shillings a dozen, at which figure it must have been a drink which only the well-to-do could afford. Wages were high, since labour was scarce and the labourer was therefore independent. An ordinary farm hand could earn from thirty to forty shillings a week, with his keep and lodging ; a shepherd from fifty to sixty shillings. The latter occupation, however, was unpopular and of no good repute ; the shepherds were said to be lazy and untrustworthy, while the work of guarding a large flock was excessively tedious. The paucity of shepherds, in fact, often compelled the squatter to pen his sheep together in large numbers, which was less ^ There were not many clergymen in the bush ; but doctors were still rarer Wsitors. In these circumstances the squatter was acting physician to all and sundry ; but when his medicine chest contained nothing but castor oil and Epsom salts, it seems probable that his success in curing disease was more limited than his good will. If he chanced on a case of gastric ulcer, and used the two remedies alteraately the luckless victim must have been speedily delivered by the more merciful hands of Death. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 183 profitable and more conducive to the spread of epidemics and disease than dividing them into smaller flocks. The sheep-shearer, whose occupation was seasonal, and who therefore moved from station to station, obtained higher wages, as more skill was required in this work ; a good shearer could clip fifty to eighty or more sheep in a day. The herdsman and stockdriver likewise obtained good money. Agriculture on the whole was held in far less favour than pastoral pursuits ; and although 260,798 acres were under crop in the year 1860 in New South Wales alone, farming was generally rough and primitive, with no rotation of crops in practice, and no manure being used to fertilise the soil. As a rule, no more com was grown than was necessary for the local demand ; but of wool, the prime wealth of the colony, 12,809,362 pounds were exported from New South Wales, and its value was more than a quarter of the total exports of £5,072,020. The live stock of New South Wales reached the enormous amount of 251,497 horses, 2,408,586 cattle, 6,119,163 sheep, and 180,662 pigs. The squatter who removed his flock from one pasture to another was aptly compared to an ancient patriarch.^ The task was tedious and difficult, for it was necessary to watch the cattle day and night in order to prevent them from stampeding into the bush, or returning to their old haunts.^ * There is an anecdote of a well-meaning lady who thought to compli- ment a great sqiiatter by comparing him to the patriarch Job. Her words h^ the opposite effect to what she had intended, for the squatter answered with offended dignity, ' I hope you do not mean to compare me to Job, who had only seven thousand sheep, whereas I have three hundred thousand. Job was a mere stringy-barker ' — a colloquial term of contempt. Some of the great Australian squatters possessed the enormous number of half-a-milliou sheep. When they played whist, it was a common thing to play for stakes of a sheep a point, and a bullock on the rubber. ^ An Australian poet (T. W. Heney's A Biverina Road) has well described this nomadic life of the squatters : — ' A land of camps where seldom is sojourning. Where men, like the dim fathers of our race, Halt for a time, and next day, unreturning, Fare ever on apace.' 184 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS But in a good year — and there were more good years than bad — the profits of the squatter were ample, and his life was easy. His market enlarged with the development of the new methods of transport, which enabled him to ship meat as well as wool to Europe ; his wealth gave him a strong position in Australia ; and his leisure left him free to pursue the open-air sports which were dear to his heart. If he lived alone in the bush his estabhshment might, it is true, be rough, and his clothing coarse ; but he could easily afford the luxury of a holiday in Sydney or even in Europe. And if he married, his home often appeared to the casual traveller whom he entertained to contain every comfort which the most exigent could desire. But the bush supported many more inhabitants than the wealthy pastorahsts and their employees. Storekeepers sold their goods at convenient places, and sometimes reaUsed a considerable fortune after a few years of trade ; the bush inn was a regular meeting-house of a more or less reputable kind, whose proprietor was assured of good profits from the bad drink which he suppUed to his many thirsty customers. And the ' sundowner,' the aimless tramp who had renounced the shackles and the comforts of civilisation, wandered from station to station begging a meal and a bed from involuntary hosts at each successive sundown. More important than these, who hved on the toil of their fellows, were the rising class of small farmers. The small farmer was in direct competition with the great squatter. He had already begun to outnumber his powerful rival ; but his position on the whole was less fortunate. His profits were necessarily less, since his operations were conducted on a far smaller scale ; while if his losses were also less in a year of drought, his resources were correspond- ingly smaller, and he had far more difficidty in tiding over a bad season. Frequently, indeed, he found it a hard and bitter struggle to wring a subsistence from the soil. He THE BIETH OF THE AUSTKALIAN NATION 185 generally farmed his land himself, with the help of his wife and children ; and to that extent his produce was grown more economically than that of the great squatter^ who could seldom directly supervise the work of his many hands on an estate of perhaps a hundred miles square. And if the small farmer hved near one of the important centres of population, he had the advantage of a steady and accessible market for his goods. But when he was located, as he often was, at some distance in the interior, the difficulties of transport were very serious to a man who could hardly afford to employ the labour necessary to carry his goods to the market, and who was seldom able to leave the farm himself. In any case, the small farmer had not sufficient resources to experiment as to the crops best suited to his soil ; it was necessary for him to make an immediate profit, for he had no available capital with which to tide over the patient years of waiting while a great plan of development was maturing. He lived too near the margin of want to be able to take any risks ; and since he could not risk the chance of a considerable loss, he never achieved a considerable success. He made a living, but he did no more. While he remained isolated from his fellows, the small farmer made but little progress. In time, however, he learnt the virtues of co-operation ; and co-operation eventually overcame some part of his difficulties.^ The assistance of the Government, in opening experimental farms and in giving advice as to crops, likewise helped him ; and the extension of the railway system did still more to bring the small cultivators into easy communication with their markets. In this way they gradually became a considerable power in AustraUa, and the growth of their influence is one of the notable features of antipodean social life in the later nineteenth century. By common consent excessive drinking and swearing were ^ See bk. xxii. for the policy of co-operation. 186 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS the chief vices of the bush. The sanguinary adjectives which were not unknown in London readily bore transporta- tion with the other commodities of civiHsation to the frontiers of the EngUsh-speaking world ; but the strength and occasional picturesqueness of his epithets probably concealed the real poverty of the settler's vocabulary. And the phrases which became consecrated by use in the rough language of the bush were sometimes even heard with horror by the more decorous or more restrained members of the colonial Parliaments ; but while the foulness of speech has largely vanished with the generation that imported it, a frankness which would be condemned at Westminster was still possible in the Commonwealth Senate in the twentieth century.^ A more serious feature of Australian life than the coarseness of its language was the habitual insobriety of a large pro- portion of its people. For one traveller who reprobated those who ' had forgotten their mother tongue and adopted that of the devil/ a dozen complained of the prevailing drunkenness. * Spiritual destitution and spirituous plenty ' was the mark of whole settlements ; and disgusting orgies were kept up night after night in every drinking den of the towns, and in every inn of the bush. It was a common thing for a man to drink away the whole of a season's wages in a single bout which might last for a week on end ; and many a poor fellow who had kept too close company with the bottle overnight found, but could not prove, that he had been robbed in the morning. But the most abstemious of men need not grudge an excuse on behalf of the Australian of early days. The pot-house or the inn was often the only place of resort which was open ^ The following dialogue, for instance, occurred in the Commonwealth Parliament on 27th May 1909. Senator Walker, ' Well, personally, I have subscribed to the Dreadnought fund. Did the honourable senator who interrupts me do that ? ' Senator Givens, * No, I did not ; every one has not bled the public so much as the honourable senator has been able to bleed them.' — Official Report of Proceedings. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 187 to him ; rum, raw, poisonous, and perhaps even drugged, the only drink. And after months of solitude in the bush, during which he had lived on nothing but tea, mutton, and damper, and seen few if any human faces, it need not be wondered at that the instinct of human fellowship was strong within him. He embarked on a wild carouse, treating and being treated by any chance boon companion of the road until the purses of both had run dry ; and then, when the deUrium was over, he would return to his work. Physically he was probably little the worse, for the enforced abstinence of the out-station and the hard hfe in the open soon repaired the ravages of alcohol ; but the money which might have been put to better uses was wasted, and the labour of a year was thrown away in a fortnight. Some improvement took place in time, as the hard livers of the old colonial school died out,^ and were succeeded by a more temperate race of men ; but one need not condemn the excesses of the original pioneers too harshly. In an age when excessive drinking was common among all classes of Englishmen, they drank more than most ; but they were also tempted more than most men to flee from the continual monotony of their life to the illusory and transient pleasures of intoxication. The dwellers in the bush may have been hard livers, and their language more emphatic than poUte ; yet they had preserved many of the best characteristics of virile manhood. Their quahties and their defects, in fact, were both crude, strong, and unmistakable. They were invariably hospitable to the stranger. They were almost always good sportsmen. And they had not lost their respect for woman — when woman deserved respect. ' See Lindsay Gordon's well-known verses : — ' Ah ! nearly all our comrades of the old colonial school, Our ancient boon companions, Ned, are gone ; Hard livers for the most part, somewhat reckless as a rule, It seems that you and I are left alone.' 188 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS But unfortunately many of the women whom the settler met could advance small claim to the courtesy which belonged of right to their more virtuous sisters ; for although hundreds of female emigrants were sent out from England, a very large proportion were dragged from the brothels of London, while many others were corrupted on the voyage by bad companions or the sailors.^ The streets of Sydney were still filled with the scum of the old world, and complaints were frequently made of the sexual vice which prevailed in the slums of the Australian metropolis.^ Yet although it was impossible to put an end to the un- savoury sights and scandals which had survived the convict era, a great change was gradually taking place, as a new race of Australian women now began to grow up which far excelled their not too reputable predecessors. It was difficult to beheve, said one visitor to the antipodes, that the beautiful children whom he saw on all sides were the offspring of such parents ; but Nature and the climate ^ were kinder to the budding nation than Britain had been. The sons and daughters of the convict and the prostitute were often at least outwardly respectable ; and year by year they were more ^ In J. P. Johnson's Plain Truths is reported the case of a ship's boatswain who boasted that he had enjoyed the favours of a hundred diflFerent ladies on one voyage between England and Australia. And in Sturt's Life is an account of the notorious female emigrants called the Green Linnets, which need not be reproduced in these modest pages. ^ See, for example, The City : its Sins, Sorrows, or the Dark Deeds of Sydney, by the Rev. D. Allen (1873). He declared that iniquity was now rampant in the city, there were ' legions of seducers, harlots, and hotel dens, decoy-houses, virtue slaughter-houses, and ante-chambers for seduction. ... If there is a hell this side the grave, this is it ! ' This discourse, with illustrative examples which I refrain from repeating, was delivered before the blushing members of the Young Men's Christian Association. I hope they did not verify its truth for themselves. But after all, it amounts to little more than saying that Sydney was a seaport town. Every big European seaport can show the same sights to those who go out to look for them. ^ An idea prevailed at one time (see Lancelott's Australia As It Is, 1852) that the climate of the antipodes developed insanity. Subsequent experience has hardly borne this out. THE BIKTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 189 and more enveloped by the steadily rising tide of those decent immigrants from England and their children whose influx was the real origin of the new Australian people. But society in the bush still remained strangely mixed. The rough labouring man who had emigrated from England and was fortunate enough to obtain a sheeprun might dis- cover that his nearest neighbour was the younger son of a peer, who had been educated at Eton or Harrow ; the latter might be disconcerted to find that the next station was occupied by an emancipated and perhaps reformed convict, into the more intimate details of whose past Ufe it would have been highly indelicate to inquire too closely.^ But all now met on equal terms, for human companionship was so rare and precious in the sohtudes of the interior that the artificial distinctions of an older civilisation were perforce abandoned. In sharp contrast to the loneliness of life on a distant station in the bush was the brightness and vivacity of the great centres of population. There was already city Life in much gaiety and scope for amusement in the young Australia, city of Melbourne. A roimd of balls and dances filled the evenings of the wealthier inhabitants, and the business of pleasure might be varied by a visit to a concert, a theatre, or the opera-house. Collins Street, the chief thoroughfare of the Victorian capital, had become a fashionable promenade, and had even been compared to the London Regent Street for its shops. The cabbage-tree hat, the red flannel shirt, and the rough beard of the gold-seeker showed less con- spicuously in the city as time wore on ; wealth brought many social refinements, accompanied with frequent incongruities as the newly rich imitated, with some lack of success, the manners of a class to which they did not belong. The newest modes from London and Paris could be bought ^ A traveller in West Australia (Mrs. Dominic Daly) discovered a happily married and prosperous convict who had been transported for killing bis first wife. The survival of the fittest ? ^ 190 ? THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS in the better shops ; the antipodean beau imitated the exquisite of Bond Street and Piccadilly ; and a lady who visited the colony in 1861 found no difl&culty in purchasing the most beautiful laces and dresses, not only in the capital, but even at the goldfields. The Enghsh have never been a nation of misers ; and where money was plentiful and easily obtained, it was not less easily or pleasantly spent. Public improvements soon accompanied private extrava- ^ gance. In 1851 Melbourne had been condemned by the Chief Justice of Victoria as ' a capital that was neither lighted, paved, nor drained/ There were splendid private houses in Flinders Street, and excellent shops and restaurants in Collins Street ; but both thoroughfares were flooded at times, and after dark were full of pitfalls to unaccustomed feet. Four years afterwards, however, the roads had been macadam- ised ; illumination by gas was soon added ; water was laid on to most of the houses, and private baths were becoming usual : a sewerage system was added later. Sydney was not a whit behind its younger rival, whose precocity and success it afEected to despise ; but Brisbane was growing more slowly, and Adelaide was still a municipal skeleton, with many vacant plots of land to spoil the symmetry of its plan. Fremantle and Perth in West Australia were as yet little more than small provincial towns. They had made, indeed, some advance since 1840, in which year a traveller remarked that the appearance of both was most disheartening, no business being done, the one church — a miserable building of rushes — being used as a civil court as well as for divine service, and even Government House boasting nothing better than a canvas roof, which was not impervious to the rain. But neither Fremantle nor Perth was an object of pride to its citizens in the year 1860. No other Australian cities, in fact, could compare with the splendid capitals of New South Wales and Victoria ; and whatever claim the antipodes might make to learning or THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 191 culture must have been justified by an appeal to Sydney or Melbourne. In those centres, however, the arts and sciences were by no means neglected, even at this early period of Austrahan history ; but sport in its various forms made a g ^^^ ^^^ more general and engrossing appeal to the majority Open-Air of the people. The greater part of the community ^ ®' lived in the open air ; and the love of open-air pursuits, which had been inherited from England, was intensified under the kindher skies of the south. Cricket had taken firm root in Australia, and almost every male between five and fifty years of age played it regularly at every opportunity. The children did their best with imperfect weapons ; a tin can often served for a wicket, a stick for a bat, and a turnip for a ball ; but their elders imported the best stumps and leather from England. Matting wickets, however, were a poor but necessary substitute for the perfectly rolled turf of the mother country ; and the outfield was generally rough and uneven, except on the great metro- poUtan cricket-grounds, where neither trouble nor expense was spared to obtain a perfect pitch. But the enthusiasm of the players soon produced proficiency at the game, and when Austrahan teams visited England, and English teams visited Australia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, there was little to choose between the champions of the two countries.^ Hunting, shooting, and fishing wherever there was a river, added to the zest of country life ; while swimming, boxing, ^ The first English cricket team visited Australia in 1862. Several cricket records were made in Australia. The highest score in any first-class match in the M'orld was 918 — New South Wales v. South Australia, 1900 ; and the two highest individual innings — 628 by A. E. J. Collins in 1899, and 666 by another batsman at Hobart in 1901. Both these huge scores were made by lads in school matches. I notice with amusement that a meeting to discuss certain points con- cerning the game was held in Australia in 1909 under the high-sounding title of an Imperial Conference, and that in a cricket dispute in 191*2 the Premier of New South Wales oifered his mediation. ■f 192 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS and rowing matches were often held in the towns. Football was less popular in Australia than in New Zealand, where it was played with a skiU and spirit that proved too much for British teams when that colony sent a picked fifteen of its sporting heroes to the motherland in 1905. But horse-racing appealed with unusual force to every section of a people that almost lived on horseback. Race- meetings were held in every centre of population, large or small ; and squatters, farmers, stockmen and traders all gathered round the course whenever there was a reasonable promise of a good run and a close finish. Meetings of this kind ranked among the most important social functions of the year ; and although the prizes were less valuable, the betting not so high, and the horses not such magnificent animals as at the classic English races, there was quite as much real sportsmanship in the small colonial scratch plate and up-country handicap as at Epsom or Newmarket. Another sign of the love of the open air which characterised the English in Austraha was the care which they bestowed upon their public and private gardens. The native flora of the antipodes, somljfe and mournful in comparison with that of Europe, was enriched by the importation of every variety of English flowers and shrubs ; and the sweet-scented mignonette, the stately dahha, the tender fingers of the honeysuckle, the prodigal magnificence of the rose, and the modest loveliness of downcast fuchsias soon blossomed beside the sad eucalyptus and the aboriginal wattle scrub. The new plants took readily to an ahen soil ; ^ magnificent Botanic Gardens were laid out in the leading cities, and few private ^ Too readily sometimes, for they spread until they became a general pest. This was particularly the case with the hardy sweetbriar and thistle. But nothing in the vegetable world was so great a nuisance as the rabbit, whose numbers grew so rapidly in Australia that it became necessary for the Government to take drastic steps for their destruction. Rewards were offered for every rabbit destroyed ; but a million and a half sterling had been spent by New South Wales alone before the evil was reduced to manageable proportions. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 193 houses were so poor- that they could not show some fragrant blooms around their walls. But while the Australians were devoted to sport and their gardens, they by no means neglected the more serious if quieter pleasures of the student ; and it was remarked by ^ ^^ide- every traveller that the people of all classes and spread Love different degrees were greatly addicted to reading.^ of Reading. Literature, especially of the hghter kind, was almost as popular a mental diet as rum or tea for the physical body. Vast quantities of novels were consumed ; the works of more solid authors were sold by most of the booksellers ; and newspapers, whether produced in the colony or obtained from England, were universal. Thanks to the progress of education, iUiteracy was becoming as rare in Australia at the end of the nineteenth century as it had been usual at the beginning ; and most of the settlers filled up some of the monotonous hours in the bush in the dehghtful company of Scott, Dickens, or Thackeray. Many of the squatters possessed complete sets of their favourite authors, and often included science, biography, and history on their shelves as well as fiction. And there were good pubHc libraries in most of the towns. Melbourne boasted a collection of over five thousand volumes, which was constantly being added to ; and both it and the rival establishment at Sydney were generally crowded with readers. A good deal of hterature, mainly of the periodical kind, was already produced in the Austrahan colonies. The first printing press had been set up at Sydney in the original year 1800 by one George Howe, who had been Australian employed as a young man in the office of the London Times', the first newspaper, the Sydney Gazette^ made its appearance on 5th March 1803. It was produced ^ One traveller tells a story of a man who read the EncycUypcedia Britannica through from beginning to end. The name of this truly heroic student has unhappily been lost. VOL. V. N 194 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS under government supervision, and contained, in fact, little but government annoimcements, reports of criminal trials, and advertisements for some years. ^ The aspiring wings of such journalists as Austraha may have contained in those early days were sadly restrained by of&cial control ; and the ingenious commentators on the events of the colony found that their compositions were revised not only by the editor of the periodical for which they wrote, but were sometimes transformed out of all recognition by the coldly critical eye and unappreciative pen of a Grovemment censor. And the early editors of Australia were rendered timid by the fact that their organs were very largely dependent on official advertisements for their revenue, as well as on official per- mission for their appearance at all. As the colony grew in size, however, the public appetite for news became greater than could be satisfied by a single sheet from a single press in Sydney. The periodicals of the antipodes advanced rapidly from the humble newspaper licensed and controlled by the Government into a number of powerful journals which came in time to exercise a con- siderable efiect on pubUc opinion. When the official control of the press was relaxed, the newspapers were generally outspoken, and often scurrilous ; but after a while a greater sense of public responsibility on the part of the editors and proprietors raised the level of Australian journalism. It is a true saying that every country possesses the newspaper press which it deserves ; and nothing gives a better idea of the advance of Australia than the contrast between the Sydney Gazette of 1803 and the able and well-conducted journals of Sydney and Melbourne a century later. Monthly and quarterly reviews of some merit and ability ^ The Sydney Gazette was a four-page weekly, and was published every Saturday. Its modest motto, on the front page of every issue, was : ' Thus we hope to prosper.' The contents of the early issues were largely reports of criminal cases and accounts of executions — an unconsciously ironioal commentary on the motto of the paper. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 195 were also added to the periodicals of New South Wales. They were conducted under considerable difficulties at first. In successive numbers of the Australian Quarterly in 1828, for instance, the editor apologised for the fact that ' typo- graphical errors were unavoidable in this colony,* and com- plained that ' all the offices in Sydney would not be able to furnish a sufficiency of figures ' for printing a daily meteoro- logical table. But, despite these mechanical drawbacks, the review contained articles on such diverse subjects as the connection between religion and science, a paper on the beauty of order in the services of the Church, and some remarks on the improvement of sheep-farming. . The scope of the press broadened from year to year ; and Y in 1856 the Illustrated Journal of Australasia may be found discussing such various topics as Chinese Hterature, the Enghsh poetry of the day, the representative institutions of the colonies, the geology of the colony of Victoria, and the ballads of Ireland — a sufficiently comprehensive hst. The Australians of the second generation were thus able to provide much of their own periodical reading from the intellectual resources of the colony itself. But for more permanent literature they still depended mainly on England. An occasional novel of no remarkable merit issued from the press at Sydney ; and the Australians were concerned that the quaUty of their local fiction was not so high as that of their wool, and seriously examined the reasons for their mediocrity in this respect.^ The bulk of AustraUan literature, however, for several years more was mainly devoted to such practical matters as the breeding of sheep, the rearing of pure saddle horses, the manufacture of colonial wines and the care of a vineyard, and the interminable controversies over the land problem and the poUtical disputes of the hour. The first ffights of the poetic muse on a virgin soil are generally timid and often ridiculous. Australia was no * See Illustrated Journal of Atutralaaia, 1856. 196 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS exception to the rule ; and a quarto volume that was pub- lished at Sydney in 1819, entitled First Fruits of Australasian AustraUan Poetry, contained nothing but common-place blank Poetry. verse and puerile rhymes to justify its ambitious name.^ Before the end of the century, however, the highest form of literature had become acclimatised in the antipodes. A large amount of readable verse that might, with the exer- cise of a charitable judgment, be almost mistaken for poetry, had been printed in the journals of the southern colonies ; it was possible to publish an Austrahan anthology of quite respectable merit ; and one or two writers deserved, although they hardly obtained, a wider reputation and a larger reading pubhc than the antipodes could provide. So long as poetry is imitative its value is small. The early Australian writers were afraid of originahty either in thought or metre, and — in a land whose seasons, cUmate, and social atmosphere were the very converse of those of England — they imitated the greater Enghsh poets to the best of their abihty. They sang the bitter sorrows of the exile ; but it is the badness of the verse, not the poignancy of the sentiment, that affects the reader to tears.^ 1 I may quote one stanza that is neither better nor worse than its fellows : — ' She (Nature) had made the squirrel fragile ; She had made the bounding hart ; But a third so strong and agile Was beyond ev'n Nature's art. So she joined the former two In thee, Kangaroo. . . . ' 2 Perhaps the best specimen of antipodean verse that imitates the great English models is the poem by Wentworth on Australia, which had con- siderable vogue for many years. I cite one stanza : — ' Britannia ! Should 'st thou cease to ride Desj>otic Empress of old Ocean's tide ; — Should thy tamed Lion — spent his former might, — No longer roar, the terror of the fight ; — May this, thy last-born infant, then arise, To glad thy heart, and greet thy parent eyes ; And Australasia float with flag unfurl'd A new Britannia in another world ? ' The sentiment is as irreproachable as the Terse is smooth and uninspired. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 197 The second half of the nineteenth century showed a very considerable advance. Adam Lindsay Gordon, an English emigrant to the antipodes, left the native Australian poets far behind in the swift spontaneous music of his ballads of the horse and bush. James Brunton Stephens, another British emigrant, wrote more polished verse that was often of very great beauty.^ And though no native poet of the front rank appeared, a hundred minor writers contributed a single song, an occasional ballad, or a reverie that vignettes some aspect of AustraUan life with the stamp of simple truth. The bulk of their collected work is as considerable as its merits are great. And its character showed an origin- ality that had hitherto been lacking ; an originality that separated it sharply from contemporary English and American verse, and gave it a position of its own in the literature of our language. The Canadian writers were full of the joy of achievement and the splendour of active Ufe ; but the heroism of a losing fight and the peace which follows man's inevitable last defeat were the inspiration of Australian poets, who dwelt on the hardships and sorrows of pioneering, on melancholy voices heard amid the soUtudes of the bush, on work begun in hope and ended in death. ' They fought for you, Grey Selections, The battle of long dry years. Through seedtimes of sweat and sorrow To harvests of hunger and tears ; You turned from the lips that wooed you, And justice, awake on her throne. For sake of those brave hearts broken, Is watching you break your own ! ' ^ ' The stanzas on ' Night ' in Convict Once have always seemed to me particularly fine. * Abandiyned Selections, by W. H. Ogilvie. 198 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Another sang of the travellers who yearned for endless rest : — * Dead kisses on the drooping lip And a dead heart in the breast ' ; * a third told of those that * fighting fell who thought to tame the tameless, and won their barren crown/ while * ... in their sleep, like troubled children turning, A dream of mother-country in them burning, They whisper their despair. And one vague, voiceless yearning Burdens the pausing air. . . .'^ Seldom, indeed, is a brighter note struck, and the call of surging youth is rarely heard. The typical Australian song is of ' where brown summer and death have mated ' : — * Out on the wastes of the Never Never — That 's where the dead men lie ! There where the heat waves dance for ever — That 's where the dead men lie ! That 's where the earth's loved sons are keeping Endless tryst : not the west wind sweeping Feverish pinions can wake their sleeping — Out where the dead men lie ! Where brown summer and death have mated — That 's where the dead men lie ! Loving with fiery lust unsated — That 's where the dead men lie ! Out where the grinning skulls bleach whitely Under the saltbush sparkling brightly ; Out where the wild dogs chorus nightly — That 's where the dead men lie ! ' ^ A weird sense of desolation runs through nearly all the Australian poetry of this period. Men set forth on journeys from which they never return ; women wait long lonely years in the bush for success which never comes : — ^ The Camp within the West, by Roderic Quinn. 2 The Dtodlinga of our Dead, by Arthur H. Adams. * Where the Dead Men lie, by Barcrof t Henry Boake. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 199 * The red sun robs their beauty, and, in weariness and pain, The slow years steal the nameless grace that never comes again ; And there are hours men cannot soothe, and words men can- not say — The nearest woman's face may be a hundred miles away.' ^ The monotony of the unvarying season meanwhile sinks deeply into the soul : — * Unchanging here the drab year onwards presses : No spring comes trysting here with new-loosed tresses. And never may the years Win autumn's sweet caresses — Her leaves that fall like tears.' ^ The persistent note of failure and death sounds incongruous in the poetry of a young nation, which usually prefers to dwell on its successful progress rather than on more melan- choly scenes ; although there are failures enough and to spare even among the successes of youth, just as there is many a wave on the incoming tide which fails to touch the beach. But Australian literature gained not a little in depth from its absorption in the sombre aspects of existence ; and if it is advanced as an objection against the Australian poetry of this period that it sometimes exaggerated the gloom and solitude of station life, it must be remembered that there was a very large amount of truth in its pictures of stoic endurance and quiet fortitude, borne too often without reward. Far less individual and striking in character was antipodean piose. No great prose author appeared in nineteenth-century Australia ; but there were many who wrote correctly and well, and whose work gained them some fame in the old as well as the new world. Among these may be mentioned Rolf Boldrewood and E. W. Hornung as novehsts, and Rusden as a historian. ' Tht Women of the West, by George Essex Evans. * The Dwellings of our Dead, by Arthur H. Adams. 200 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Li the year 1860, however, the native literature of Aus- tralia was still of poor quality, and art did not yet exist. It Art and is true that the establishment of Fine Arts Insti- MuBic. tutes at Melbourne and elsewhere at this time indicates the presence of an active interest in painting and sculpture ; while the creditable designs of many of the pubhc buildings erected in the state capitals proves that the Australians were aUve to the value of dignity and beauty in their civic life. But in neither case had any original talent asserted itself. The churches, offices, and houses of the antipodes were mainly copied from those of England ; and it was justly said that the pictures which ' sold most readily were the refuse of the French market.' But in the next generation very many young Australians came over to Europe to study art in the studios of Paris ; and although no great master of painting or sculpture was bom in the Enghsh antipodes in the nineteenth century, a large amount of sound and capable work was produced. And already a noticeable taste for music was spreading over the land. No great Australian singer had as yet charmed the whole world, as did Melba forty years later with the sweet- ness and depth of her incomparable voice ; but Philharmonic Societies had been founded ; the piano was seen in many homes, and a visitor noticed with some surprise, as early as the year 1852, that the best classical music was often heard at remote stations in the bush. If no original dramatist of any merit had yet appeared, the theatre in Sydney was declared, probably with some exaggeration, to be as good as that in any English town except in London ; the opera was per- formed and appreciated at Melbourne ; and even on the gold- fields the strains of the humble accordion were frequently heard when labour was over for the day, while less often the vioHn and the flute were played in their idle moments by more accomplished seekers after nuggets. Their interest in art and literature was enough to defend THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 201 the Australians from the charge that they were absorbed in the material affairs of life to the exclusion of more spiritual matters. And the practical attention which they gave to education ensured that future generations would be as well equipped mentally as they almost invariably were physically. One of the chief drawbacks to family life in the bush had been the lack of educational facilities. Children might grow up healthy, active, and with a love of the open Australian air ; but they were also apt to grow up ignorant. Education. Some parents had httle time, while others had little inclination, or possibly even httle capacity, for the training of their offspring ; and the teacher, hke the doctor, was probably many miles away. The richer settlers could indeed place their children at one or other of the good boarding schools which were established in Sydney or Melbourne, and the wealthiest of the squatters occasionally sent their sons to England to complete their education. But the majority, who could never hope to afford so great an outlay, were forced to depend on the local state schools, whose operations were gradually extended by the governments of the various colonies into the sparsely populated interior. It is very greatly to the credit of AustraHa that her people attached considerably more importance to education in the nineteenth century than was done in England during the same period. In the old convict days the schools of New South Wales had indeed been few in number and apparently poor in quality. But with the increase of free settlers the desire for knowledge spread ; and in the year 1860 the mother colony already counted 798 schools within its borders, with 34,767 pupils in attendance. These were gradually increased year by year, until in 1895 they numbered 3463, with over a quarter of a million daily scholars. The education of chil- dren between the ages of six and fourteen was made com- pulsory by the Pubhc Instruction Act of 1880, the parents being required to pay a small weekly fee of threepence for 202 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS each child educated, and receiving a free pass by railway for their children to the nearest school. Much the same system was followed after a time by each of the other colonies, Queensland lagging somewhat behind, while West Australia was so liberal that whenever the authori- ties were notified that sixteen children were present within a radius of three miles, they were at once prepared to estabUsh a school in that locality. The Australians were fortunate in freeing themselves after a time from the rehgious disputes which hampered the edu- cational field in the motherland. Li the old colonial days the schools of New South Wales were, it is true, largely under the direction of various sects ; and from 1848 to 1866 there were two rival authorities in existence, the one denominational, the other undenominational. But in 1866 this double control was modified, and fourteen years later it was swept away entirely, the Government schools of the colony being declared entirely unsectarian. Henceforth Australia was spared those wearisome and unending controversies which did so much to delay the advance of knowledge in England. Nor was there visible in Austraha that distrust of popular education which still remained an obstinate prejudice or superstition in England. Practically every child bom in the antipodes was drawn within the net of elementary instruc- tion ; illiteracy declined year by year. In 1857 one person in every four who was married in New South Wales was unable to sign the marriage register otherwise than by mark ; in 1906 only two in every hundred failed to write their names when required. Higher education was likewise attended to ; and after 1850, when the University of Sydney was established, the The uni- ambitious scholar in the antipodes could take his Teraities. degree in several faculties without leaving the shores of Australia.^ But the pohtical rivalry between one ^ Barff, Short Historical Account of the University of Sydney. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 203 settlement and another was soon extended to the educational field. What New South Wales found necessary Victoria could not do without ; and that ambitious colony, which in the year 1852 already possessed 115 elementary schools, saw with satisfaction the foundation stone of Melbourne University laid on 3rd July 1854. South Australia followed suit with Adelaide University ; and nearly half a century later, the colony of Queensland celebrated its jubilee in 1909 by deciding to found a similar institution in Brisbane. But the competition in education was open to fewer objec- tions, and it brought with it greater advantages, than the poUtical rivalry between the states. It encouraged individu- ality at the cost of economy ; it can hardly be said to have lowered the dignity of the professors, since the emoluments were generally large enough to attract capable men. The absence of one central university may have retarded but did not prevent the growth of national unity ; it also stopped the inevitable tendency for learning and literature to become associated with any one place. Although education was divorced from religious instruc- tion in the ordinary elementary curriculum of Austraha, it does not appear that religion suffered through not Reugion in being taught in the colonial schools. 1 The religious Australia, opinions of the English people at the antipodes, in fact, followed generally those of the English people at home rather closely, both in quality and degree. Those who were members of the Church of England in the old country found the priests of the Anglican communion awaiting them in the antipodes ; for the Anglican Church had not neglected what was at once its opportunity and its duty in the southern continent as it had in Canada and the West Indies,'^ and the ^ This a highly controversial question, and a good deal of rather ruddy ink has been spilt by disputants on either side. I can only plead that I have done my best to form an impartial judgment, and await the inevitable kicks from those who dissent. ' See vol. iii. bk, xi. ch. iii., and vol, iv. bk. xii. ch. ii. 204 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS work that had been begun by the first chaplain in convict days laid the foundations of a structure that had grown steadily among the free settlers. Those who were Non- conformists in England usually found a pastor of their own denomination or of some similar sect holding almost identical religious views in Australia, with whom they could worship in comfort and spiritual peace. The Irish immigrants remained true to the historic Cathohc creed which had been their stay through generations of misfortune ; the harder Scots held fast to the sober Presbyterian teaching of their country.! The British settlers in the antipodes had no desire to found any new school in religion. None of those peculiar and often absurd developments of Christianity, or frank experiments in religious faith and practice, of which American soil has been so fertile, took root in Australia. Neither heresy nor schism troubled the faithful with controversy ; indeed, so consistent were the people in imitating the example of Britain that complaint was made even by the orthodox that the spirit of Australian religion was altogether unoriginal.^ The churches were built on the same plans as those of England, their ritual and the very hours of divine service were the same as at home ; and while the attendance was usually good, there is no hint that the ordinary preacher either thought it necessary or found it possible to produce a sermon superior in quality to those pulpit platitudes which made drowsy congregations nod approving heads in the British Isles. But if the Enghsh in the antipodes lacked originality in their religion, their beUef was not necessarily lacking in vitaHty or virihty. Nor were they ignorant of the value ^ The religious denominations are stated (Lancelott, Australia as it is, 1852) to. have numbered at that time, Anglicans, 93,137; Roman Catholics, 56,899; Presbyterians, 18,156; Wesleyans, 10,008; Jews, 979. ^ Contemporary Review, 1889. THE BIKTH OF THE AUSTEALIAN NATION 205 of Christianity as a rule of life or slow to appreciate its ministers. It was noticed by an observant lady who travelled through Australia that, although brutality and coarseness were sometimes seen on the goldfields and elsewhere, and women occasionally bore the marks of their husbands' fists, the clergy were generally treated with respect, even if their teaching was too often neglected by an impatient world.^ And their influence, if it could not compare with the spiritual tyranny of the old divines of New England, was nevertheless consider- able in its cumulative effect, and few could deny that it was exercised for good.^ CHAPTER III THE UNITED COMMONWEALTH: 1880-19013 In the hundred odd years that went to the making of the new English nation in Australia three main periods of growth ' Social Life and Manners, 1861. I confess that the lack of originality in Australian religion makes me marvel. One would have thought that some new message to mankind would have come from the prolonged meditation that was enforced on every dweller in the bush. Surely not every squatter confined all his thoughts to sheep-soab ? 2 A young Australian journalist named Frank Fox once told me that there was no religion in the antipodes. There could be no belief in God, he asserted, in a country where irrigation was necessary. I imagine he thought he had perpetrated an epigram. Unfortunately for his theory, Holland is at once one of the most religious and best irrigated countries in Europe, while the fundamental law of the Australian Commonwealth states that the people ' humbly rely on the blessing of Almighty God.' These words were included in obedience to a wide- spread popular demand, and I presume they were not meant t be meaningless. ^ A useful little volume of official Papers relating to a Federal Union qfthe Atistralian Colonies is dated 1862. For some years subsequently there is little federation literature in Australia ; but from about 1870 to 1900 and even later a large mass of pamphlets, speeches, magazine articles, and discussions on the subject issued from the press. The more important of these are indicated in footnotes in the following pages. The standard legal authority for the whole subject is Quick and 206 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS and change may be discerned, whose leading tendencies and characteristics were in most respects sharply dis- Three tinguished, and clearly divided from each other. AuBtraJiai ^^^ *^^ distinction between each of the three Growth. periods was not merely that superficial change which is inevitable when one generation gives place to its successor ; it was a complete change in government, in policy, in the popular outlook, and in the whole trend of that political sentiment which helps to shape the destinies of a nascent nation. I. The first period saw the inauguration of the system of convict transportation in 1788, and reached its height under Governor Macquarie some twenty-five years later, at which time the immigration of free men was discouraged, and Australia was regarded as a colony reserved for the reformed, or at least emancipated, prisoners who had been expelled from the shores of Britain, II. The second period opens with the arrival in large numbers of free immigrants in the two decades between 1832 and 1852. Their influence, as might have been but was not, in fact, foreseen, was strongly although not invariably exercised against the continuance of transportation ; and the total cessation of the convict system, in deference to their urgent demands, was henceforth only a question of time. But when the stain of crime was once abolished in 1840 — for the fact that transportation was continued to the struggling colony of West Australia until 1868 hardly affected the, as yet, far more important eastern provinces of the continent — the English in Australia made rapid progress. The old criminal population rapidly gave way before the steadily Garrau's Annotated Constitution, an exhaustive aud able work ; to this may be added Moore's Commonwealth of Australia and Clark's Constitu- tional Law. Other useful works include Teece, Comparison between the Federal Constitutions of Canada and Australia ; Barton, Historical Sketch of Australian Federation ; Garran, The Coming Commonwealth ; WlUoughby, Australian Federation : Aims and Possibilities; Cockburn, Australian Federation; and Craig, The Federal Defence of Australia. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 207 flowing tide of free immigration ; the sombre dawn of southern colonisation was followed by the bright sun of liberty. In this second period of its history the antipodes obtained those free institutions which no British community will remain without for long ; and although West Australia still lagged behind — for responsible government was not granted to that state until 1890 — the bulk of the Australian people, who had settled in New South Wales and Victoria, were in control of their own government and administration throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century.^ They had already begun to progress on individual and provincial, not on united and national lines. Victoria and Queensland had separated from New South Wales ; West and South Australia had few interests in common, and Tasmania was likewise isolated from the rest. The attention of young communities is naturally concentrated very largely on their own internal and immediate afEairs, often to the entire seclusion of more distant matters ; and in any case the area of the virgin continent was far too large for any collective interest to exist spontaneously between provinces that were divided from each other by hundreds, and in some cases by thousands, of miles. During this second period one may indeed observe an occasional sign of the formation of a united national sentiment in the swift current of Australian provincial life, as one may see an occasional bubble float to the surface on a swift- ^ Responsible government of a type similar to that recommended by Lord Durham in Canada (vol. iii. bk. xi. chs. iv. and v.) was introduced in Australia in 1856. It had been preceded in New South Wales by a Legislative Council, which, established in 1843, consisted of thirty-six members, of whom twelve were nominated by the Crown, and the remainder elected by vote, a property qualification being required. Previous to this a Legislative Council of seven members, nominated by the governor of the colony, had been introduced in 1823. This council was enlarged to fifteen in 1828. Some of the early ministries were very unstable. South Australia had ^ forty cabinets in thirty-seven years ; New Zealand once had three cabinets in three weeks. 208 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS running stream ; but the main trend of public opinion in each colony was strongly in favour of the separation of one province from another. Each developed on its own lines ; each watched jealously the development of its neighbour ; all alike repudiated the idea of sacrificing their individual importance to the formation of the greater common unit. There was, in fact, no popular driving force behind the occasional proposals for union. There seemed little to unite for, and nothing to unite against. III. But the third period, whose beginning may be dated very roughly from about the year 1880, saw a reversal in many respects of the dominant political ideas of the second. Individualism now gave way to collectivism ; provincialism to nationalism ; division to unity ; and after twenty-one years of vigorous controversy federation triumphed over isolation, and the Austrahan nation was born. The same process, in fact, which had changed Anglo-Saxon England from a heptarchy of warring states into a United Kingdom ; which had transformed the independent colonies of America into a united republic ; which had joined the provinces of Canada into a single Dominion, was now to take place in Australia, and to change the individual English colonies of the antipodes into a united nation. Even during the years when the provinces prided them- selves most on their provinciaUty and their isolation from Failure of their neighbours, when Victoria was enforcing ^3Jiy a tarifE against the exports of New South Wales, Union, and when both New South Wales and Queensland 1849-57. ^gj-e building their railways on different gauges, there were some who looked for a union of the various colonies in one common political organisation. It is true that none of these attempts were fruitful ; but at least they prevented the idea of national union from sinking altogether into the background, as it had done among the American colonies in the early eighteenth century. THE BIRTH OP THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 209 In 1849, for instance, a committee of the English Privy Council recommended the selection of the Governor of one of the Australian colonies as Governor-General, with the power of convening a General Assembly of Australia. A Bill to that effect was introduced in the following year in the Imperial Parliament, but abandoned ; and although in 1851 Governor Fitzroy was appointed Governor-General, the title was only nominal.^ Two years subsequently a move was made in the same direction in Australia ; committees in New South Wales and Victoria both referred to the subject, and Wentworth, the first native statesman of Australia, announced himself strongly in favour of union ; but nothing came of the idea.^ Although Wentworth was discouraged, he was not dis- heartened by his failure ; and when living in England in 1857 he addressed a memorial to the British Government on the subject. But again he was unsuccessful ; and un- equivocal signs soon made it evident that Australia was by no means ripe for union yet. An intercolonial conference to discuss the whole question of union or federation was suggested by the province of Victoria in November 1857. South Australia and Tasmania both agreed to take part in the debates, and delegates were appointed to represent the three colonies ; ^ but New South Wales refused to entertain the project, and it was therefore again necessarily abandoned. ^ This project of union was denounced in Australia with that full- blooded invective which generally serves to conceal poverty of argument. Robert Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke) appealed to the people to * put it from them as a thing accursed, to have no part whatever in working it. Let them leave the wretched offspring of tyranny and indolence still-born — dead. Let the Government, when it found the colonists would not pollute their souls by putting any of its foul provisions into operation, take their scheme back amidst the shouts of ridicule which shall reverberate throughout the Empire.' Gas ; but gas that was readily swallowed, and speedily produced a species of political intoxication. 2 For Wentworth's career see ch. i. of this book. ^ See speech of Premier of Tasmania, 9th July 1S84. VOL. V. 210 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Without the co-operation of the mother colony it would have been ludicrous to discuss any plans of union ; but for many years more New South Wales remained stead- fastly opposed to the idea. And in 1859, when a further political division was made by the separation of Queens- land from New South Wales, it was clear that for the present the tide was running strongly in the opposite direction. The next two decades were the dead years of Australian unionism, during which time the cause that Wentworth had advocated seemed to make little if any progress. It is true that there were no additional subdivisions of the five continental states into smaller units. But such additional subdivisions were advocated ; and notably in the case of Queensland and South Australia the arguments in favour of separating the tropic north from the temperate south were weighty.^ It is also true that there were still some who never abandoned faith in Australian unionism during those years when their political creed was suspect of the multitude. But their influence was generally small ; and although they could point to certain indications that unionism was still alive, their opponents could retort with emphasis and equal truth that the same indications proved that it was very nearly dead. In 1860, for example, a select committee of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales was appointed to consider the problem of federation. The committee sat and deliber- ated, but no report was ever produced. Ten years later a proposal in favour of a general conference on the subject, which was made by the province of Victoria, failed to gain any more support than the previous proposal from the same quarter in 1857 ; but in 1873 it was possible to hold an intercolonial conference, which, however, was confined to postal matters, at Sydney. ^ See bk. xx. ch. ii. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 211 During the next few years the tide began to turn, but to turn very slowly ; and though the advocates of the individual states were still largely in the majority, the ^^^ ^^^ unionist cause in time began steadily to gain Turns, ground. Akeady in 1877 the poet Brunton ^^^^'^i- Stephens foretold that the natal day of the new nation, whose * bounds should be the girdling seas alone,' was near ; ^ and in 1880 the first Federal Conference met at Sydney. When poets and politicians agree, there is usually some truth in their predictions ; but the prophecies in this case needed time for their fulfilment. For twenty years more the question of the political future of Australia remained unanswered ; yet during that time the careful observer might have seen that, while the old divisions of provincial state from state continued, there were certain impulses, both external and internal, which now combined to urge Australia towards political union. The chief external impulse which influenced the divided colonies of Australia in the direction of political union was the fear of foreign aggression. If union is strength, External division must be weakness : and the colonies, influences Tending to admitting their divisions, were unable to deny pouticai their weakness. union. It is true that Australia was protected by the mighty force of the British Empire and the British Navy, It is also true that she was isolated from the rest of the world. She was not unconscious of her isolation, which impressed itself on her with the arrival of every mail from Europe ; nor was she ashamed of her lonely throne in the southern seas. And ^ See The Dominion of Australia, by Stephens. The whole poem is worth reading. Another Australian poet, to whom I apologise for having mislaid his name, wrote as follows : — ' From all division let our land be free, for God has made her one.' The sentiment is excellent, but the author forgot that the contrary example of Spain and Portugal might have been urged by factious opponents. 212 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS she was not ungrateful for the protection of the empire and the navy.i But her isolation had not protected her shores from invasion in the past, even in the old days of slow saihng ships ; the Dutch and Spaniards had reached Australia as well as the British, and if French ambitions to found an antipodean New France had come to naught, GaUic names upon the maps of British Australia were a constant reminder of projects that had certainly been abandoned, but might again be revived. And the isolation of Australia from the rest of the world had shrunk steadily since the steamship had superseded the sailing vessel. The island continent was no longer eight months or even eight weeks from Europe ; and there was no certainty that her isolation would not continue to shrink as the means of communication became quicker.^ Many parts of the old world of Europe and Asia were over- populated. Austraha, on the other hand, was nowhere very thickly populated, and large tracts of her territory were altogether bare of human beings. Many of those tracts were not desert ; on the contrary, they were fertile and luxurious wildernesses of nature, which were certain to appeal strongly to men suffering from land-hunger.^ Against a large invasion of such men, stiffened by some military force and discipMne, the two or three million scattered English people in Austraha would have been helpless. The latter would not indeed have been driven from their own settlements, but they could not have driven the invader from the land he had seized. And with that invasion the 1 This was admitted even by the Sydney Bulletin, a strongly anti- imperial newspaper. See, for example, the issue dated 30tli March 1911: — 'Never in the world's history has a self-respecting nation been defended so cheaply as Australia was under the old regime.' 2 See, for example, a tract entitled Sixteen Days to Australia. At that time the voyage from England took five or six weeks. ^ See Alfred Searcy's In Australian Tropics, where some remarkable details of the fertility and beauty of north and north-western Australia are given. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 213 last chance of political, social, or racial unity in Australia would have vanished for ever. It might have been urged in answer to this that the waste spaces of Australia were British territory, and that they were therefore protected by the overpowering strength of the British Navy. That was indeed true. But the British Navy was not always in evidence in Australian waters, and what is not always in evidence is sometimes overlooked. And even though the Navy was trusted, the Imperial Govern- ment, which controlled the Navy, was not always trusted. That Government had not invariably been tactful or sym- pathetic in its dealings with the people of Australia. Promi- nent pohticians, too, in England had been heard to speak in favour of abandoning the colonies ; ^ and they had not been repudiated by the Imperial Government. Those anti- imperial speeches in England were not forgotten when men came to consider the question of imperial defence in Austraha. It is hardly credible that any British Government, however much it may have inwardly sjonpathised with the anti- imperial views of Cobden and the English Free Trade school, would actually have abandoned an imperial territory, whether in Austraha or elsewhere, at the bidding of a foreign power. But the new generation of Englishmen in the antipodes, young, ambitious, and enterprising as it had shown itself, and vaguely conscious of national aspirations which it could hardly as yet express, now began to insist, not only upon the retention of the whole of Austraha as British territory, but upon the necessity of the expansion of British influence as the sovereign authority over the isles of the Pacific. And to that expansion the Imperial Government would by no means consent. The question came to a crisis when the colony of Queens- land annexed the great island of Papua in the year 1883, and * See Tol. iv. bk. ivi. ch, ii. 214 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS the Imperial Government refused to ratify the act of the colony.^ The essential underlying fact, of which both the Imperial Government and the Australians were well aware, was that Germany, now busily engaged in founding a colonial empire, wished to obtain a footing on that island ; while Queensland, from whose northernmost territory Papua was only divided by a narrow strait of water, had not unnaturally begun to regard that country as one destined for her own. But the Austrahan colony understood little of European politics, and the Imperial Government of the day cared little for Australian interests ; ^ the annexation of Papua, which the Gladstone Cabinet had itself determined on before it was definitely informed of Germany's intentions,^ was disallowed, and a large part of the island was proclaimed German terri- tory. The announcement caused intense irritation in Queens- land, and indeed throughout Australia ; and the obvious comment was made that if the five colonies of Australia had been united, the Imperial Government would have paid more attention to their wishes, even at the expense, perhaps, of some further straining of the already strained relations with Germany. In that sense, therefore, the refusal of the Imperial Government to allow Australian expansion was one of the chief external impulses towards Australian union. The loss of the greater part of Papua — for part of the island was ultimately annexed by Britain — brought with it the remembrance of another episode that pointed the same moral. The island of New Caledonia, which had been dis- ^ See bk. xx. ch. i. 2 A letter from Gladstone to Granville, in which he speaks of the duty of dealing tenderly with the ' prejudices ' of our colonies (Life of Lord Granville, 1885) sufficiently proves this, apart altogether from the fact that the Imperial Government overrode the wishes of Australia. It must be remembered, however, that the Imperial Government had a much more urgent and difficult question on hand in Egypt (vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. iii.Yof which Germany took full advantage to embarrass the eeble hands of Gladstone and Granville. See also vol. iv. bk. xvi. ch. ii. or the general policy of the Cabinet. Lift of Lord Granville, vol. ii. p. 371. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 215 covered and named a century before by Captain Cook, had been annexed by France, and used as a penal station for convicts ; and that, in spite of the protests of Australians who, having at last purified their own house, objected to this scandal at their doors. Here too remonstrances which were ineffectual when coming from divided colonies might have had more weight if they had been uttered by a united Common- wealth. A domestic quarrel with the Imperial Government in 1888 over the question of excluding Chinese immigrants ^ likewise emphasised the disadvantages of disunion ; and in the following year a report by General Bevan Edwards, pointing out the utter inadequacy of Austrahan military defences in case of invasion, startled the colonies almost into a panic. Again the moral was drawn out that the only possible means of successfully resisting invasion from without was by union within the country.^ These were the chief external influences making for Australian union. A minor influence of the same origin and leading in a similar direction was afforded by the study of the past history and contemporary politics of Europe and America. There are some indications in the ephemeral literature of the time^ that the example of federal unity in the United States, in Canada, and in Germany was not lost upon the more serious school of Australian statesman- ship ; but such studies were too remote from the ordinary ^ See bk. xx. ch. iii. and bk. xxii. ' There had previously been a rather absurd scare of an invasion by Russia, of all countries in the world, in 1877 ; and Australia was already seriously perturbed at the possibility of an Asiatic invasion. * There are several volumes of bound tracts, pamphlets, and magazine articles dealing with Australian politics and industry in the Royal Colonial Institute. In one such volume, among discussions as to the future of Australian vineyards, the prevalence of sheep-scab, and the improvement of cattle-breeding, I came across an incongruous but comely intruder in the shape of an animated discussion as to the number of petticoats worn, or rather displayed, by Letty Lind, a popular dancer of the day ; together with a testimony by a clergyman as to the propriety of the performance (without illustrations). 216 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS provincial political life of the antipodes to have much weight with the rank and file. These external influences towards Australian union were reinforced by certain internal influences tending to the same Internal 6nd. The practical traveller noticed and con- influences demned the absurdity of each Australian state Political building its railways on a different gauge, with Union. tj^e inevitable consequences of inconvenience to passengers every time they crossed the inter-colonial frontiers, of high charges for freight carried from one colony to another, of continual delays and endless expense.^ The divided and none too friendly nations of Europe had, with the exception of Russia, agreed upon a standard gauge for their railways, to the common benefit of all concerned ; but what men of different languages, manners, and customs had done in the old world, men of the same language, manners, and customs had not done in the new. Had Australia been a united commonwealth before the construction of her rail- way system, she would certainly have built her Hues of communication on a uniform gauge ; as it was, provincial jealousies overrode the general advantage.^ The same traveller, who grumbled at the inconvenience of changing his train on a journey from Sydney to Melbourne, may well have cursed the additional infliction of a custom- house on the inter-colonial frontiers. For the divided Aus- tralian colonies had raised high fiscal barriers against each ^ The gauge in New South Wales was the standard British gauge, 4 ft. 8J in. In Victoria it was 5 ft. 3 in. ; the same in part of South Australia, but the 3 ft. 6 in. gauge was also in use in. that state, as in West Australia and Queensland. The smaller the gauge, the cheaper the cost of construction — an argument not without force in a new country ; but the ultimate cost of breaking bulk every time merchandise crossed a colonial frontier more than outbalanced the original economy in the end. ^ Federation in this respect came too late. The cost of altering thousands of miles of permanent way, the rolling stock, and the station accommodation would have been too heavy for the not illimitable finances of the Commonwealth to bear. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 217 other ; Victoria, which introduced a protective tariff in 1866, excluded the products of New South Wales, and South Australia excluded the products of Victoria. New South Wales remained true to her original free trade policy, imposing a tariff for revenue only ; but the neighbouring colonies became staunchly and permanently protectionist.^ An interminable and embittered controversy raged around the subject, and vast quantities of ink and paper were con- sumed in the attempt to convince opponents of their fiscal errors.^ But the combatants were obstinate, and were neither convinced nor convincing ; debates and public conferences were held from time to time,^ but in vain. The root of the difficulty in this case, over which every disputant stumbled and frequently fell headlong, measuring his length across a stony expanse of comparative statistics, lay in the undeniable fact that each colony had prospered, whatever fiscal system it had adopted. It was impossible either to prove or to deny that any or all of the colonies might have done either better or worse under a different system. On the mere lines of commercial advantage the vexed problem could never have been settled. But the whole subject was lifted to a higher plane by Sir Henry Parkes, when dis- cussing the sensational statements of General Bevan Edwards regarding the defencelessness of Australia from invasion. * The question of free trade or protection,' said the veteran * Governor Fitzroy, who wa8 appointed Governor-General of Australia in 1851, during the premature and abortive attempt to unify Australia, predicted the tariff wars between the colonies and the consequent increase of friction, jealousy and ill-will. Precisely the same thing occurred in the early United States. See vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. iv. And in Canada, bk. xi. ch. v. ' I have looked through much of the literature on this question, and I cannot advise anybody else to follow my example. If the tireless student wishes for a sample rather above the usual controversial average, let him consult Sir George Reid's Five Free Trade Eaaaya. ' As an example, see report of Australasian Commercial Conference, 1890, held at Dunedin. m THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS politician of New South Wales, ' is trifling, compared with the necessity of giving to Australia an Australian Govern- ment.' ^ Parkes had touched, and not without intention, on a chord that was destined to vibrate with increasing strength through The the antipodes. For many years that astute and spiriTin far-seeing man had advocated with leisurely Australia, determination the federal cause ; and it is to his lasting credit as a statesman that he perceived clearly the impossibility of reaching a settlement that rested solely on a commercial and fiscal basis. TarifEs might differ, commercial interests might vary, in every province ; but the interests of the people of Australia as a whole were greater than the divergent commercial interests of all its divided pro- vinces. Common trade interests may lead, and often have led, to the formation of a powerful trade league or commercial union ; but when those common interests diverge, the league which is based on them alone will also dissolve. ^ A nation, on the other hand, is founded on the stronger basis of emotion, tradition, and sentiment, the consciousness of a common purpose, the possession of a common tongue ; and its nation- hood will survive the shocks of divergent commercial interests within its borders which would have been sufficient to split a commercial league into irreconcilable enmity.^ Australia had no common commercial interests, but her people were beginning to have a common national conscious- ness founded on the possession of a common ancestry, a common tongue, and a common destiny — the peaceful con- ^ See Parkes's Speeches on the Federal Government of Australia i published 1890. '■^ I need only refer to the mediaeval history of the Italian trading republics. * The conflict of agricultural and manufacturing interests in modern Europe and America, which has been weathered by states founded on the principle of nationality, would probably have split a commercial league or trading union. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 219 quest and colonisation of a virgin continent. And it was indeed no small factor in the spread of the nascent sentiment of nationality in the antipodes that practically the whole white population of Australia had sprung from a single nation in the northern hemisphere.^ Here, therefore, was no funda- mental clash of ideals, aims, or methods ; the differences between province and province in Australia were those of brothers who have lived long apart, but who have retained the old family likeness in spite of separation. In the happy words of a famous phrase coined by Sir Henry Parkes, ' The crimson thread of kinship runs through us all.' Some, at least, of the abler spirits among the generation that reached maturity as the nineteenth century ebbed began to claim a more ample horizon, and to think in national instead of provincial dimensions ; there were debates and disputes as to the qualities necessary to a nation and the existence of a national spirit ; a Young Australia party made itself somewhat noisily evident, and after the manner of youth it showed less respect for its fathers than its seniors thought they deserved. The cry of ' Australia for the Australians ' was raised,^ and not without some support and effect in limiting the influx of immigrants from England.^ Birth in Australia was now elevated into a virtue or a merit,* and some of the older settlers, who knew far more of the real difficulties of life in an imdeveloped country than their sons, even complained that young Australia spoke of its parents with contempt as foreigners.* These were the perhaps inevitable absurdities of an infant nationality, which time and experience reduced to their proper ^ The all- British character of Australia is discussed statistically in the previous chapter. '^ By a writer in the Melbourne Review, 1880, and others. ' See bk. xx. ch. iii., and bk. xxii. * In direct contrast to the previous generation, which denominated those of English birth as ' standard ' coin, and of colonial birth as mere ' currency.' In each case the phrase was an indirect method of self- praise. * Melbourne Review. 220 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS perspective ; ^ but in spite of such occasional follies, Australian nationalism was built on solid ground. And whatever form it may have taken in its infancy, Australian nationalism was necessarily in favour of Australian It Neces- union, since nationalism depends on union. The sarUy problem, therefore, which seemed insoluble when Australian regarded from the lowlands of commerce, where Union. Qjjy. points of difference were visible, was found more practicable when regarded from the highlands of national sentiment, where only points of agreement were seen. These various impulses, external and internal, combined to lead Australia towards political union. But there were other impulses which tended to perpetuate pohtical separation; these impulses, however, were altogether of internal origin. And while the external influences which urged the colonies towards union were strong, and were counteracted by no external influence in favour of continued separation, the internal influences in favour of union were weak, and were more than neutrahsed, at least for some time, by the internal influences opposed to union. The chief and most deadly internal enemy of Australian union was not active opposition but passive indifference. Arguments can be met by arguments, taunts by taunts, the cheap sneer beloved of cheap poHticians by the cheap sneer or the dignified retort in return ; but indifference cannot be fought by indifference. And one after another ^ Even greater absurdities were committed at times on behalf of the contemporary infant nationalist movements in Europe. Some of the Slavonic peoples on the Lower Danube made their language a test of nationality ; but unfortunately those who spoke the various dialects were not mutually comprehensible. At a general congress held to demonstrate Slavonic principles I believe the delegates had to hold the discussions in German, as the only language that everybody understood. And I remember that once in the streets of Prague, the very centre of Czech nationalism, I was foolish enough to ask my way in German. My informant proved the vigour of his patriotism and the strength of his anti-Teuton convictions by a copious expectoration at my feet before he replied. I thanked him with due humility in French and passed on. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 221 the advocates of political union complained that audiences received that subject in stony silence. Sir Henry Parkes, the oldest of Australian politicians, whose refer- internal ence to local controversies and fiscal disputes never influences failed to evoke applause and discussion, found pouticai little response to his set speeches on federation, union. And a younger and more cultured orator, whose eloquence has moved the proverbially cold people of England to the same enthusiasm with which his own antipodes have greeted his warm and teUing phrases, had the same chilling experience ; Alfred Deakin, who embraced the cause of AustraUan union with ardour, hkewise admitted that on this subject, and this subject alone, he encountered ' a deadweight of apathy ' which seemed irresistible. When such was the fate of the leading statesmen, it may be beheved that lesser pohticians wasted httle time on an unpopular cause. The average candidate for ParUament found that no votes were to be gained by advocating union, and speedily abandoned the subject for the more popular cries that bore welcome results on the day of the poll ; others, more bold, who risked the loss of a few unionist votes by speaking openly in favour of local interests and provincial prejudices, probably found that they had won more support than they had lost by their temerity. And very many candidates solved a difficult tactical problem by simply sitting on the fence, following a time-honoured device by declaring themselves in favour of the principle of union, but opposed to the means suggested, and thereby contriving to make the best of both pohtical worlds.^ The more definite objections to Australian union were not ^ It was stated that one reason for the popular indifference to the federal cause was the low quality of Australian politicians. But the argu- ment will not stand examination. It is true that Australian politicians were often not of very high standing. But only the more independent men favoured federation, and their arguments fell flat ; it was too risky and likely to be unpopular for the average vote-catching demagogue, whose safe course was to flatter local prejudices. 222 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS without weight. The old local jealousies of state and state continued strong. Similar local jealousies had existed in Canada before federation in 1867 ; but they were not accentuated in Canada, as they were in Australia, by differences of chmate as well as distance.^ Canadian states- men had had many difficulties to surmount before they could achieve national union through federation ; but at least they had no semi-tropical province with a coloured- labour question to consider, such as confronted the architects of AustraHan union in Queensland. And indeed Queensland, so far from thinking of union with the rest of the continent, had an acute problem of separation on hand within its own territories. A strongly-supported movement had been started in that colony for its division into three mutually independent provinces ; an association was established in aid of this project, which issued an elabo- rate report on the subject,^ and it was suggested that the two new divisions of a colony which had itself been carved out of the original domain of New South Wales should be known by the rather absurd names of Carpentaria and Capricomia.^ But Queensland was only one of the obstacles to AustraUan ^ Semi-tropical Queensland mt.s always considered to be on a different footing from the temperate southern states, both by unionists and anti- unionists ; and Parkes, in his project of federation adumbrated in the Melbourne Review of 1879, suggested that Queensland as well as West Australia should be left out of the union. In the former case climate, in the latter case distance and lack of population, probably determined his proposal. Similarly in Canada, fifteen years before, there had been some opposition to the inclusion of British Columbia, which also lay isolated and almost uninhabited in the extreme west, in the Dominion. Curiously enough, rich gold deposits were discovered in both these despised territories, which have since had an ample revenge. With regard to climate. Dr. Johnson once asked, ' What is climate to happiness? What proportion does climate bear to the complex system of human life ? ' A good many people in his own day could have en- lightened the excellent tory as to the difference a good or bad climate makes to happiness ; and history shows again and again that it has a considerable effect on politics, which are after all one aspect of the complex system of life. ^ First Annual Report of the North Queensland Separation Council, dated 14th June 1886. There was much to be said for the division of Queensland into sub-provinces. =* Lang's Coming Event. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 223 union ; there were as many obstacles, in fact, as there were separate states. New South Wales resentfully remembered that the younger colonies had revolted from her parental authority in earher days, and asked with some bitterness why they should advocate union as essential in 1890 when they had denounced union as intolerable in 1850. West AustraUa, which had only just obtained full responsible government, had naturally no wish to resign any of her rights to a general continental union ; and the fact that the eastern colonies often referred to their huge western neighbour as an upstart and a Cinderella hardly smoothed the path of union in that direction. South AustraHa, too, distrusted Victoria, and Victoria was suspicious of New South Wales. Another argument that appealed to each colony with equal force, was the knowledge that the federation of the whole must diminish the importance of each individual division. The provincial parliaments would tend to sink to mere local councils when a superior parliament legislated for all ; the provincial premiers would be httle more than local politicians when greater men perorated in a Commonwealth Assembly ; and the provincial capitals would be less important than the city which was eventually chosen as federal capital. But the very mention of a capital roused the bitterest of animosities among rival partisans. Sydney was the oldest city in AustraHa, Melbourne the largest, and Adelaide modestly claimed the most culture ; each therefore thought its title to be the capital of the whole continent sufficiently estabUshed. And each in consequence had to pay the penalty of municipal ambition in hearing taunts and insults and disparaging comments passed upon its buildings, its citizens, its air, its water, and even its drains, by the heads of the two rival muncipal factions.^ ^ It was finally agreed aa the only satisfactory way out of the difficulty, that a new federal capital should be founded, after the example of the United States. A prolonged wrangle between New South Wales and Victoria resulted in an arrangement that the federal capital of Australia 224 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS The eternal fiscal question was well to the fore among the objections adduced against Australian union. Any form of union that was worth anything, it was said, presupposed fiscal union and intercolonial free trade. Now there were certainly many obvious advantages in intercolonial free trade ; but every commercial interest took fright at the mere mention of the phrase, and each colony jealously maintained its own fiscal barriers against its neighbour. The highly protected manufacturing state of Victoria insisted that New South Wales should abandon its traditional free trade pohcy. The latter retorted that it would be easier for Victoria to lower her tarijS than for New South Wales to raise one. And South Australia advanced the argument that if intercolonial free trade were once in existence, her own industries would be ruined by floods of exported goods from Victoria.^ An equally complicated and ultimately not less difficult question concerned the necessary adjustment of the pro- vincial and federal debts under union. Each of the colonies had borrowed somewhat heavily in the English money market. Some critics held that they had borrowed extravagantly ; ^ others declared that they had borrowed no more than their undeveloped resources justified them in doing. Whether that was true or not was hardly germane to the immediate argument ; what was really important was the fact that they should be situated in the territory of the former state, but that it should not be at Sydney nor within a hundred miles of the metropolis. In the meantime the Federal Parliament was to sit at Melbourne until the new capital was ready. The people of Sydney were inclined to take these stipulations as an insult, but they appear to have consoled themselves with the reflection that nothing better could be expected from the far inferior citizens of Melbourne. The site of the new capital was eventually fixed in 1909 at Yass- Canberra, and plans and designs were submitted and published by official authority. 1 Speech of Premier Playford, 1890. ^ See, for a scathing indictment of Australian state finance, Wilson's An Empire in Pawn ; for a more moderate statement, a paper by Fenton on Australian Federal Debt (1892). THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 225 had borrowed unequally, and that their debts had to be consolidated. And no man Mkes the prospect of being burdened with part of his neighbour's bills. Such were the chief reasons that influenced Australians against the union of their country ; and to these reasons, few of which could be dismissed as altogether without weight, was added the silent influence of every conservative element in the community, that strong but often unseen power which bids men leave well alone lest the good should become worse and not better ; that complacency at the progress which has been made under known conditions, and distrust of the possibihties which await men under unknown conditions ; in a word, all those influences which give stability to a com- munity, and which were certain to be found strongly sup- porting the union when once union had been achieved, were now as strongly opposing the union and supporting the cause of the individual states. The interplay and opposition of these various and con- flicting forces made Australian union in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. On the whole, The Even the balance in the trembhng scales of public Balance of these opinion proved in favour of union but against contrary close union ; the colonies were wilUng, or per- iii^'iences. haps it would be more correct to say they were not un- willing, to accept a more or less loose federal tie with a common general constitution. Australian statesmen, fortified by past political experience, rejected that rope of sand, a confederation of the type that leaves the various provinces sovereign states and the central authority impotent.^ Such a constitution is useless in * This was tlie type of constitution advocated by Jefferson and the early American democrats. It proved a failure between 1783 and 1787, but it was still advocated by the democrats for many years. See vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. iv. I notice that it was also advocated in the British West Indies in 1911, in opposition to the scheme of a general federation suggested by (iideon Murray. VOL. V. P 226 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS peace and worse than useless in war, since it has a delusive appearance of strength that might deceive a friend but could never deceive a foe. But while Australians refused this political sham, they would not have an absolute legislative and executive union, such as prevailed in the United Kingdom, and has since been achieved in South Africa ; ^ they were therefore forced to fall back upon the middle course between a loose confedera- tion and an absolute union, and to frame their general constitution somewhat after the type of those in operation in the United States and Canada.^ But even here there was room for choice and a selection of means and methods. The original constitution of the United States tends to exalt the authority of the individual states and to depress the authority of the central power ; the constitution of the Dominion of Canada, on the other hand, tends to exalt the authority of the central power and to depress the authority of the provinces. It is significant of the narrow balance in favour of union over separation in Australia that the makers of the future Commonwealth constitution deUberately preferred the example of the United States to that of the Canadian model, the less central- ised to the more centralised piece of statecraft. Of the three general types of union among constitutional states, therefore, the Australians chose neither the strongest — an absolute union of legislatures, nor the weakest — a mere confederative alliance ; they chose the medium bond. But in making their choice they decided on the weaker rather than the stronger form of federal union — a fact which shows decisively how great was the power of the provincial states and of local provincial feeling in the antipodes. But the reliance on the example of the United States ^ See vol. vi. bk. xxvi. ^ For an analysis of the United States' constitution, see vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. iv. ; for the Canadian, vol, iii. bk, xi. ch. v. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 227 rather than that of Canada demonstrated much more than the strength of provincial feeling in AustraUa. It demon- strated much more than the admiration of one Republican people of Enghsh stock, which was slowly feeUng Feeling in its way towards nationhood, for another people of ^^ ^*' English stock which had already achieved nationhood. It proved that there existed a body of pohtical opinion in Austraha which favoured the repubhcan system of the United States rather than the monarchical system of the United Kingdom ; it indicated the presence of a political school which favoured separation from the United Kingdom and the complete independence of AustraUa, That school was never indeed very powerful, and even such influence as it possessed tended to diminish towards the close of the nineteenth century ; but its existence, although not of decisive importance, was not entirely without effect among the causes working for and against Australian union. The question at issue, therefore, was not merely whether Austraha should be united, but whether that union should be within or without the empire, and whether it should take republican or monarchical form. Austraha, isolated as she was from the rest of the world, was not too remote from the main currents of contemporary pohtical thought to feel that wave of repubhcan sentiment which threatened and even overturned thrones on the continent of Europe, and which claimed some prominent if rather academic supporters in Britain. Unhke the Cana- dians, who lived too close to the United States to have much belief in the superiority of repubhcan institutions,* many AustraUans, fully conscious of the manifest defects of the * See vol. iii. bk. xi. clis. iv. and v. The elevation of Canada to tho rank of a kingdom within the Empire was suggested by a Canadian statesman at the time when federation was being discussed, but rejected in England, where the anti-imperial sentiment was then at its height. A few years later, when Disraeli proclaimed Queen Victoria Empress of India, it might have been adopted, but was apparently overlooked. 228 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS system of government in the British Empire, admired at a distance the method of government which they could not imitate without breaking the imperial tie. The democratic citizens of Victoria and New South Wales envied the boasted simphcity of manners and equahty of rank which prevailed in the North American Repubhc ; and some antipodean pohticians perhaps coveted the ample opportunities of corruption which existed under the successors of the in- corruptible Washington. Some drew elaborate compari- sons between the disunited British states on the Atlantic in 1783 and the disunited British states on the South Pacific a century later ; ^ and many speakers and writers uttered the aspiration that a United States of Australia should be formed, and professed the patriotic behef that its future would be not less glorious than that of its mighty elder brother among Enghsh nations, the United States of North America. Associated with this republican school, but not necessarily always identical with it, was a distinctive movement in The separ- Austraha for separation from the empire, mentin^^ Separation was indeed a political possibihty, Australia. although hardly ever a poHtical probabihty for some years during the later nineteenth century — a possibility which was openly discussed as something more than an aca- demic question in England at the height of the anti-imperial movement,^ a possibihty which was furthered by the language of not a few pohticians in Austraha. Anthony Trollope the novehst, who visited the antipodes in 1871, and pubhshed an account of his impressions, came to the conclusion that separa- tion was probable ; Archibald Forbes the joumahst declared ^ It was possible to draw a fairly close parallel, except for the fact that the thirteen American colonies had separated from the Empire and the five Australian colonies had not. The comparison had at least one use, in that it drew the attention of Australians to the weakness of a mere Federal Council or Confederation, such as existed in America during and immediately after the American Civil War. ^ See vol. iv. bk. xvi. ch. ii. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 229 that federation would not be achieved while Australia remained within the Empire.^ And a well-known clerical politician of the day at Sydney, Dr. Lang, a quarrelsome Presbyterian minister whose loss Scotland survived with equanimity and whose presence Austraha tolerated with patience, had pro- duced a flatulent book upon the subject in 1870, in which he foretold the coming event of the entire freedom and independ- ence of the antipodes, and declared that separation would prove the more excellent way for all parties.^ He antici- pated an immediate improvement in education, rehgion, and moraUty if the colonies severed the imperial connection and estabMshed a repubUc whose capital was at Sydney ; ^ and when faced with the objection that, however moral and religious a virgin the independent Austraha of the future might be, she lacked the strength to defend herself from the rude attack of any foreigner who desired to possess her, the angered cleric could only answer with some lack of logic, ' Away with such rubbish ! ' J The book would have been more dangerous to imperial unity had it been less stupid ; but it would scarcely have been pubUshed at all had there not been some support for its views. I^But the separatist movement in Austraha failed. It was never adopted as a settled pohcy by any poUtical party in any of the colonies. It never appealed to more than a numerically insignificant and not very influential minority. Its spokesmen were hardly of sufficient weight or standing to convince the people, who as a whole were far from disloyal to the imperial connection ; and the definite repudiation of the separatist doctrines by politicians ' London Nineteenth Century, 1883. See also United Service Magazine, January and March, 1891. '^ The Coming Event, or Freedom and Independence, by Lang. * Marcus Clarke in 1877, while agreeing with Lang as to the founda- tion of a republic (see the previous chapter) disagreed as to the capital, which he placed in New Zealand. 230 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS like Sir Henry Parkes naturally did much to discredit the anti-imperial school in the eyes of the public.^ The main supporters of the separatist school were those with grievances, real or imaginary, and prejudices, well or ill founded, against England.^ They were assisted, but not perhaps very appreciably, by the geographical isolation of Australia, by the inevitable tendency of widely separated communities to diverge in thought, and by the ineradicable impulses of human nature. There will always be some among the younger members of the family who desire to leave the parental roof and to set up house for them- selves.^ The fact that there were so few supporters of separation in Australia, however, shows that the mistakes of Britain in dealing with her antipodean colonies had either not been serious, or that circumstances had allowed her to retrieve those mistakes. But even to those who professed themselves unmoved by sentimental attachment or the mysterious sym- pathies of kindred race and blood, there were strong utiUtarian ' In a speech delivered in 1889, Parkes remarked that 'What the Americans had done by war, the Australians could bring about in peace without breaking the ties that held them to the mother country.' Ten years earlier he wrote (Mdhotirne Review, 1879) that the British connection ' would receive new elements of durability and definity from Australian union.' ^ See a letter cited at the opening of bk. xxii. for some of these grievances or prejudices. ' A similar but earlier separatist agitation in Canada was even less successful (vol. iii. bk. xi. ch. v.). In that case it sprang directly from Britain's free trade policy. I doubt whether the separatist and republican feeling in Australia would ever have attained any influence had members of the J^nglish royal family been appointed as governors of the colonies. It was difBcult for young Australians to be enthusiastically loyal to the British Crown when few of them had ever seen even one of its distant relatives. Had Australia been declared a kingdom of the British Empire, as it was suggested by Canadians that Canada should be, and a British Royal prince been appointed to Sydney, probably little would have been heard of Australian republicanism. This is, of course, all speculation and hypothesis, and therefore best confined to a footnote ; although I observe that some modern authors prefer to air their theories in the text, to keep the facts down in the basement, and to leave literary style and interest outside altogether. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 231 arguments in favour of maintaining the imperial connection. For not only did Britain defend Australia against the attack of possible enemies, but British capital had been largely instrumental in developing Austrahan industries, in building Austrahan railways, in financing Australian governments ; and without the steady fertilising stream of British capital that flowed through the five continental colonies of the antipodes their progress would have been far less rapid. It is said, indeed, that capital is independent of pohtics, and that it is irresistibly drawn wherever good security or fair interest is offered. That is true, but it is not the whole truth ; for the series of Colonial Stock Acts which were passed by the Imperial Parliament in the years 1877, 1892, and 1900, and the Trustee Act passed by the same authority in 1893, gave to certain colonial securities a standing as trustee stocks in the British market which largely increased their pubUc value ; and this important privilege, although well earned by colonies which had always respected their financial obhgations, would hardly have been granted by Britain had the colonies thrown off their allegiance. The qjiestion whether the union of Austraha should take place within or without the British Empire was therefore answered emphatically by a large loyalist majority ; Admiration but if the republican and separatist movements gtatesin died from lack of support, there was nevertheless Austaraiia. widespread admiration of the United States in Australia, and in this respect the most steadfast imperiaUsts were hardly behind the advocates of separation and repubhcanism. Sir Henry Parkes himself on one occasion referred to ' the rich stores of pohtical knowledge collected by the framers of the Constitution of the United States ' as a valuable aid to those who were preparing to frame the Australian Constitution ; and Alfred Deakin acknowledged that the example of the United States had been continuously in the mind of the delegates at one of the most important of the intercolonial 232 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS conferences for the discussion of the proposed Constitution for the future Commonwealth.^ ' At the Austrahan Federal Convention/ he wrote, ' copies of The Federalist were in every hand, the names of Hamilton, Madison, Adams, and Jefferson on every lip ; while the most effective peroration at the Melbourne Convention in 1890 was couched in the words of Washington/ The first definite step on the long road that led finally towards Australian union was taken in 1880, when a conference Negotia- was held at Sydney to consider the general question Federation ®^ federation. Its deliberations soon made it 1880. evident that public opinion had advanced in a unionist direction since the intercolonial postal conference of 1873, but that it had not advanced very far. Sir Henry Parkes, the most prominent Australian statesman of the day, and the only one who had consistently expressed his behef in federation for many years, was the leading spirit in the debates ; and Parkes himself was forced to admit that the day had not yet come for the construction of a federal Con- stitution. But at the same time he advanced the contention that the day had come when * a number of matters of much concern to all the colonies might be dealt with more effectually by some federal authority than by the colonies separately.' His contention was discussed, denied, and approved in various quarters during the next few months. On the whole, approval predominated ; and when in 1883 another inter- colonial conference assembled at Sydney, an attempt was made to translate the judiciously vague resolution of Parkes into ^ Deakin in Scrtbner's Magazine, 1891. Other references to America and Australian federation may be found in Parkes' Australia and the Imperial Connectimi (1884), and Speeches on Federation (1890) ; Carnar- von's Annexation and Federation (1884) ; Beadon's Australian Federation (1889); Clarke's Australia and the Imperial Connection (1891); Kill- worth's Federation (1892) ; The Commonwealth and the Empire (1895). This tendency to study the history and example of the United States had its effect, not only on the federation of Australia, but on the White Australia movement. See bk. xxii. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 233 fact. The several delegates began to debate the creation of a federal legislature, its constitution, powers, and equip- ment ; and this debate was a plain sign that pohtical opinion had again advanced in a unionist direction since the previous conference. The reason for such an advance was clear. Questions of foreign poUcy, the control of the Pacific Ocean, and the expansion of British authority over the neighbouring islands, had loomed above the horizon in the interval. Austrahans had been quick to recognise that in this matter their divisions were a source of weakness, and therefore they were ready to agree to the formation of some central body, which was to be in charge of * the relations of Australasia with the islands of the Pacific,' and similar external affairs which affected every colony ahke. But there agreement ended. The conference was hopelessly divided on internal questions, and the delegates were plainly unwilling to entrust the proposed new legislature with any real power. As practical pohticians they knew that where the power of the purse was withheld, everything was with- held ; but they would allow the new legislature no control over pubMc revenue or expenditure, so insistent were they on preserving every iota of the old state rights. Nor would pubhc opinion have sanctioned such federal control, even had the delegates been prepared to allow it. The conference, which had sat with closed doors, and which therefore evoked suspicion from curious outsiders — suspicion diligently fomented by opponents of federation — The Feder- nevertheless had some result. It split the advo- ^^^ ^P"*- cates of union into two parties ; and it resulted in the crea- tion of a Federal Council, whose first session was opened at Hobart in February 1886, and was attended by delegates from Tasmania, West Austraha, Fiji, Queensland, and Victoria. The unionist spht was hailed with delight by the anti- 234 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS federalists, who were probably still in a considerable majority in every colony. The division lay between the supporters of a more or less complete form of union, with a supreme Australian Parliament endowed with full powers of legislation and taxation, and the supporters of a loose common bond which was nothing more than an alHance or confederation, and which left the real power in the constituent states.^ The latter party won at the outset, and the creation of the Federal Council was the visible proof of its success ; but the former party, headed by Parkes and a few stalwarts, secured the ultimate victory. In neither case, however, was the victory complete. The advocates of a loose confederation were utterly routed by facts, and the trend of events ; the advocates of close union had to abate some of their demands, and to agree upon a compromise which contained considerable elements of weak- ness in the final draft of the constitution. The Federal Council failed altogether. A purely con- sultative and deliberative body, it had no inherent power, FaUure of ^^^ ^* could obtain no influence ; a weakly babe the Federal from the first, it died unlamented and unloved, councu. Anti-federalists and complete federahsts both proclaimed its impotence, which was in truth self-evident to all mankind. None of the colonies took it seriously, and New South Wales, under the direction of Parkes, refused to be represented at its deliberations altogether.^ Had the smaller states refrained from attending, the Council might have survived awhile ; but when the mother colony of Australia declined to recognise it, its doom was sealed. Parkes had to bear the brunt of some abuse from the loose federalists for his action, for abuse is a commodity which is not less plentiful in Australia than in other English com- ' Fundamentally the same political difference as that between Hamilton and Jefferson in the United States. Vol. iii. bk. ix. eh. iv. * New Zealand and South Australia also refused to send delegates. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 235 munities where free speech is often very free speech indeed ; but that was of Uttle moment to the old pohtician, who had received and returned a good deal of political dirt in his time. He had long since gripped the truth that union, to be worth anything, must be a real union, not an imposing sham with every dignity and no power ; and he bided his time for an opportunity to state his case afresh. The failure of the Federal Council ^ marked the end of the second stage of the road towards union. The advocates of a loose confederacy were obviously beaten, and they had now to choose between a close union and no union at all. The advocates of close union, on the other hand, carried no conviction to a reluctant and indifferent pubUc, and the anti-federahsts appeared to have won all along the line. It seemed clear that in deciding her political organisation Austraha must have all or nothing ; and for some time it seemed equally clear that she would choose nothing. But at what appeared to be the darkest hour of Australian ^" unionism, General Bevan Edwards issued his report on Australian defence. Its effect was instantaneous. ^^ j^^^j. Everybody agreed that defence must henceforth conferences, be a primary consideration. Everybody likewise agreed that some measure of inter-state union, or at least of inter-state co-operation, was necessary to secure a satisfactory scheme of defence. The anti-federalist was compelled to admit that the isolated action of each individual state would lead to overlapping, extravagance, and miUtary weakness. The supporters of the moribund Federal Council — it still had supporters, for men will defend their own children even at the point of death — could not deny that the Federal Council as originally planned had no control over defence. But the advocates of close union, the only scheme of poUtical organisation which would ensure a satisfactory plan of internal ' There are several volames of the Proceedings oftht Federal Council. 236 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS defence, took occasion by the hand, and again enforced their views on a yielding but still reluctant people. The immediate consequence was a resumption of the federal conferences. A preliminary convention was held at Melbourne in 1890, and in the following year a great National Australasian Convention met at Sydney. That Convention was the most remarkable assembly of statesmen that had ever met together on Australian soil. At its head was the now aged Sir Henry Parkes, who had not only undertaken in his seventy-fifth year a vigorous public campaign on behalf of federation, but who could point to nearly a quarter-century of consistent advocacy in favour of Australian union. By his side was a still more aged veteran, a white-haired weather-beaten man who had assisted in the government of one of the young AustraUan colonies fifty years before ; and this ancient pioneer of the growing Empire of England in the south was an aristocrat of the true Whig stock from Britain, yet one withal who displayed the strange contradiction that he embraced democracy with all the ardour of a landless immigrant of twenty. Such was Sir George Grey, the representative of New Zealand in the Australasian Convention.^ Sir John Forrest,the first premier of the young colony of West Australia, had crossed a continent to aid the building of national unity ; near to this pioneer of an infant community sat Edmund Barton, a representative from the oldest of the Australian colonies, who had coined the pregnant phrase that went to the heart of the discussion : ^ After this conference New Zealand took no further part in the negotiations for Australian federation. In 1891 the New Zealand Parliament passed a resolution which declared that, 'looked at from every point of view, the whole weight of the argument is against New Zealand entering into any federation except with the mother country. ' A New Zealand politician, observing that the distance between Australia and New Zealand was twelve hundred miles, remarked that here were twelve hundred good arguments against the union of continent and islands in one political federation — a remark that would have applied, a fortiori, to the federation with Britain suggested in the official resolution. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 237 * A nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation.' ^ There, too, with the veteran Parkes and Grey, was another representative of the younger school of Australian statesmen, Alfred Deakin of Victoria, the most philosophic pohtician and perhaps the most convincing orator in the whole assembly. 2 All the seven states of British Australasia were represented at the Convention, and those who were summoned to attend the great assembly may well have been inspired, as they met together in the beautiful metropolis of the antipodes, at the thought of the work before them and the work that had already been done. A bare century previously AustraUa had been the place of exile in which thousands of unhappy men had been doomed to miserable years of punishment. It was now the home of free and prosperous communities, which lacked nothing but unity to make them a nation. When so much had been done under adverse conditions in the past, what might not be done under better conditions in the future ? When so great a work remained to be done by those now charged with its achievement, how heavy and yet how honourable was their responsibihty that undertook it ! Whatever the thoughts of the delegates, their work was sound. The Sydney Convention drew up a draft Constitu- tion, and debated its provisions word by word and sentence by sentence. The result of their labours formed the very bedrock of the future Commonwealth ; but for the time at 1 Edmund Barton was born at Sydney in 1849. Educated at Sydney University, he studied law and entered provincial politics. He was Speaker of the New South Wales Assembly from 1883 to 1887. ■^ Alfred Deakin was born in 1856 in Victoria. He studied at Mel- bourne University, and was engaged in law and journalism in addition to politics. He entered the Victorian Parliament in 1879. His eloquence soon brought him to the fore ; but besides the great services he did his country in advocating federation, he was responsible for large irrigation works in his native province. In order to extend his knowledge of irrigation Deakin travelled extensively in the United States, Egypt, Italy, and India. 238 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS least the labour seemed thrown away. The people still distrusted the idea of union, even though complete unification was now abandoned, and federal proposals took its place ; and the debates in the State Parliaments on the proposals of the Sydney Convention showed no enthusiasm whatever, and no abatement of the old sectional differences and jealousies. It was more particularly in New South Wales and West AustraHa that the draft Constitution was unpopular. The latter colony was too young for its secession to have wrecked Austrahan union ; but the adherence of New South Wales was vital. And in the mother colony two parties professed themselves definitely and unalterably against federation. Sir George Reid, a poHtician who owed his public influence more to his ready wit than to soHd merit,i led a fiscal campaign in which he put free trade above federation, the commercial ideal above the national ; and he bitterly compared New South Wales to an abstainer who proposed to set up house with five drimkards. And the rising Labour Party, which had recently attained some power in the state, but would have had no influence at all in the larger federation, con- demned union root and branch as a proposal that was steeped in imperiaUsm, and would crush the workers under a mihtary despotism. It is one of the curiosities of political incon- sistency that, a few years after federation had been achieved against its wiU, the Labour Party attained more power in 1 Sir George Reid was born in an Ayrshire village, the son of a Presbyterian minister. When seven years old his parents took the lad to New South Wales; in 18S0 he entered the State Parliament, becoming premier in 1894. After opposing federation for some years he finally professed himself converted, deserted the State Parliament for the Federal Legislature, and was federal premier in 1904-5. In 1910 he was appointed first High Commissioner for Australia in London. His opponents gave him the nickname of Yes-No Reid ; but his wit wag often too much for them. At one hostile political meeting a bag of flour was thrown over him ; whereupon he remarked to the audience, ' You will notice, gentlemen, the more violently I am assaulted by my enemies the whiter I appear.' A huge man physically, 1 remember hearing him remark at an official banquet in London that he was the only man who represented a whole continent, and that he felt he could never represent anything smaller. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 239 the Federal Legislature than in the State ParUaments, and was the foremost in wishing to enlarge the centrahsing machinery which it controlled, at the expense of the provincial liberties which it had once extolled.^ Against such opposition the federal idea seemed to make no headway. One anti-federal politician boasted that federa- tion was as dead as JuHus Csesar ; ^ but the supporters of federation did not allow their cause to go by default, and they undertook a more active poUcy to secure their ends. Federal leagues were formed, and meetings held in favour of union, and these were not without their influence on public opinion. But it is probable that the financial panic of 1893 had more effect in hastening federation than all the arguments of its supporters. The economic crisis which affected pubhc and private credit throughout Austraha showed clearly the economic interdependence of the various colonies in a convincing manner that came home to every business man and most private citizens ; and it knocked the bottom clean out of the contention, advanced at many meetings in New South Wales, that fiscal differences were more important than national union. Free trade had not saved the mother colony from the crisis, nor had protection saved Victoria. Two years later, in 1895, a Federal Conference was held at Hobart, at which the important suggestion was made that a direct vote of the whole people should be taken on the question of federation, and that if a majority was obtained in three of the States it should suffice. A great popular ' It may be added that, in the stress of the election campaign of 1910, Deakin, one of the leaders of the federation movement, accused the Labour Party of being complete unionists. There were good grounds for tlie accusation ; but it came rather curiously from Deakin. ~ It is a favourite but very foolish device of politicians to Ijoast that the causes they oppose are dead. After the great Liberal victory at the British general election of 1906, many Liberals boasted that imperialism and the policy of Imperial Federation was dead. (See particularly A. G. Gardiner, editor of the London Daily News, in the CoiUemporari/ Review, 191 1. ) The corpse proved an uncommonly lively one. 240 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Convention followed at Bathurst in the following year, with further conferences at Adelaide and Sydney in 1897 ; and the subject was again discussed in London with the Imperial Government on the occasion of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee the same year. In 1898 the whole question was for the first time submitted to the direct popular vote. The result was a gratifying surprise to the federalists. In each of the four states which voted a majority was ob- Popuiar tained in favour of federation. In Victoria and Referen- Tasmania the majority was overwhelming ; in dum on . . . Federation, South Austraha it was two to one ; even in New ^^^^- South Wales, the home of state rights, there was a bare majority for union.^ The majority in the mother colony showed the trend of opinion, but it showed also that the two parties were very evenly balanced. A general election was held to determine the question, at which even the opponents of federation professed themselves in favour of the draft Constitution, pro- vided changes were made in various details ; in consequence, every member of the New South Wales Parliament was now pledged to some kind of union with the neighbouring colonies. It was now generally felt that federation was assured. A conference of state premiers was held in 1899, in which only the inter-state financial problem presented serious difficulties ; and after another popular vote in New South Wales, the federal Constitution was adopted.^ It was substantially the 1 The actual figures were : New South Wales— for federation, 71,595 ; against, 66,228. Victoria— for, 100,520; against, 22,099. South Aus- tralia — for, 35,800; against, 17,320. Tasmania — for, 11,797; against, 2,716. It had been agreed that an affirmative majority of ten thousand was necessary in every state before federation could be carried, and this was obtained in all save New South Wales and Tasmania. " The figures at this referendum were : for federation, 107,420; against, 82,741. A referendum held in Queensland gave 38,488 for federation, and 30,966 against. Another referendum was held in West Australia, while the Commonwealth Constitution was being discussed in the Imperial Parliament, the result being 44,800 for, and 19,691 against federation. The emphatic majority in this last case caused considerable surprise. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 241 same Constitution that had been drawn up at the Sydney Convention eight years before. Subject to the certain approval of the Imperial Govern- ment ^ — which was given after the Australian Constitution Bill had been discussed and passed unanimously in The the Imperial Parliament in 1900 2— the cause of gSSi*'' Austrahan union was now won. The victory of wealth, the centripetal principle was not indeed complete, and the provinces were still able to retain much of that power and influence which their representatives had so jealously guarded during twenty years of discussion ; but it was now deter- mined that a central federal authority should be set up, which should possess certain carefully restricted but still extensive prerogatives, and this federal authority was to be called the Commonwealth of Australia. A faint flavour of repubhcanism still clung to the good old EngUsh word Commonwealth; a slight recollection of regi- cide and revolution had survived the two and a half centuries since Cromwell had ruled the short-Uved Commonwealth of England. That was in itself no objection to the diminishing repubhcan element in Austraha ; ^ but the supporters of * Although short-sighted political theorists had sometimes recom- mended that political divisions between the colonies should be fostered, since they would on that account remain weak, and therefore amenable to imperial control (see vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. i.), the Imperial Government had never, even in its worst days, been guilty of the mean policy of fomenting dissensions among the overseas communities in order to strengthen its own position. It had, in fact, even pressed union on the colonies when they had been opposed to the idea, and both it and they had sufiFered in consequence. (See vol. i. bk. iv. ch. i. ) ^ A conference was opened at the Colonial Office in London, under the presidency of Joseph Chamberlain, to discuss the Commonwealth Con- stitution, on 5th April 1900. The Bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 14th May, and discussed and passed unanimously, every party approving it. Read a third time on 25th June, it passed the House of Lords without opposition on 5th July, and the Royal Assent was given four days later. The debates, which were not remarkable, have been reprinted in Debates and Speeches an the Commonwealth Constitution Act. * In 1893 a Democratic Social Federation at Sydney endeavoured to pass resolutions in favour of the founding of an Australian republic. This was the last dying groan, the death-rattle in the already choking throat, VOL. v. Q 242 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS monarchy were able to adduce good authority for the word,^ and it was generally approved of as the best available. The actual Constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, as finally agreed upon between the colonial statesmen and the The Imperial Government, owed most of its founda- common- tions, its ultimate conception of pohtical philo- stitution, sophy, almost entirely to the unwritten British 1900. model, the grand origin of all modem constitutions that are based on the representative principle. But it derived much of its superstructure, many of its secondary details, and a little even of the binding cement of its foundations, to the example of the United States, whose Constitution had long been studied and admired by all parties in AustraUa. It owed considerably less, but still it owed a little, to Canada, of those who had advocated the federation of Australia on a republican basis. Republicanism and separatism existed after the foundation of the Commonwealth, but they were not advocated by responsible men. There are, however, some signs of those sentiments in the words attri- buted to the federal premier, Andrew Fisher, in the Beview of Reviews (Ehigland), July 1911. But Fisher first repudiated the interview and then repudiated part of the repudiation ; and the editor of that publica- tion, W. T. Stead, was an extraordinary person who professed to have dealings with the spirit world, and who had published what purported to be an interview with the ghost of Gladstone a year or two before. His dealings with the quick and the dead seem to have been equally unfortunate. ^ The word had been proposed by Parkes in 1891, ajid was preferred to United Australia, the Federated States, and the Dominion. The latter title was particularly obnoxious, since it suggested imitation of Canada, which every patriotic Australian was anxious to avoid. The expression had been in common use by Elizabethan writers ; for instance : — * Civil dissension is a viperous worm That gnaws the bowels of the Commonwealth.' 1 King Henry VI. and ' The Commonwealth is sick of their own choice.' 2 King Henry IV. Both quotations had a certain aptness at the time in Australia. The word had been used by Elizabeth herself in her message to the Speaker of the Commons in 1593 — 'Idle heads, which will meddle with reforming the Church and transforming the Commonwealth ' ; and it occurs in one of the Martin Marprelate tracts (The Almond fw a Parret), ' the care of all the Commonwealth.' THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 243 whose institutions Australia, as became an ambitious younger brother of somewhat different views, was at considerable pains not to imitate. And it owed something, a few of the essentially democratic innovations which it embodied in the historic fabric of English constitutional statecraft, to its own original deviations from the accepted routine of orthodox pohtical doctrine. Like the nascent Austrahan nation, the Austrahan Constitution was the creation of an English people, of a young people, and of a people with the power of independent thought. The preamble of the Commonwealth of Austraha Constitu- tion Act opens with the statement that ' The people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God/ have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Common- wealth, under the Crown of the United Kingdom.' This definite insistence on the indissolubihty of the federal bond was due to remembrance of the spht between northern and southern states of the American union in 1861, and to the anticipation of a similar spht, which some pohtical prophets had foretold in Austraha ; the reference to the British Crown was an indication that the monarchical principle had pre- vailed in Austraha, as it had in Canada in 1867, and therefore it was an imphed profession of faith in the essential unity of the British Empire ; the allusion to the people was an affirma- tion of Austrahan rehance on the democratic principle. Neither the American nor the Canadian Constitutions had been submitted to the popular vote.^ ' The blessing of God was besought in the Constitution of the United States, but not in that of Canada. ^ The Australian Constitution is definitely democratic in its reliance on the people, and the Act embodying it specifically defines the Common- wealth as a federation of the people. This is absent from the Canadian Constitution ; on the other hand, the Australian Constitution follows that of the United States in carefully omitting the word nation. Further, the word federal occurs fifteen times in the Australian Constitution, but only once in the Canadian. These verbalisms are not altogether without significance. 244 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS The Commonwealth was to be governed, like the Dominion of Canada, by a Governor-General appointed by and respon- ^j^g sible to the Crown. ^ As in Canada and the Governor- United States, the executive head of the realm ^^^^"^ • was to be paid an annual salary of £10,000 from the general revenues. He was the direct representative of the Crown, the commander-in-chief of the naval and military forces of all the Austrahan colonies ; and he was to be assisted by an advisory Federal Executive Council, similar to that which advised the Governor-General in Canada. But this Council — which was in practice the Commonwealth Cabinet of the day — was not to consist of more than seven members unless the Commonwealth Parhament determined other- wise, and their total salaries were not to exceed £12,000 a year. 2 Australia had already to meet so heavy a bill for the upkeep of the state governments that it could not permit unlimited extravagance on the part of the federal authority. The Governor-General had the power of proroguing and dissolving Parhament ; and he could grant or reserve his assent on parliamentary Bills. But the Crown might disallow any Bill even after the Governor-General had given his assent, provided that such disallowance was announced within twelve months. The Governor-General of Austraha was not charged, as in Canada, with the appointment of the provincial or state governors. In Canada these latter were only lieutenant- governors, whose acts, and those of the provincial legisla- tures, could be vetoed by the Governor-General in Council. The Australian state governors were stiU appointed by the ^ At the 1891 Sydney Convention Sir George Grey had proposed in the fullness of democratic zeal that the office of governor-general should be elective. But this was too much even for democratic Australians, and the suggestion was negatived by thirty-fives votes to three. ^ It was also stipulated that they must be members of the Common- wealth Parliament within three months of assuming office. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 245 Crown, and the Acts of their Parhaments were considered directly by the Crown. To that extent, therefore, the Australian federal union was less close than that of Canada, and the Australian states retained much of the power which the Canadian provinces had resigned ; while the functions of the Commonwealth Governor-General were less extensive than those of the Dominion Governor-General, whose functions in turn were less extensive than those of the President of the United States. Austraha followed the example of Britain, the United States, Canada, and its own provincial states in dividing its Parhament into two chambers, which were named The — after the American, not the British model — the health" Senate and the House of Representatives. In ParUament. constitutional theory — and here also the American federal example was followed — the Senate represented the states, and the House of Representatives the people. It is at once the privilege and the penalty of young com- munities that they have no feudal aristocracy, no landed interest of long descent and old renown, which can form a hereditary House of Lords after the British model. Neither the United States nor Canada has been exempt from the difficulty of forming a Senate, of forming a stable conserva- tive element in the Constitution from a young and there- fore necessarily somewhat unstable and radical people ; but whereas in the former case the Senate elected by the states had become a power, in the latter the Senate nominated by the Crown for life was universally admitted to be the weakest link in the Constitution. Australia had no hesitation in avoiding the Canadian model, not only because it had been imsuccessful, but because the method of nomination was not sufficiently democratic for the politicians of the antipodes. But even the American model was not democratic enough for the AustraUan Constitu- tion, which rejected the American system of the election of 246 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS senators by the state parliaments, and substituted their direct election by the people.^ In Australia, as in America, there were to be an equal number of senators for each state ; but whereas the American states were many in number, and the Australian states were few, six Australian senators instead of the American two were to be chosen from every state of the Commonwealth. The Senate was to choose a president, and to decide ques- tions by vote. When the votes were equal, the question was deemed to be decided in the negative. The president was to have a vote, but no casting vote, since that would have destroyed the theory of the equal representation of the states in the Federal Parliament, The Senate was subject to the usual disabilities of a second chamber with regard to money Bills ; but any Bills which it had no power to amend itself it might request the House of Representatives to amend. The popular House, the House of Representatives, was to consist of members elected by the people of the various states. The House ^^^ ^^e members of the Senate, they were of Repre- directly elected by the popular vote ; but the Ben ives. jj^^gg ^f Representatives, which could increase the total number of its members if it wished, was never to have fewer than five members from any of the states of the Commonwealth. It was always to elect its members, above this minimum of five, in proportion to the population of the ^ The appointment of a nominated Senate had been discussed at the Federal Conventions, and eventually rejected in favour of the elective principle. The State Senate of New South Wales was nominated by the Crown, not elected. A suggestion had once been made that a hereditary House of Lords should be established in Australia ; it perished of overwhelming ridicule. A similar suggestion had been made as regards Canada (vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. v.), and the Canadian Constitution of 1791 contained a clause empowering the Crown to establish a hereditary aristocracy in that colony. It remained a dead letter, as did also the well-meant project of founding a provincial baronetage in Ontario, and the famous order of Caciques and Landgraves in the abortive Constitution of Carolina (vol. i. bk. iv. ch. iii.). THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 247 state ; but whenever its numbers were increased those of the Senate were also to be increased, in order that the pro- portion of two representatives to one senator should always be preserved.^ The House of Representatives, like its prototypes in Britain and America, was presided over by a Speaker, who had no vote unless the numbers were equal on a division, in which case he had a casting vote. Both senators and representatives were to be paid £400 a year for their services, ' until the Parliament otherwise provides.' In this matter Australia followed the example of the United States and Canada, and within a few years the Imperial Parhament followed the contagious and comfortable example of its children. In the event of disagreement between the two Houses, a general election was to be held ; if there was still no agree- ment, a joint sitting of the two Houses was to be held, at which an absolute majority was to decide. This was tanta- mount to placing the final power of control over the legislative machine in the popular chamber. Faihng disagreements between the two Houses, or the carrying of a vote of want of confidence in the ministry, Parhaments were to be triennial. This was one of the few matters in which AustraUa imitated New Zealand, and revived a system which England had abandoned.^ At least it ensured that her people should have no lack of opportunity to express * In the first Commonwealth Parliament New South Wales had twenty-six members, Victoria twenty-three, Queensland nine, South Australia seven, West Australia and Tasmania five each, in the House of Representatives. ^ British Parliaments were triennial from 1694 to 1715, when the Septennial Act was passed, which remained in force until 1911. The Parliament Act of that year changed the duration of the Imperial Parliament to five years. The shorter the period that elapses, the less change is likely to occur in the personnel of the members of Parliament, and in the long run less public interest is likely to be taken when elections are frequent. But I imagine that the recording angel, who alone knows ihe number of lies told by candidates and their agents at general elections, weeps whenever Parliament is dissolved. 248 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS their political opinions ; but there were occasions when they appeared to be sufEering from a surfeit of elections. The Federal Parhament was charged with deciding all questions as to peace, order, and good government ; trade, Fanctions commerce, taxation, bounties, and borrowing of the money for the Commonwealth : the post, tele- Conunon- . . wealth graph, and telephone services ; naval and military ParUament. (defence ; the care of lighthouses and coast lighting, and other measures for securing the safety of Austrahan shores, ports, and harbours ; questions relating to the census, currency, and coining — including banking and insurance, provided these did not infringe the authority of the states ; the control of quarantine, astronomical observations, weights and measures, bankruptcy, copyright, naturahsation, mar- riage and divorce laws, laws relating to parental rights, and old age pensions ; the administration of all justice, and immigration or emigration ; the conduct of foreign affairs, and questions relating to the northern islands, and the acquisition of property on just terms from any state or person ; the control of naval and mihtary railways, the construction and acquisition of State railways with the consent of the states ; all matters referred to the Common- wealth Parhament by any of the State Parliaments, and matters incidental to the execution of any power vested by the Commonwealth Constitution in the Commonwealth Par- liament or in either of its houses. It was further laid down that all laws made by the Common- wealth Parhament within the Umits of the Constitution were to be binding on every state, notwithstanding anything in the laws of any state ; and that although every original power of the states should continue as of old unless it was specifically reserved to the Commonwealth, in the event of a conflict betwen the two, the law of the Commonwealth was to prevail over that of the states. No alteration of the Constitution was to be made unless it was supported by THE BIRTH Of THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 249 both Houses of the Commonwealth Parhament with an absolute majority, and was subsequently approved by a referendum. These latter provisions, which were of fundamental im- portance, tended to centraUse power more and more in the hands of the Commonwealth ; and in this matter Australia approached towards, although it did not at first altogether reach, the examples of the United States and Canada, in both of which countries the federal authority had gained power at the expense of the provincial units. Another important branch of the Commonwealth Con- stitution, which told heavily in favour of the federal authority, was that relating to finance. In the earher, and Authority even in some of the later, discussions concerning of tiie federation it had seemed that agreement over wealth over this essential matter would prove impossible ; FinaJice. yet without a financial concordat, as every delegate from every state well knew, federation would have been impossible. The financial history of the various Australian states was an intricate, difl&cult, and occasionally a rather delicate subject. The individual colonies had borrowed heavily to develop their natural resources, to construct roads and railways, to build harbours, and to promote settlements. Their credit was usually good, for they were prosperous and growing communities, and they had made full use of their credit on the London money market for more than forty years. The result was that, as a critic of Australian finance remarked, while the new Commonwealth would be the richest nation in the world, it would also be the most heavily indebted. The criticism was justified by statistics. The first AustraUan public loan, which was raised by New South Wales in the year 1842 for the purpose of assisting immigration from England, had been for so modest a sum that the not very extensive internal resources of the colony were sufl&cient 250 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS to float it. The next loan which was required was raised in London without difficulty in 1855. Victoria followed the example of New South Wales in 1859 ; Queensland followed Victoria in 1861, two years after its establishment as a separate colony. South and West AustraHa had already raised money in London, the former in 1854, the latter in 1845 ; Tasmania followed suit in 1867. The appetite, in finance as in other things, grows by what it feeds upon. Since the inaugural loans had been raised, repeated apphcations had been made to London for more ; and London had supplied the required amounts, usually with Uttle demur. A steady stream of British capital, as of British emigrants, flowed from the old country to the new ; but the new men hardly kept pace with the borrowed money. In the year 1860 the total debt of Austraha was £9,050,235 — a sum of £7, 18s. 7d. per head of the population ; by the year 1900 the total debt had increased to the enormous amount of £203,601,295— a sum of £53, 16s. 6d. per head of the population.^ Not every colony was indebted in an equal amount.^ And no colony had any desire to assume responsibihty for the debt of any other colony, although no colony would have objected very seriously to pass its own debts over to the federal authority. Yet a consohdation of the various debts, as also of the various revenues and tariffs, into one common system, would have improved the position of all aUke, and strengthened the finances of Australia. It was precisely this consohdation which appeared hopeless of attainment. The difficulty was solved, in so far as it was solved, by a compromise which was called after its author, the Braddon ^ The public debt of Australia continued to increase after federa- tion. On Slst June 1910 the total sum borrowed and actually spent was £249,305,568, * In 1900 the debt of New South Wales was £67,361,246 ; of Victoria, £53,071,275; of Queensland, £35,898,414 ; of South Australia, £26,117,845 ; of West Australia, £12,641,610 ; of Tasmania, £8,511,005. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 251 Clause. Sir Edward Braddon/ one of the many Anglo- Indians who had settled in Tasmania after their official career in the East had closed, had been a delegate at the Federal Conventions ; and his proposal, as finally amended and accepted, was that the entire revenue from all the states should be raised, for a period of at least ten years, or longer if the Federal Parhament should so determine, by the Common- wealth authorities ; and that of the total net revenue thus raised not less than three-fourths should be returned to the states for their own expenditure. In addition, uniform customs dues were to be imposed by every state within two years. The compromise, which was as satisfactory and as short of perfection and permanence as most compromises, saved the situation at the cost of a violent outburst of feehng in New South Wales. The mother colony, which was never guilty of ingratitude to her own memory, and which never forgot that the younger states were her own rebelhous and upstart daughters, saw herself obliged to abandon her cherished free trade policy in order to come into line with the protec- tionist majority, as the only means of securing fiscal uniformity and the national union which her own old leader. Sir Henry Parkes, had so long advocated. She had had to abandon her cherished and very natural desire to see her own capital, the mother city of the continent, recognised as the capital of all Australia. And while smarting under these insults she saw herself obhged to accept the Braddon Clause, which diminished her authority over her own finances. Anti-federal poUticians assured the people they had been tricked, and by an ingenious perversion of the truth, declared * Sir Edward Nicholas Coventry Braddon was born in 1829, and after a distinguished civil and military career in India, he settled in Tasmania in 1878. He took a leading part in the political life of the colony, and died in 1904. He was a brother of the well-known novelist, Miss Braddon, whose ingenious plots have given far more general satisfaction than the Braddon Clause. 252 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS that the Braddon Clause was a device to raise four times as much revenue as was in fact required. The deception was clever enough to have deceived the unwary ; but once the lie had been exposed, the anti-federal cause lost its hold in New South Wales. An integral and important part of the Constitution con- cerned the administration of justice. It was enacted that a xne High Court should be estabhshed, and that all Judiciary. judges should be appointed by the Governor- General in Council ; nor were they to be removed except by an address of both Houses of Parhament in the same session. In this Austraha followed the excellent British rule for preserving the impartial administration of justice ; but it was further laid down that there should be no appeal to the Queen in Council from the decision of the High Court, unless the High Court should itself certify that the question was one which ought to be determined by Her Majesty in Council. Except as thus provided, the Constitution was not to impair any right which the Crown might be pleased to exercise by virtue of its royal prerogative to grant special leave of appeal. The Commonwealth Parhament might make laws hmiting such leave, but it was enacted that those laws must be reserved by the Governor-General for the consideration of the Crown. This limitation caused considerable uneasiness in legal circles in England, which looked with jealousy on any Umita- tion of the royal prerogative, such as this admittedly was ; and which understood, perhaps better than the framers of the AustraUan Constitution, the value of an attempt to preserve legal uniformity throughout the empire ; but the AustraHans refused to give way. Their view was expressed in a human argument not without weight. * The consciousness of kinship,' said the AustraUan delegates, ' of a common blood and a common sense of duty, THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 253 the pride of race and history — these are Knks of empire. When the Australian fights for the empire, he is inspired by these sentiments ; but no patriotism was ever inspired or sustained by the thought of the Privy Council.' The argu- ment may not have satisfied the lawyers ; but those who remembered that Austrahan troops were at that moment fighting by the side of the British in South Africa were in no mood to dissent.^ Such was the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Austraha. It was a compromise, probably the best avail- able compromise, between the advocates of Final national union and provincial rights. It had of the^con- the strength and the weakness of most com- stitution. promises ; it secured immediate if not enthusiastic popular support at the price of imperfections left for future remedies. It represented a victory for the principle of union, but not of close union ; and it was clear that a long struggle was still to come between the forces that had been so evenly balanced. And during the first years of the new Australian Common- wealth there was the same attempt on the part of the larger federal authority to extend its control over the smaller provincial units that had marked the early constitutional history of the United States.^ The real fault to be found with the Austrahan Constitu- tion was that it exemphfied that besetting sin of Enghsh democracy, a disposition to create too much legislative and administrative machinery. The six provinces of Austraha had their own six parhaments, in addition to the one common assembly ; and even the most fervent admirer of constitutional government had to admit that this was more than adequate ^ The Australian High C!ourt, like the supreme court of the United States, very quickly justified its position and proved its impartiality and strength. Within the first decade of its existence it had disallowed several enactments of the Commonwealth Parliament on the ground that they were contrary to the Constitution. 2 See vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. iv. 254 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS for a commimity whose total population was considerably less than four millions.^ But if some Australians lamented this excess of pohtical machinery, others perhaps recalled with satisfaction that their case was not so bad as it might be. Austraha had a rather larger population than the United States at the foundation of the constitution of that republic ; but whereas Austraha had seven parliaments in 1901, the United States had fourteen in 1801. Canada had been almost equally fertile in constitutions,^ and some of the small West Indian islands, the Bahamas, the Bermudas, and Barbados, had the full pohtical machinery of two Houses of Parhament for a population of a few thousands.^ It was decided that the new Constitution of Austraha should be proclaimed with proper pomp and befitting cere- Prociama- i^ony on the first day of the twentieth century — tion of the an auspicious day, it was felt, for the birth of a ww^i*Con- ^^^ nation and the inauguration of what some stitution, ardent patriots hoped would prove a new and better age. Special services of prayer and inter- cession were held in the churches an hour before midnight on the preceding day, and the old century and the old political order to which it had given birth in Austraha died together. The midsummer sun of the antipodes rose the following morning, the 1st of January 1901, over the lavish decorations that heralded the celebration of national unity at Sydney — a city which indeed scarcely required new ornaments to deck her beauty ; official congratulations passed to and fro, and the ^ Statesmen are scarce, particularly in a young country which has no leisured class ; and with so many seats to be filled, it was impossible to get a very high grade of man to fill them all in Australia. There were not enough politicians to go round, as on the local councils in England, Indeed, it is said that in one of the State Parliaments it was necessary to pass a rule that the porters and attendants should not address members by their Christian names, nor drink with them in the bars of the House. Even in a democratic country it is wise to preserve some distinctions. ^ Vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. v., and bk. xi. chs. iv. and v. ' Vol. i. bk. ii. ch. vi., and vol. iv. bk. xii. ch. ii. THE BIRTH OF THE AUSTRALIAN NATION 255 inevitable series of public banquets was given, at which the fare, as is usual on such occasions, was more enjoyable but less innocuous than the formal speeches.^ And three weeks after the new nation was born, the Queen of England and the head of the whole British Empire died. The single span of Victoria's long reign stretched The New back to the days when convicts were still trans- Nation, ported to Australia, when the Government of what was then the undivided colony of New South Wales was military and not constitutional, when the interior of the continent was hardly known, and its total population numbered hardly a hundred thousand. In that one reign the seeds of the new nation had been sown by the free immigrants who followed the convicts, had sprouted, grown, and were now bearing fruit. The new nation was born as the aged queen lay dying ; and with the proclamation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 the third of the great English nations overseas took its place by the side of the United States and the Dominion of Canada, its two elder brethren. The first years in the life of a young nation, like the first months in the life of a young child, are a critical and anxious time. The mortality of infant communities is as heavy as that of little children ; the whole world is strewn with the graves of both. And the newly-born nation resembles the newly-born child in that it cannot see far ; it may cry loudly, but it cannot ease its pain ; it may kick bhndly in fretful agitation, but it cannot walk. Neither has much hold on hfe ; with both the head is weak upon the trunk. The future character is largely unformed ; and although the will is there, its direction is as yet uncertain. But the healthy nation, like the healthy child, survives the ^ See London Times, Jan. 2-10, 1901 ; Sydney Mail and other celebra- tion numbers of the Australian journals. J. F. Hogan in the Con- temporary Review (1901) says that the average Australian was apathetic over the celebrations. 256 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS perils of infancy. By the close of the eighteenth century the United States had outgrown the worst of those inter-state jealousies which had seemed about to wreck the repubUc in civil war. After the formation of the Dominion in 1867, Canada passed through a period of amazing growth without any serious troubles. And Australia was now to pass through the stress of one of her periodic droughts, to experience the inevitable friction between old provinces and new federation, and to feel some apprehension as to the very base on which her own existence and her national ideal rested.* And from these trials she too recovered, and marched forward to the fulfilment of her destiny. ^ See the close of bk. xxii. I i Book XX THE PACIFIC OCEAN: 1578-1910 CHAPTER I ENGLAND AND THE PACIFIC Centuries before the united English Commonwealth in the antipodes was hammered on the anvil of statesmanship out of internal feuds and provincial jealousies, cen- ThePre- turies before the first Enghsh, or even the first historic European vessel adventured its frail body on the ^^°^^°- Pacific Ocean, other men and other races had come and gone across those endless waters. Some tarried awhile on this small island, others on that ; some survived to salute the white man with welcoming caress or menacing spear, others had already vanished before his coming for ever. . But of the scattered and unwritten annals of those ocean wanderers little or nothing is left. Mute memorials of for- gotten peoples, rude images and carven statues, greet the stranger here and there ; old weather-beaten gods, searching in dumb enquiry for lost worshippers that have travelled on ahead to an unknown heaven, stare from sohtary islands out into the silent deep ; but the deep answers not.^ For the South Seas guard their secrets with jealous care, * An account of the extraordinary sculptures and images on Easter Island, the creation of an unknown extinct people, has been published by the Hakluyt Society, with a full bibliography of the subject. Similar mysterious remains exist on the Caroline Islands. VOL. v. B 258 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS mocking gods and men alike ; the past and its peoples have for ever vanished, and this gross fantasy we call our earth has no more need of them or heed of them. Like the visions of dreams, like the voices of night or the mists of the morning, the ancient nomadic islanders of the Pacific are gone, their passing a mystery like the end that met them. The wandering voyagers who sped from isle to isle on frail raft or Mght canoe have sailed at last beyond all earthly seas, swept by the winds of miseen fate across the measureless horizon of death. Others survived to greet the white man ; but these also are gone or going, as in due time the white man, too, may go and leave no memorial. Man builds his empire on solid continents ; but the ocean suffers its children awhile, and then mocks and devours them. Spanish adventurer and Portuguese trader invaded the Pacific from west and east in the sixteenth century, but left ^g less mark on its isles and archipelagoes than Malay European pirate or Maori warrior of old. And few of their nvasion. discoveries were made known at home. Although Spanish treasure ships passed regularly between the Phihppines and Peru, the ocean they crossed remained almost a closed book to Europe, and accounts of their voyages were suppressed lest Other nations should aspire to share the fortunes of Spain. The French at first hardly ventured so far afield ; the Dutch, too, had httle use for a watery waste where commerce was lacking ; ^ and the Enghsh flag was barely known in the Pacific before the end of the eighteenth century. The first EngUsh vessel to cross that ocean was Drake's Golden Hind in 1578. Eight years later the adventurer ^ It must be remembered that few of the islands in the Pacific Ocean were known to the early European mariners or cartographers. One of the old English navigators remarks that there was no place where a vessel could cast anchor between America and Asia. Had the Spaniards not suppressed the knowledge of their discoveries other nations would certainly have followed them into the Pacific, and indeed the fact that their policy of concealment succeeded in giving them a monopoly of the Pacific Ocean for two centuries was its best, and only, justification. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 259 Thomas Cavendish traversed the same seas ; but from that day English enterprise, fully occupied in the East Indies and on the Atlantic coast of America, left the far western and southern seas to others for nearly two hundred years. Commodore Anson indeed followed in Drake's track in the middle eighteenth century ; ^ but prudent British skippers of the mercantile marine, whose paths happened to lie across the Pacific, sometimes found it politic to hoist the Spanish flag on the broad seas that part Asia from America.^ Between Calcutta and New York England had as yet no territorial footing whatever. Nor was any attempt made to obtain a foothold on the western side of South America. Drake, Cavendish, and Anson came to destroy the power of Spain, not to build up the power of Britain. The errand of Byron, Wallis, and Cook was science and discovery, not colonisation.^ And the first settlement made by England in the southern seas was an accident, an unforeseen experiment carried out in solitude, unknown and for long disregarded by the English people at home. But the history of the lonely little colony that was founded by mutineers from the Bounty on Pitcaim Island, the pioneer English settlement in the Pacific, pitcairn has a perennial and univeirsal interest. The island, 1790. romance of its origin enthralls the schoolboy ; the lessons of its progress and decline may well attract attention from the student of human society. On the 9th October 1787 the Bounty, two hundred and forty-five tons. Lieutenant William Bligh, K.N., left the Thames with a crew of forty-five ofl&cers and men on a voyage * For Drake and Cavendish, vol. i. bk. i. ch. iii. ; for Anson, bk. V. ch. ii. 2 See the instance cited in vol. iv. bk. xv. ch. ii. " See bk. xvii. ch. ii. Had the Scottish settlement in Panama (yoL i. bk. iv. ch. iii.) been successful, the course of British colonial history might have been altogether different, But it failed dismally. 260 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS of discovery in the south seas. Such voyages had been frequent of late years ; they were still considered hazardous and likely to lead to strange adventures, but none ever had so extraordinary and unlooked-for consequence as this. The vessel proceeded with little incident to vary the slow monotony for some weeks. But Bligh's acts soon showed that his character already had the faults which years after- wards, when Governor of New South Wales, led to his deposition by the free settlers of that colony.^ Although a capable seaman, he was irascible and unjust, and ready to bring accusations at large against the men under him of petty thefts and disobedience to orders. In that age, and in that service, sailors were used to harsh treatment. But there is a limit to the patience of men. The crew grumbled at his insults, and Fletcher Christian, the ship's mate, at length rebelled ; and on 27th April 1789 he headed a mutiny while the vessel was in the South Seas near the island of Tahiti. It was successful : Bligh was overpowered, and cast adrift in the ship's launch with eighteen companions and sufficient provisions to last until they should make the nearest land ; and the Bounty pro- ceeded imder Christian's command with the remainder of the crew to Tahiti. Bligh eventually made his way to England, after a terrible voyage of forty-six days in an open boat before he sighted land at Timor, three thousand six hundred miles from the scene of the mutiny ; but among the rebels open dis- agreement soon broke out, and the party divided. Most of the men determined to settle on the island of Mytea, where they were afterwards found by a vessel sent from England to ^ See bk. xvii. ch. iv. The story of the mutiny has been written in detail by Lady Belcher, The Mutineers of the Bounty. The fortunes of the Pitcairn Islanders are discussed in Beechey's Voyages ; and there is some valuable information in the official Colonial Office Reports on Pitcairn Island for 1900 and 1901. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 261 discover and arrest them, and then transported home and punished for their crime. But nine of the crew decided to stand by Christian. Each of these men took to himself a Tahitian wife ; and this party, accompanied by a few Tahitian men and women who wished to follow them, twenty-seven persons in all, departed to establish themselves elsewhere. The whole Pacific Ocean is strewn with islands and islets, nearly all of them fertile and fruitful, and many of them uninhabited by human beings. Some lie in the main road of ocean traffic ; others are solitary spots in a solitary sea. It was to one of thp most remote and lonely of all these islands that Christian determined to conduct his fellow- mutineers. In the small ship's library aboard the Bounty, along with nautical almanacs, rules for astronomical observations, and the officers' guides of the day, were some of the accounts that previous travellers had published of their voyages in the South Seas. One of these travellers, Captain Carteret, had described the extreme loneliness of Pitcaim Island, a volcanic rock some two miles long by three-quarters broad, the most remote of many remote islands in the Low Archipelago.^ It was to this solitary spot that Christian led his men. Here at least they were safe from pursuit. Early in the year 1790 the party landed on Pitcaim Island. Everything that could possibly be of any use was removed from the vessel ; planks, nails, bolts, and sails were taken ashore ; and that done, the hull of the Bounty was fired and sunk in the little inlet that has ever since been known as Bounty Bay. The whole island was now divided into nine portions by Christian, and distributed equally among the nine white men. The Tahitians were omitted from the partition. * It Avas discovered by Carteret in 1767, and named after the midship- man who first sighted it. 262 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS For three years all went well, and the little community flourished and throve in amity and peace. But then came six years of continuous tragedy — tragedy none the less grim that it was played on a petty stage, out of sight of a world that was now engrossed in the French Revolution and a European war. It happened that the Tahitian wife of one of the Englishmen accidentally met her death by a fall over a clifi ; and the widower took to himself by force the wife of a Tahitian. The sin brought its own immediate punishment in this primitive drama of lust and hate. The Tahitians conspired against the English and threatened to kill them ; and the Tahitian wives of the other white men betrayed the plot to their husbands. Remonstrance was made with the adulterer, but to no purpose. He refused to restore the woman to her husband. And being a good workman, his services were so valuable to the community that he was left unpunished. But from that day peace vanished from the island. The guilty man lived on ; but his sin recoiled upon the innocent. Fletcher Christian was shot in a brawl, thus paying the penalty of his weakness in dealing with the offender ; and four of the other white men were also killed. Among these four was the adulterer ; but his sin had not yet purged itself upon his fellows. Four Englishmen only remained ; and these, fearful lest they also should be destroyed, decided to kill all the Tahitian men. The work was done without difficulty ; but the Tahitian women, horrified at the murder of their countrymen, determined to escape from the terrible isle. A leaking boat stopped the wild design at the outset ; and the women then plotted to murder the four remaining Englishmen. The plot was discovered and frustrated. But the numbers of the whites were now again reduced. One had discovered a means of distilling alcohol from the plants THE PACIFIC OCEAN 263 of the island, and he and a companion were constantly drunk. The one threw himseK over the rocks in an attack of delirium tremens ; the other lost his reason. In self-defence the two remaining Enghshmen were compelled to shoot their mad companion. At last the evil consequences of the dead adulterer's sin had worked themselves out. The two surviving whites, Edward White and Alexander Smith, were sober, godly men, who devoted themselves to the task of teaching what was left of the little community a better way of hfe. A Bible and a Prayer Book of the Church of England that had belonged to Fletcher Christian were found, after long neglect, and regularly used. A service of prayer was held every morning and evening, and systematic religious instruction was given to the children of the colony. It was in the year 1799 that this extraordinary change came over the settlement. Nearly ten years had now elapsed since the mutineers had come to Pitcairn, and no stray vessel had brought them news of the outer world. Truly Christian had led his men to a safe refuge. A few months later Edward Young fell a victim to asthma ; and Alexander Smith — who subsequently changed his name to John Adams, as though to wipe out all trace of the hateful events with which he had once been associated — was now the only one of the original company of mutineers that survived. But the children of this small community were growing up around him. And the memories of little children are short ; the offspring of the mutineers gave no sign in after life of any knowledge of the evil deeds of their fathers. Nor was John Adams unfitted for the work before him. Patiently and thoroughly he taught his pupils from the Bible day by day ; and the years that were big with events in the great i" world where nations and empires were struggling and falling, passed peacefully and slowly on this lonely rock of 264 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS the ocean, whose only happenings were the primal necessary things of nature, seedtime and harvest, and birth and mating and death. At long last, after twenty years of soMtude, an American vessel hove in sight of Pitcaim. Communication was established ; the extraordinary story of the settlement was told, and forwarded to England, together with the chrono- meter and compass of the Bounty as a proof that it was true. Widespread interest was aroused at home ; but the Napoleonic war was at its height, and in the clash of arms in Europe the petty affairs of Pitcairn were forgotten. A few years later the island was visited by two British frigates. Adams was asked if he wished to return to England ; and to the surprise of his hearers — for he would still have been hable to stand his trial for mutiny — he answered in the afl&rmative. Only the tears and entreaties of his people now dissuaded their leader, and the warships sailed away without him. But one of the crew was so attracted by the character of the colony that he sought, and obtained, permission to settle on Pitcairn. This was the first new blood the colony had received since its founding. Again, in 1825, the island was visited by Captain Beechey on a voyage of discovery, and full enquiry was made into the condition of its people. Investigation amply proved the value of Adams's work. Beechey found that the little com- munity had now increased to sixty-six persons, who lived as one large family under the care and control of the old mutineer. Their houses were clean and comfortable, their gardens neat and tidy. Their food was simple, being pork or fowls, vegetables and breadfruit. Alcohol was forbidden, and their drink was water, or an infusion of ginger sweetened with sugar. The women still preserved some Tahitian customs — the food was cooked in Tahitian fashion, and children were suckled at the breast for two or three years, after the fashion common among the Pacific Islanders — but THE PACIFIC OCEAN 265 the children spoke excellent English, and could read and write intelligently. The morals of the community were above reproach. The sin whose consequences had nearly destroyed the original settlement was unknown ; the people were obedient to the instructions of Adams, and reUgious observances were frequent and regular. On Sundays no work whatever was permitted, even the necessary food being cooked the day before ; the whole Sabbath was occupied in pubhc worship, no fewer than five services being held by Adams and attended by all. Every one seemed happy and contented. The lives of the Pitcaim Islanders were passed in conditions of idyllic peace ; they had known no larger stage on which to play the round of life, and they needed none. Not long afterwards, on 29th March 1829, the well-beloved head of the community ended his strange eventful life. He was sixty-five years of age when he died, and his last moments were cheered and comforted by the tender care of the people he had led from anarchy to peace. The strange chances of human fife, which fated this son of a poor London boatman to save and establish a little com- munity in the southern seas, had given the mutineer-pastor, John Adams, a place in history as sure, albeit on a far less conspicuous plane, as that held by George Washington. In each case a man, seemingly of ordinary and even common- place calibre, who would otherwise have been unknown beyond the small immediate circle of his intimates, was forced by unsought and unforeseen circumstances into a position which he alone of all his fellows was competent to fill ; and his mastery of those circumstances sufficed for that remembrance when the work was done which we poor mortals call immortahty. When the grief of the people had somewhat abated, another pastor was chosen, and the petty happy round of life con- 266 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS tinued as of old. Again the years passed ; but as they passed a silent subtle change was seen. The population outgrew the narrow resources of Pitcaim, and the British Grovernment, which felt a moral responsibility for this strange settlement in the wilderness of waters, persuaded the people to remove in 1856 to the larger Norfolk Island. But the experiment was not altogether successful. The descendants of the mutineers left their Uttle rock unwillingly, and recalled its memory with regret ; they disliked their new abode, which, they said, was not their own, as Pitcairn had been ; and after two or three years, many of them returned to the lonely rock which they had never ceased to call their home. Once more the peaceful monotonous round of life began. But again there were subtle and at first unnoticed changes in this small community, the minute yet unceasing action of circumstance and environment on a people whose circum- stance and environment was never changed by travel or new blood. They remained indeed happy and contented ; but their peace was a stagnant vacant peace. The population now rapidly increased ; in thirty-four years the people had trebled, despite an epidemic which varied their usual good health in 1893.^ There was no room for this expansion on the island, yet none would leave its narrow shores. Over-population and in-breeding resulted, and in time a general deterioration of moral and intellectual fibre was observed by the casual visitor ; it was stated that the people did nothing and read nothing all day, that they refused books when these were offered them, and that the children no longer spoke good BngHsh, but a chpped and stunted dialect which it was difficult for the outsider to ^ The epidemic was ascribed, probably with justice, to the visit of a trading vessel shortly before. Similar outbreaks from a similar cause are mentioned later in this chapter as occurring all over the islands of the Pacific Ocean. I have read somewhere that the people who inhabit the isle of St. Kilda, off Scotland, ascribe any sickness that visits them to infection brought by travellers from the mainland. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 267 understand. Their restricted interests, sharpened by no exterior stress or friction, had continually contracted on themselves to their own harm. The houses and gardens were now untidy and uncared for. Mutual love no longer prevailed ; a feud between the two principal famihes divided the island into rival camps, but even the feud was sullen and languid. Crime, too, was no longer unknown, and two murders were committed within eighteen months. There were more women than men among the new genera- tion in Pitcairn, and to this may perhaps be ascribed part of the degeneration of morality.^ Several illegitimate children had been bom ; and this occurrence, which would have horrified the pious soul of good John Adams, was not excused or explained by the fact that the people had recently abandoned the teaching of the Church of England for the tenets of the Seventh Day Adventists,^ or by the recent political revolution which had given them a constitution. There was now a parhament of seven members on Pitcairn, elected by every man and woman — for female sufErage obtained one of its earhest victories on that island — over twenty-one years of age. The existence of a parhament in so small a community is probably a sign that the Pitcairn Islanders had been unable to breed a man of sufficient natural authority to rule as Adams had ruled, and much of the slackness which was observed among the people may certainly be ascribed to the gradual extinction of the gentle but effectual authority which he had exercised. A generation previously the island might have furnished a ' I speak with hesitation on this difficult question, and indeed any attempt to construct a general theory on a problem which may be affected by climate, local considerations, fashions, and individual example would be absurd. But it seems probable that the more equal the distribution of the sexes, the better will sexual morality be. - The Adventists are Christian sects which look for the speedy second coming of the Messiah. The Seventh Day Adventista hold their Sabbath on the Saturday, after the Jewish fashion. 268 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS practical illustration of Utopia for the political philosopher, an idyllic picture of Christian peace and goodwill to the religious. But it was now no more than a sorry and depressing example of divergence through separation from the parent stock, of deterioration through lack of mental interests, of intellectual apathy leading rapidly towards atrophy. The isolation of the people of Pitcaim from the struggles and temptations which beset other human beings on the wider stage of hfe had not evolved a higher type, of men superior to the rivalries and jealousies of their fellows ; it had produced instead a physically and mentally inferior tribe, divided into two factions, incapable of advance on its own small territory, and equally incapable of holding its own elsewhere, or even of the desire to go elsewhere.^ But while these subtle changes were slowly affecting the uneventful Hves of the Pitcaim Islanders in their remote Europeans Settlement, other and far stranger changes had Invade the been occurring around them in the Pacific. When **^^°' their fathers had mutinied on the Bounty a century before, the white man had been a rare and curious visitor to the South Seas. But since then all was altered. White traders and missionaries had come and conquered the old inhabitants of a thousand isles ; European warships had charted the unknown seas, sailing vessels and steamers now made their way to every comer of the ocean, and the great powers of the world had begun to covet and control the beautiful fertile lands whose very existence had been unknown until near the close of the eighteenth century. The trader brought a visible hell, the evangehst promised ^ I make no excuse for giving the trivial annals of Pitcairn Island thus fully. From its petty history the philosopher of another planet could reconstruct the whole of human society ; and our own undoubted sages, who are sometimes inclined to overlook the part which environment plays in the world, may realise from the lives of those who could not escape from their environment how great a factor it may become. Its effects are less on a larger scene ; but for the ruck of humanity they exist nevertheless. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 269 an invisible heaven ; but both brought danger and death to the aboriginal islanders of the Pacific. And whether the white man came on the errand of God or Mammon, Theyspread whether he sought to save or destroy, uncon- Disease, sciously he carried the seeds of his own diseases, and the people he visited had not the power of resistance which he had acquired in long generations of sufEering and eUmination of the susceptible.^ Practically every visit which every European made to any of the Pacific Isles was followed by the outbreak of an epidemic, although the white man himself might not be aware that he carried the germ of a single malady upon his person or the vessel in which he came. Tuberculosis, smallpox, syphilis, influenza, measles, dysentery, meningitis, and whooping-cough ravaged the islands ; and in almost every case when careful enquiry was made it was found that the aborigines had diminished since the coming of the white.^ It is beheved indeed that the aboriginal people of the Pacific Isles had already begun to dechne before the white man came among them.^ The lack of a stable Decrease of social or pohtical organisation caused continual Aboriginal wars between rival chiefs and islands, which did ^'>p^*^*^*'°- much to thin the numbers of the tribes. The inbreeding of a small population may have done harm in some islands ; but * I must leave the question to medical men— if they can answer it — why European civilisation and diseases should have been so fatal to the aborigines in North America, the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia ; whereas in Asia and Africa, on the contrary, the natives have apparently increased more rapidly since the advent of Europeans than before. In every case medical science, missionary teaching, and the ban on tribal war have been the same ; but while it has assisted the natural increase of population in the Old World, it has availed nothing in the New. There is no obvious reason why the African negro should have a greater resisting power against disease than the American redskin. * One exception was the Solomon Islands {Statistical Report, Sydney, 1909). It was sometimes suggested that infection was carried from one island to another by the trade- winds and not by human agency. 2 Ellis's Polynesian Researches. 270 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS since in most cases there was frequent communication with other islands, and a fairly regular importation of fresh blood, this can hardly have been more than a hmited source of damage. It is disputed whether the open, and in some cases disgusting, licentiousness of the people reduced their vitahty ; but it is certain that, although the birth-rate was high, the horrible practice of infanticide, which was extremely prevalent, more than counteracted the exuberant fertility of the native women. There were cases in which women converts confessed to the missionaries that they had kiUed five or seven or even nine of their infants ; one terrible instance has been recorded in which the seventeen children of one mother had all been done to death at the moment of their birth. Sometimes the child was strangled, sometimes its throat was pinched until it died ; a more barbarous method — if there are degrees in this kind of inhuman savagery — was to break the bones of the new-bom child one by one until the wretched infant perished. In most of the islands the child was either destroyed immediately after birth — its destruction having been pre- determined by the parents — or suffered to hve ; but in the Sandwich Islands it might be destroyed by its creators at any time during the first year of its existence. And frequently the child was not born at all, for the aborigines were artists in abortion ; but in these cases outraged nature sometimes revenged itself upon the unnatural mother. . . . How greatly the population diminished through infanticide may be judged from the fact that one evangeUst of long experience, who was a competent and careful observer by no means given to exaggeration, gave it as his deHberate opinion that two-thirds of all the native children born in the South Seas were murdered by their parents.^ No birth-rate, however high, could survive that awful drain upon it ; above * Ellis's Polynesian Researches. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 271 all when, as was the case here, it was the female children in particular who were hable to be destroyed. There were islands where the proportion of men to women was as five to one ; yet in these islands polygamy prevailed. As to the origins of this widespread system of murder there might be differences of opinion,^ but of the facts there could be no doubt whatever. The causes existed before the white man came, and they persisted after his coming. But if the population was falling before the European invasion of the Pacific, its diminution afterwards was rapid and fearful. On one island of the Marquesas it dropped from many thousands to eighty in thirty-four years. An epidemic of smallpox and tuberculosis reduced a tribe of four hundred persons to two. In the Gilbert Islands it shrank steadily from disease.^ In the Fiji Islands an epidemic of measles broke out in 1875, shortly after a British vessel had visited that archipelago ; and within less than a year forty thousand of its inhabitants had perished from a disease that is usually regarded as one of the less serious maladies of childhood in Europe. On almost every island the aboriginal population was dying out before the white invader. This terrible destruction of native life was regarded by some white men with equanimity, and, if we are to beUeve the evidence of an honest but prejudiced witness, even with rejoicing ; ^ but there were others, earnest and warm- ^ Possibly it was originally due to over- population, which, on the small spaces of the Pacific Islands, soon became a pressing question, as at Pitcairn. It was also a recognised social usage, and the wife of inferior station who had married a chief was considered to hare raised herself to his rank when she hs^l borne and killed several children. a Colonial Office Reports : Viaita to Gilbert and Ellice Is., 1909-10. ^ Paton in his Autobiography has an anecdote of a white trader who landed men whom he knew to be suffering from measles on an island, in order that the natives might take the infection and so die. He said to Paton, ' Sweep these creatures away, and let the white men occupy the soil.' Precisely the same doctrine was held in Queensland ; see bk. zviii. eh. iii. 272 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS hearted Christians in Britain, to whom the thought that whole tribes and races of mankind were perishing without The Spread *^^ gospel of eternal salvation caused unutterable of Chris- distress ; and by these men, who had not for- ^" gotten the command of Christ to spread the Gospel among all peoples, an effort was made to evangelise the South Seas while there was yet time.^ The years that followed the exploration of the Pacific Ocean were, indeed, a time of great missionary zeal in Eng- land. An heroic effort was made to convert the negroes, both in West Africa itself and in the West Indian plantations ; ^ others were kindled with the desire to evangelise the aborigines of South Africa,^ and the peoples of India and Malaya ; ^ and in this fervour the South Sea Islands were not forgotten.^ The first party of twenty-five Protestant missionaries was ^ The same causes had the same effects in Spain nearly three centuries before ; vol. i. bk. i. ch. ii. ^ See vol. iv. bks. xii-xiv. ^ See vol. vi. bk. xxiv. ch. ii., and bk. xxv. * See vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. ii. for Malaya. The first English mission- aries arrived in India early in the nineteenth century, when Lord Minto was Governor-General. ' There is a very large literature of missionary effort in the South Seas. Much of it is very valuable, both in an historical and ethnological sense ; some is beautiful and even inspiring as the record of heroic struggles against difficulties ; but part is puerile and superstitious, or narrow and bigoted ; and — in my opinion, at least, after struggling through most of the many volumes — it is always far too long. Among the leading works may be mentioned : Ellis's Polynesian Researches, a valuable and moderately expressed examination of the condition of the South Seas ; John Williams's Narrative of Missionary Enterprise, the straightforward autobiography of an honest man ; Calvert's Fiji and the Fijians, a good book spoilt by a bad editor ; G. S. Rowe's James Calvert of Fiji and Lawrie's Two Missionary Visits to the Friendly and Feejee Islands, both examples of the worst style of mission literature ; Lovett's James Chalmers, good ; Prout's Life of Williams and Button's Missionary Life in the South Seas, futile compilations; Steele's New Hebrides and Christian Missions, not very stupid ; Turner's Nineteen Years in Poly- nesia, Hunt's Memoirs of the Rev. W. Cross, and Ellis's History of the London Missionary Society, good ; Robertson's Erromanga the Martyr Isle and Murray's The Martyrs of Polynesia, moderate ; the Life of Sdiiryn, Young's Life of Patteson, Selwyn's Letters on the Melanetian Mission and George Brown, an Autobiography, all excellent ; John G. Paion, by his brother, and Paton's Autobiography, full of incidents but prejudiced and bigoted. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 273 sent out to the Pacific Ocean in the year 1797 by the London Missionary Society, a body whose fundamental principle it was that each evangelist should plant the form of Church government he thought most suited to the soil in which he worked. These pioneers of the faith established themselves in Tahiti, the Marquesas, and the Friendly Islands, learning the languages, and living as far as possible among the people whom they wished to convert ; but for some years there was no result of all their labours. At last they were compelled to leave Tahiti without having made a single convert, but hardly had they gone when they were recalled. The native chief of that island now promised to embrace Christianity ; the forced conversion of his people followed, after a war in which the followers of the old religion were overthrown ; and thus unexpectedly the first real victory of Christianity was won in the Pacific. Other mission stations followed in quick succession. In 1826 a Wesleyan Mission was opened in the Friendly Isles ; and the Tongan converts of that archipelago soon carried the news of the new reUgion, which they embraced with ardour, to the then little known islands of Fiji. Bishop Selwyn, the able and energetic head of the Church of England in New Zealand, had hardly arrived in the antipodes before he set about spreading the work of evangelisation, and in 1849 the Melanesian Mission was begun under his direction. The Catholics, ever to the fore in the spreading of the Gospel, had already begun work in the Solomon Islands, and both here and elsewhere they carried the banner of Christ to some of the most lonely and savage resorts of man in the Pacific.^ The work was seldom easy, and nearly always dangerous — for the people of the Pacific were as fickle as children — but ^ The official Handbook of the Solomon Isles Protectorate (1911) contains an account of the Catholic mission of St. Mary and its martyrs on those islands. VOL. v. S 274 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS these pioneers of the faith comforted themselves with the thought that St. Paul, the great pioneer of Christianity, had Difficulties passed through perils not less grave. And there Mis^on^^*"^ were martyrs, too, in the Pacific — men who watered aries. the creed they had helped to plant with their blood : such were John Williams, clubbed to death in the surf off Erromanga ; the two Gordons, husband and wife, whose blood marked the spot on the rocks where they fell for many a year ; a Catholic bishop and three priests on the Solomon Isles ; and several others, martyrs in will if not in deed, who were stricken down by fever or dysentery as they worked on alone among strange scenes and an ahen people. Often, indeed, the way was hard and the soil stubborn, ' a sowing time of tears/ as one confessed in sorrow when all persuasion seemed in vain ; but few lost courage or abandoned the task before them. And sometimes an omen would convince where preaching or prayer had failed. For many and various were the chances that moved these fickle islanders. At one place a sickness broke out after the teaching of the white man had been rejected — it was ascribed to the anger of the white man's god, and all at once beUeved. At another time an epidemic of dysentery was laid at the door of the missionary when success seemed in sight, and he had to flee for his hfe.^ Once when the people were perverse, ' a hurri- cane taught them righteousness,' through fear, wrote the simple-minded man who pointed the way of the Cross, nothing doubting that God had worked a miracle to aid His servant ; indeed, many times ' the divine agency was too conspicuous to escape attention ' in thus leading men on the path to salva- tion. Such was the faith that can move mountains, and in truth it moved many in these years. But if God was at work with His people, as the missionaries ^ It was a prevalent belief among the natives that all sickness was due to an enemy, and that therefore that enemy must be sought out and killed. The fact that an epidemic usually followed the arrival of a stranger shows how the belief arose ; the remedy was natural. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 275 held, the forces of evil were also busy. The backsUders from the faith were many, and they were chiefly among the young ; too often they returned to their own gods, and restored the idols which they had never truly banished from their hearts. Yet sometimes the way was easy, and a whole island would be converted in a day, the people exclaiming, ' Surely this is the truth ; our religion was all deceit ' ; or, as at Rurutu, ' The glory of our gods is as birds' feathers, soon rotten ; but your God is the same for ever.' At such times the enthusi- astic proselytes would hasten to build a church, and even their spears would be turned into balustrades to form a pulpit ; they would apply themselves to read the Christian scriptures in their own tongue, and entreat the privilege of becoming missionaries to others — a favour that was only granted after long training and examination by the white evangelists.^ But it was only the smaller islets that so readily abandoned their belief in pagan gods ; in none of the important islands was Christianity introduced without a war, in which the newly made Christian would fight with heathen brother for the triumph of the faith. Mission narratives declare that in these conflicts the pagans were always the aggressors ; but even if that rather doubtful assertion were universally true, it would still remain the fact that the original cause of the strife lay with Christianity as the invading creed. But even within the sacred limits of the Christian faith unhappy conflicts arose among its divided preachers and converts that caused grave scandal and distress. DivisionB The miserable strifes and jealousies which divided among the Protestant sects of Europe were perpetuated ®™' in the South Seas, as one denomination after another quarrelled over its share in the spoil of souls ; and the narrowness and ^ Ellis remarka {Polynesian Jieaearches) that there were few sudden con- veraiona. But the facts are against him. 276 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS bigotry which it was still Britain's pride to exhibit in religious matters was not forgotten when Protestant missionaries in the Pacific encountered their comrades of the CathoUc Church. In some cases, indeed, the friction between rival Protestant sects was composed by an agreement for each to restrict its energies to a certain sphere. Where the field was so vast a friendly accommodation of this kind should never have been difficult. But between Protestant and Catholic missionary was undying hate, and the simple natives who were enjoined to embrace the religion of truth and love may well have wondered which was the truth and where the love, when each denounced the other in turn as an impostor. One Protestant propagandist, John G. Paton, was not ashamed to suggest a parallel between the CathoUc Church and the rites of the heathen deities.^ The Wesleyan missionaries were found denouncing the Catholics as men who were obhged to flee their own country ; ^ and in Fiji there was a well-understood distinction between Catholicism, ' the pope's reUgion,' and Wesleyanism, ' the oily religion.' ^ When such divisions prevailed among the white teachers, the native pupils who had so recently been saved from the discomforts of eternal damnation need not be severely blamed if they showed less of charity than zeal in their dealings with other converts of a different brand, and sometimes used their ancient weapons in the propagation of the new faith. An open war that raged between rival sects in the Friendly Islands called for the intervention of the British civil power ; * nor were such incidents unprecedented in the history of the conversion of the Pacific Islanders to Christianity. ^ Paton's Autobiography. ^ Erskine's Journal of a Cruise in the West Pacific. 2 Britton's Fiji in 1870. The oil was a tribute which the Wesleyan converts bad to pay for the support of their missionary. ■* Colonial Office Report : On the Recent Disturbances in the Affairs of Tonga, 1887. There were no fewer than five separate denominations of Christians on the island. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 277 But in the end, and despite their mutual disagreements, the Christian missions conquered the pagan creeds. And they not only conquered but ruled the people, with a ^^^^ discipline stern and strict and sometimes harsh, Eventual a discipline which indeed purified the old savage life " °'^' of the Pacific of many of its grossest features, but which also interdicted song and dance and much of the light of life and love. If the horrid rites of brutal gods were henceforth banished, the beautiful legends that had passed from isle to isle through the length and breadth of the broad ocean were also now tabu,i and in their place were introduced the Shorter Catechism,^ the grim God and dour defini- ^ The dances and songs of the Pacific Islanders were condemned as indecent, which they probably were ; although perhaps hardly more so than some that excite applause on the European stage. But the earlier missionaries seem to have known nothing of the legends of the islands, which they roundly condemned as heathen. What else did they expect ? But these legends were often beautiful ; some are mentioned in bk. xxi. ch. iii. ; one may be cited here. A Tongan story tells that once a maiden was so beautiful that her father kept her secluded from the gaze of men. But the sun in the heavens, which sees everything on earth, saw her and loved her as she lay one day on the beach after bathing in the sea. And, seeing him and loving him in return, the maiden conceived, and in due time gave birth to a child by the sun, and this child was called a sun-child. Now other children mocked at him, for that he had no father ; but his mother com- forted him, saying that his father was the sun. And behold, the child went to see and to speak with his father on the ocean out of which he saw him rise every morning. But the sun heard him not when he shouted, and sank out of sight ; so the lad said, ' I will go back and wait for my father when he climbs again out of the sea.' And this time the sun saw his child, and came and talked with him behind a cloud. And that day the people said that the sun delayed his journey across the sky, because he stopped to talk with the lad. But he gave his child of the earth a message to his sister the moon, and the lad waited for her, and talked with her that night. But her he disobeyed, for she was only a woman ; and disobeying her he died. For my part, I would exchange a good many volumes of missionary memoirs and sermons for another prose poem like that. But poetry is inherent in the Pacific, and some modern Englishmen who have travelled in that ocean have caught something of its charm, as is evidenced by that enchanting romance, The Blue Lagoon, in which my friend, H. de Vere Stacpoole, has added a pure gem to the literature, not of England only, but of the world. ^ *r have gone carefully through the translation of the Shorter Catechism into Aniwan.' — Paton. 278 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS tions of Scots theology, the complicated ceremonial law of ancient Jewry,^ and the hymns and tracts of modern Wesleyanism. The strict observance of the Sabbath, that Puritan fetich which has sat so heavily on modem England, was trans- strict- planted to the Pacific ; and one of the first cares Missionary ^^ ^^^ missionaries was to insist that the Christian Rule. Sunday should be as drear and dismal in the South Seas as in Scotland. In Hawaii, said one evangelist, ' the Sabbath was spent in a manner truly gratifying. No athletic sports were seen, no noise of playful children, shouting as they gambolled in the surf, no persons carrying canoes. . . . (Such was) the dawn of a bright Sabbath Day.' ^ As the power of the missionaries grew among the native Christians, penalties were imposed for any infringement of the strict round of Sabbath duties ; a spell of work at road- making was exacted as a penance from the unruly who could not attune their joyous vitality to the decorous dullness of the day of rest ; ^ and in one scandalous case, where a Chris- tian missionary had drawn up an entirely new code of laws for a tribe which he had converted, severe punishment was imposed upon the Sabbath-breaker, but no penalty whatever was provided for murder.* With each conversion the power of the missionaries grew among a docile if fickle people ; and although they professed themselves unwilling to interfere in native politics, they were seldom able to refrain for long from making fundamental changes in the barbaric government of the Pacific Isles, nor 1 Erskine (Journal of a Cruise) found the books of Leviticus and Numbers translated into the native tongue in Samoa. 2 Ellis's Polynesian Researches. Ellis states that the strictness of Sabbath observance was desired by the people themselves. After the missionaries had dwelt sufficiently upon the importance they attached to it, perhaps. ^ Ellis's Polynesian Researches. * Williams's Narrative. Williams was himself the author of the code. He was afterwards murdered. Could he have foreseen the future he might have been a better lawyer but a less willing missionary. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 279 do they seem in fact to have been very unwilling to in- troduce a new earth as well as a new heaven among their followers. In part, it is true, this intervention was inevitable, for Christianity cut right across the aboriginal conception of society. Against infanticide every evangehst was bound to protest. Cannibahsm had also to be sternly stamped out. And it was likewise decided that polygamy could not be recognised among converts, and that every candidate for baptism must content himself with one wife. Slavery, to judge by the past practice of the Christian churches, was a more open question ; but the evangelical school to which most of the Protestant missionaries belonged had always been inspired by the example of William Wilberforce, and was therefore committed to emancipation wherever its influence prevailed. Against each of these practices, all common in the South Seas, the missionaries protested ; and not in vain. Infanticide and cannibalism were suppressed, at least to outward appear- ance, with little difficulty ; ^ but polygamy, a far more deeply rooted social custom than either, needed more per- suasion, and there were often distressing scenes when the numerous wives of an important man were publicly repudiated by their owner. The old heathen creed of the Pacific Islands was a political as well as a religious system, and in smashing the one the missionaries smashed the other. The authority of the chiefs vanished with the power of the native priests and the destruction of the native idols ; a social revolution confronted ^ Perhaps the missionaries were not always so successful as they hoped and believed. A naval officer, whose name I forbear to mention, tells me that he and some of his shipmates were sumptuously entertained a few years ago at a feast by the chief of one of the Pacific Isles. ' Ah,' said the native potentate to his guests after the feast was ended, ' you white men object to eating your fellows. But the roast pork which you have just enjoyed was the flesh of a native baby.' The disgusted sailors bombarded the place as a return for this excessive hospitality. 280 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS the people and their evangelists ; and the white man naturally assumed the vacant leadership.^ That the missionaries made full use of their power is testified by many impartial observers, and by the admissions of the missionaries themselves. A secular witness declares that in Tahiti the missionaries were supreme until the coming of the French, and that on another island nobody was allowed abroad after eight in the evening.^ A white stranger who unwittingly transgressed the rule was arrested and taken before the resident evangelist for judgment. In the Sandwich Islands the government was a pure theocracy, in the hands of missionaries from New England, who were unconsciously preparing the way for the future annexation by the United States. In many islands, too, the missionaries insisted on the converts contributing towards their upkeep ; and while native arts and crafts were decaying,^ the missionaries taught their charges something of the cultivation of the soil, of the use of money, and of the commerce of civiUsation.* The introduction of sugar, coffee, cotton, and arrowroot, and tobacco plantations was essayed, and not without success ; the products were sold to passing traders, and part at least of the proceeds was devoted to extending the work of the mission and the support of the missionary. The missionaries were often criticised for the severity of their rule, and indeed it had many vulnerable points. They were usually men of obscure and humble origin, of poor education, whose most valuable quahties were zeal and strength of purpose. In general they had but a limited ^ It is not altogether irrelevant to remark that a great number of the missionaries were Scots — a race which seldom fails to dominate a weaker people, whether in England or elsewhere. ^ Lamont's Wild Lift among the Pacific Islanders. The agents of the London Missionary Society had begun to introduce the same discipline in Madagascar, but here also they were ousted by the French. Vol. ii. bk. viii. oh. iv. 3 Colonial Office Reports : 0/ Visits to Gilbert Islands, 1909-10. * Ellis's Polynesian Researches ; Williams's Narrative. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 281 range of ideas, and no appreciation whatever of the good points of the old native system, which they condemned as mere savage cannibalism and brutality, and which it was their constant errand to destroy entirely.^ Indeed, they saw only the evil and debasing side of native customs, and they made the same efforts as their colleagues in West Africa ^ to estabUsh, among an alien people, the entirely European standard by which alone they judged civilisation, since it was the only standard they knew. The complete convert was marked by the wearing of European clothes as well as by his acceptance of the faith of Jesus, and the promise of paradise in the next world was almost conditional on the assumption of a sufficiency of garments in this. The male converts of the Pacific Islands were taught to cut their hair short after the European fashion, in order to distinguish themselves from the unregenerate ; trousers were proclaimed to be as essentially necessary to eternal welfare as a belief in the doctrine of justification by faith, despite the fact that many generations of pious Christians had dispensed with both. And the female converts were induced to veil or perhaps enhance their charms by the wearing of skirts and bonnets ; ^ a matter in which they readily copied and even surpassed the wives of the missionaries themselves. These peculiarities brought some ridicule upon the missionaries in the Pacific, but in other greater matters ^ This contempt for foreign institutions, which is never far from the surface in the ordinary Briton, was not confined to the missionaries as regards barbaric customs. The grave and sober Hallam, in one of his histories, declares that he considers the annals of savages unworthy of his pen. The savage might have retorted that, to judge by his writ- ings, Hallam was too indigestible to be worthy of the cannibal cooking-pot. ^ Vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. i. ' The good Williams in particular bestowed bonnets on the astonished ladies of every island where he preached. He appears to have attached almost as much importance to the adornment of the head as to the con- version of the heart. 282 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS they could hardly help themselves. When the old authority of the native chiefs broke down before the new rehgion, some new authority was necessary to preserve order ; and that authority could only be provided by the missionaries, the originators of the new order. But whatever the faults of the missionaries might be, they shone in comparison with many of the other white visitors to the Pacific Ocean. For these were lawless and bloody years of force and crime in the South Seas, years in which evil deeds of violence and treachery and uncleanness were rampant. There were runaway convicts from Australia, who sometimes claimed to be messengers of the Gospel of Christ, and even administered a blasphemous travesty of the sacraments of the Church to the deluded people of the Pacific Isles ; and there were white traders who by common consent brought disgrace not only on their own names and on that of Europe, but on humanity at large. Most of these traders were British ; for since the revolt of her South American colonies Spain, in the early nineteenth European century, had lost her old position in the southern i^tiir^ seas. And French travellers were seldom seen Pacific. so far afield on trading errands, albeit from time to time French scientists and missionaries passed round Cape Horn to one or other isle of the Pacific ; but the practical monopoly of the ocean commerce was in the hands of British and Yankee skippers. Some of the white traders were certainly honest and fair in their dealings ; such were Captain Paddon, who did business with the islanders for many years, and in time built up a reputation for never cheating or ill-treating his savage clients, and thus came and went among them in perfect security.^ And there were other traders whose name was as good in the Pacific Ocean, and who resisted all tempta- tions to rob or bully those with whom they trafficked. To ^ Armstrong's Mdanesian Mission. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 283 such men, whose sterling character was proof against the evil customs of their baser rivals, all honour is due. But these were unhappily a minority ; by far the greater number were bold and reckless and brutal men, the very dregs and ullage of civilisation, who hardly Their looked upon the people with whom they traded ^o^ts. as human beings, and were ready to commit any outrage and any injustice to get a profitable cargo. Engaged in ' a precarious and almost piratical trade, carried on in small vessels, principally from Sydney, in sandalwood, trepang, tortoise-shell, and cocoa-nut oil,' ^ their profits were often as great as their work was usually dangerous ; for sandal- wood, the most valuable product which they purchased from the islanders, was worth £30 to £50 a ton ; ^ and one man, whose case was not exceptional, admitted that he had made over £70,000 out of that traffic alone in a few years. Their method of trading was ultimately costly, for the forests of sandalwood were seriously diminished, and some- times exhausted by their rapacity and the carelessness of the islanders, who were at first quite ignorant of the value of the article which the white traders sought and bought with such urgency. But the cost fell not upon the original traders, and it was the brutality with which the traffic was carried on, rather than the lack of foresight of those engaged in it, which made the exploiters of the South Seas notorious for evil. Most of the terrible deeds of treachery and bloodshed which stained the Pacific Ocean red during the nineteenth century have indeed been forgotten ; but the shameful ^^^^ memory of some survives to prove that the Brutal European could be as savage as those whom he condemned as barbarians. The mate of one vessel that came from Sydney boasted that he had shot six islanders without provocation, in order to spoil the market for any future ' Erskine'i Cruise. * Robertaon's Erromanga. 284 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS trader.^ Another is known to have incited neighbouring tribes to war, in order that there should be a greater demand for the weapons and gunpowder he had on board at a higher price than offered in time of peace.^ Sometimes, too, the traders who had secured a full cargo of sandalwood refused to pay the natives for the collection and transport of the goods ; occasionally, on a pretext that they had been defrauded or even without any pretext at all, they would kidnap a native chief, and either sell him into slavery, or, from pure wanton cruelty, land him on another island, perhaps among his enemies, where certain death awaited him,^ And it was notorious that they kidnapped any of the native women whose beauty attracted them ; * and however loose the morals of the islanders may have been, they may well have resented the theft of wife or daughter by strangers who had already cheated them, and perhaps murdered some of their comrades without provoca- tion. So notorious were the evils of the traffic that they compelled the attention of the British Government, and in 1817 an Act of Parliament was passed to deal with murders in the South Sea Islands. But Parliament had no authority in the Pacific Ocean, and the lawless British traders of the day must have laughed at an Act — if indeed they ever heard of it — which it was quite impossible to enforce. The only justice which they had to fear was the rough justice of the enraged natives, who took an indiscriminate revenge when and where they could. And it is hardly surprising that the islanders often retahated on their tormentors. Occasionally an innocent white crew was lured ashore, deceived by friendly professions into false security, and then massacred ; at times the natives would dive under the ship's launch when it pulled ^ Erskine's Cruise. ^ Paton's Autobiography. ^ Robertson's Erromanga. * Similar outrages occurred in New Zealand ; see bk. xxi, ch. i. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 285 inshore to trade, overturn the boat, and kill its occupants as they struggled surprised and helpless in the water.^ Traders as well as missionaries were subject to unprovoked attack from time to time, sometimes an act of vicarious revenge, in which the innocent suffered for the guilty ; and it is recorded that the white traders and the islanders often distrusted each other so much that, even when chaffering for bargains, every gun was loaded ready to fire and every spear poised ready to hurl on either side, the while articles for barter were exchanged by means of long poles stretched out from European ship to native canoe.^ But the evil deeds of the traffickers in sandalwood and pearls and oil paled before the methods of those who trafficked in men. From time to time in the The Kanaka earUer years of British traders in the Pacific, Traffic, when whaling captains were running south into the Antarctic or putting in at Galapagos,^ and tramp traders from Sydney running cargoes of produce from the New Hebrides to Australian ports, a Pacific Islander would be kidnapped, transported to New South Wales or Queensland, and sold there for the best price he would fetch. Labour was scarce, and white labour was dear, in AustraHa ; and in one port or another — ^for sometimes it was necessary to carry the wretched captive from port to port to obtain a sufficient price for his purchase — the rascally captain was fairly certain to obtain a remunerative return for the human cargo he had stolen. Thus began the trade in Kanakas, as the natives of the Pacific Islands were commonly called in Australia.* It is true that slavery and the slave trade had been ^ Robertson's Erromanga. 2 Britton's Fiji in 1870. * Galapagos was a great centre for British and American whalers. It once accommodated a more distinguished visitor, Charles Darwin, for a short time. '' The word kanaka is the equivalent for 'man' among the natives of the Pacific. It was adopted by the traders and later by the planters. 286 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS prohibited througliout the British Empire.^ But wherever the strong can oppress the weak, there the silent spectre of slavery casts its sorrowful shadow over the horizon of Hberty ; and although slavery was never legally allowed in Austraha, something not far removed from the thing itself was commonly practised for several years. There were many colonists, squatters, Queensland planters, magistrates, and justices, to whom cheap labour was every- thing, and the means by which it was procured of little account.^ In later years, however, conspicuous improvements were made in a traffic which had occasioned no small scandal. In the ordinary process of economic evolution, the individual traders, the ' blackbirders ' as they were often expressively called, whose name had stunk in the South Seas, gave way before powerful and well-equipped commercial companies ; and these were admittedly far more humane in their dealings.^ And strict regulations were eventually made by the Australian governments regarding the importation of indentured kuli labourers ; every Pacific Islander who was engaged was to be provided with a contract, which was to be translated to him ; he was to have one hundred and forty-four cubic feet of air on the voyage, to be provided with a pound each of flour and meat daily, with a sufficiency of vegetables, tea, sugar, and tobacco.* Other regulations were introduced as one island after another was annexed by European powers ; and although the project of forbidding by international agreement the traffic in arms and anununition failed,^ heavy fines were now 1 Vol. iv. bk. xiii. ch. iii. 2 It was, however, universally allowed that the planters on Fiji, who knew no rule except their own, were far worse than the Australian employers. ^ Robertson's Erromanga. * See the Queensland Polynesian Labourers Act, 1868 ; and J. L. A. Hope's In Quest of Coolies (1872). * Official Orrespondeuce and Papers, 1887. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 287 imposed on traders detected in that destructive but profitable business.^ But not even these penalties could check the traffic in arms, which was stated to be larger than ever at the beginning of the twentieth century ; ^ and they were only it is partially effective in checking the abuses of the suppressed, labour traffic. And the better conditions required by law for the kuli traffic were not always carried out ; some scandals still occurred.^ Few of the native labourers, among whom the mortahty in Australia was very heavy, ever returned to their homes ; * and when they did return, their knowledge of the white man's vices was a curse to their fellow islanders. The abuses were in fact inherent in the traffic, under whatever regulations it was carried on, and the whole importation of indentured labour from the Pacific Islands was at length prohibited by the new Australian Commonwealth Government after the year 1904.^ Between trader and missionary, between commerce and Christianity, was waged a continuous conffict through the greater part of the nineteenth century for authority over the ' Solomon Islands Report, 1900. 2 Solomon Islands Report, 1902. ' See the Report of the Roj'al Commission of 1885 ; and the evidence cited in Yonge's Lift of Patteson and Paten's Autobiography ; also the Report on Labour Traffic, 1883, and on Outrages in the South Sea Islands, 1873-4, with an earlier Report on the Deportation of South Sea Islanders, 1871-2. The missionaries never said anything worse about the traders than the evidence in these reports. ■* Solomon Islands, Statistical Report, Sydney, 1909. See also Mr. Justice Higinbotham's evidence {Parliamentary Correspondence, 1884) that there was a difficulty in returning each labourer to his own island, which might be hard to identify among many hundreds of similar islands ; yet, ' unless he ia landed at his own island and village, he is sure to be condemned to slavery if not to death, as well as to forfeiture of his hard-earned store of trade in return for his three years' labour and ex- patriation. Not unfrequently, and after a vain search for some time, the unfortunates are landed anywhere, and have been seen gesticulating and wild with despair as the boat pulls away leaving them to their fate. ' * Pacific Islands Labourers Act, 1901. In debating the Bill its author, Sir Edmund Barton, remarked that ' the trafBc was bad, both for the kanaka and the white ; it was not inaptly described as limited slavery.' 288 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS Pacific Islands. Nor did the messengers of Christ always succeed in conquering those of their countrymen whom they Anarchy in dubbed, with some readiness but not without the South good reason, the messengers of Satan ; for the firearms and the powder, the ardent spirits and the bright clothes which the trader offered were often more attrac- tive to the savage than the Bibles and the bonnets of the man of God. And great as was the authority of the mission- aries on some islands of the Pacific, theirs was always a precarious rule, thanks to the fickleness of the natives, and the fact that the missions had little or no physical force to uphold them. The British pirate-trader who armed his boat with cannon ^ and his crew with gun or cutlass was usually more than a match for any missionary autocrat in the South Seas, if it came to an open fight between them ; and there was as yet no other established rule in the Pacific Ocean. Some praiseworthy but rather pathetic efiorts were certainly made by a few British settlers of the law-abiding kind to Attempted institute a stable government on the islands they EstabUBh- inhabited. There were some men, respectable Btitutionai planters as well as missionaries, who felt the Govern- necessity of substituting order for the anarchy and lawlessness they had too often witnessed : and by these men, who deserve honour for their heroic if forlorn enterprise, strange parodies of civilised governments had been set up here and there ; and that extremely hardy plant, the British Constitution, had been bedded out in various parts of the South Seas by its enthusiastic admirers with more or less success. The solitary settlement at Pitcaim had its Parliament of seven members. A kind of native Legislature had been established at Tahiti. On the Friendly Islands the full forms ^ These cannon were sometimes discarded weapons which had been sold second-band by the British Admiralty. Although out of date in Europe, they were more than sufficient to terrorise the South Seas. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 289 of constitutional government were exercised or imitated by a puppet Premier and a puppet Parliament under a puppet King, set up by British settlers ; ^ in Fiji, too, an attempt had been made to declare the islands an independent kingdom, after they had been refused successively by the United States, Prussia, and Britain. But in its new abodes, uncomfortably surrounded and almost choked by unsympathetic pirates, hungry cannibals, pious missionaries, and other white settlers who enjoyed playing the autocrat on soUtary isles, the glorious British Constitution, which in more fortunate lands has produced such wonderful flowers, seemed strangely out of place. The fertile soil of liberty and the rich manure of party feeling, those essential adjuncts of parliamentary rule, were both lacking in the South Seas, whose simple people were far more intimately concerned with sandalwood and sea-slugs than prerogative and privilege.^ But without the power to enforce and maintain it, the most perfect form of constitutional government is less effective for order than the rude autocracy of a savage king. And now that the old authority of the native chiefs had broken down, while the authority of the missionaries and planters was too precarious and limited to ensure order in the South Seas, it was generally admitted by law-abiding settlers that the ^ This Legislative Assembly was a judicious blend of Lords and Commons. Half its members were hereditary nobles, who held office subject to good behaviour — an invidious rule whose introduction would be bitterly resented in European legislatures ; the other half were popular representatives elected every three years. Every male who paid taxes and had not been convicted of a crime was entitled to a vote. 2 The firm belief of the average Briton in the universal efficacy of the British Constitution is amazing. These strange experiments in the Pacific Ocean may be compared with the constitutions given to Corsica and Sicily, when those two islands were for a brief period British possessions (vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. iv. ), and the statement of an English political writer in the eighteenth century, quoted in vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. i., that the French would welcome a British conquest of their country if it were accompanied by the British Constitution and the Habeas Corpus Act. The average Parisian would probably have thought the Habeas Corpus was a new aperitif or a strange demi-mondaine. VOL. V. T 290 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS protection of a strong European power, able to enforce its will on white pirates and native warrior chiefs, was essential to the future security of the Pacific Ocean. No European nation had yet annexed all or even any of the myriad isles of the south, when it could have had most Britain for the asking, and all for the fighting. And the refuses to British Government, obedient to the flowing tide Pacific of anti-imperial sentiment in Victorian England,^ Islands. steadily refused every appeal that came from time to time from the Fiji Islands and elsewhere for protection or incorporation within the Empire.^ The British colonists in the antipodes implored the mother country to proclaim all the islands around the Australian coast British territory ; ^ but British statesmen at home. Liberal and Conservative alike, saw no political advantage in the possession of such remote and scattered dependencies. It is true that British interests were now predominant in and around the Pacific. Most of the traders, missionaries, and planters on the various isles and islets and archipelagoes were British. And Britain possessed Hongkong and Singa- pore on the Asiatic side of the ocean, British Columbia on the American side, and Australia and New Zealand in the far south ; but among all the isles of the ocean that connected these great possessions she had no foot of territory other than Pitcairn. But events at length forced the unwilHng hands of Britain to a forward policy, in the Pacific as in other parts of the Her world. Ths scandals caused by British traders reluctant in the South Seas had attracted the attention of Consent. ^j^^ British Government so early as 1817, when an attempt was made without success to bring murderers in * See vol. iv. bk. xvi. ch. ii. 2 An appeal came from Tahiti for British protection as early as 1825. A similar appeal came from Savage Island, but was-disregarded for many year«. ^ Bk. xix. ch. iii. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 291 those regions to justice. From time to time in later years British naval vessels patrolled and in some sort pohced the Pacific Ocean ; but these visits were too rare and irregular to be of much effect. And meanwhile the scandals continued and grew in volume as the trade in Kanaka labour increased. Definite action was at last taken. In 1872 and 1875 Acts of Parliament were passed to restrain the evil traffic ; in 1874 the Fiji Islands, where that traffic was rampant, were annexed ; and in 1877 an Order in Council created the office of High Commissioner in, over, and for the Western Pacific Islands, who was charged with the protection of the natives and the settlement of disputes among British subjects. It is not without significance that this action was taken at the time when the tide of anti-imperial sentiment in Britain had begun to ebb. The Fiji Islands, which had been first discovered by Tasman, and which had since been settled by various missionaries and planters from Europe, were now declared a Crown Colony, under a Governor and Executive Council of five official members ; subsequently a Legislative Council was appointed, which from March 1904 consisted of the governor ; ten official nominated members ; six unofficial members, elected by the European residents ; and two native members. These two were nominated by a council of the great chiefs, who chose six nominees, and from these six the governor chose the two whom he thought most suitable to serve. 1 But the real question that faced the British Government in the South Seas was not so much the Constitution under which its new territories were to be ruled, but the traffic in labour and the produce of the soil. ' Sir Everard im Thurn in Quarterly Review, January 1912. The ex- foveinor of Fiji here states that the choice was limited owing to the 'ijians not understanding English, and to their being too shy to take part in the debates. The system may be compared with the Maori members of Parliament in New Zealand. (6k. xxi. ch. iv.) 292 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS In the early nineteenth century, when white planters had settled in Fiji alongside the missionaries, each had been a law to himself, importing his own labourers from elsewhere, and often arming them when necessary against the natives of the particular island he occupied.^ The Fijians themselves were often at war, and endless disorders broke out upon the islands ; ^ but when the British Government, after long delaying to act upon the request to annex the archipelago, finally hoisted its flag in 1874, the great chief handed over the great club, the symbol of authority, to the first British governor, Sir Arthur Gordon.^ From that time the planters were secure, and Fiji progressed rapidly as a tropical colony, whose products found a ready market in the industrial world. The natives decreased, although an attempt was made to preserve their ancient customs and manner of hving ; but the loss was made good by the import of labourers under government control from other islands in the Pacific and even from India. In 1910 the coloured population was 87,390 true Fijians ; 3004 imported Pacific Islanders, and 35,406 indentured kulis from India. For some years after the annexation of Fiji, the British Government stayed its hand in the Pacific. The High .pjjg Commissioner whom it had appointed exercised Friendly his authority over a large area, but the islands 8 es, 19 . j^g visited were not proclaimed British territory. In the Friendly or Tonga Islands, for example, which Cook had first visited in 1774, and all whose inhabitants were now professing Christians, the sham constitution and the puppet king continued their independent existence until 1900. But the very fervour of rehgious belief in this archipelago brought about the intervention of the civil power, as it had among other zealous converts in the earlier history of the faith. 1 Britton's Fiji in 1870. - See, for example, Letters and Notes during the Disturbances in the Highlands, knovm as the Demi Country, of Viti Levti, Fiji (auon. 1879). ^ Afterwards Lord Stanniore. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 293 A war broke out between the various denominations, in which the mild tenets of Wesleyanism became rather strangely identified with a forward militant pohcy ; and the tumult was only suppressed when a British Protectorate was proclaimed. The neighbouring Savage Island,^ whose inhabitants had been declared by Captain Cook to possess ' the ferocity of wild boars/ and who had for long preferred the gavage flesh of the missionary above his doctrines, was island, also annexed in the same year, at the request of the people themselves ; and another group of equally savage islands had already been proclaimed British territory. The Solomon Islands had first been discovered by a Spanish explorer, and to him they owe their name, which was intended to indicate their wealth to his countrymen. But ^^^ attempts to colonise them ended in failure, and Solomon from that time the fact of their existence was as **' far as possible suppressed by the authorities of Madrid. The early English explorers in the Pacific sought for them in vain ; and when the group was at length discovered, the opposition of the inhabitants, who were sturdy and well-armed,^ suc- ceeded in keeping Europeans at a distance. Even in 1909, sixteen years after they had been annexed by Britain, their total white population was only two hundred and fifty-one, and life could not be said to be secure, while the climate was by no means healthy. Other islands in the Pacific were Ukewise annexed, or proclaimed to be under British protection, from time to time. * The best account of Savage Island has been written by Basil Thomson, whose description of The Fijiana may also be regarded as a standard work. ^ Some specimens of their arms, which were recently presented to the Royal Colonial Institute, are terrific weapons of offence. The mere sight of them exhibited on the stairs made most of the members of the Institute turn pale and tremble. But the intrepid librarian handled them fearlessly, at least until an ill-advised and, I believe, entirely unfounded suggestion that the weapons might be poisoned led him to the instant study of anti-toxins. 294 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Among these may be mentioned the Gilbert and EUice group, whose poorly paid uneducated native officials were SmaUer stated to perform their duties with admirable British honesty ^ — a testimony to the fact that the ' ^' early explorers, who considered the South Sea islanders all incorrigible thieves, had underrated their powers of improvement ; the Carohne and Fhnt Islands ; Ocean Island, geologically a solitary mass of pure phosphate rock that was commercially valuable ; two small neighbours of Pitcairn, also bearing phosphates ; the Starbuck, Vostoc, Christmas, Fanning, and Penrhyn Islands, the three last being acquired for the purpose of laying a cable from Canada to Austraha ; and several minor rocks and crags and atolls, whose annals are known only to the winds that whisper through their belt of palms, to the cyclones that sometimes sweep them bare, and to their most frequent visitors, the birds that carry the seeds of plants and ferns to restore the life destroyed. Some of these small dependencies, the Cook Islands, whose capital of Rarotonga was one of the most beautiful Depen- and fertile spots in all the South Seas, Palmerston, denciesof Penrhyn, and Suwarrow Islands, and Chatham New Zea.- •' ' ' land and Island, were grouped together under the adminis- Austraua. tration of New Zealand ; ^ others— Norfolk Island, Bird and Cato Islands, and Lord Howe Island — were governed from Australia.^ And a movement was started in Fiji for the incorporation of that archipelago with the Government 1 Colonial Office Reports, 1909-10. 2 An account of these islands is given in the New Zealand Year Book ; a detailed memoir of the largest may be found in Mehr aZsfunfzig Jahre auf Chatham Island, by Bruno Weiss (Berlin). ' Lord Howe Island has a petty history typical of many places in the South Seas. Discovered in 1788, in 1833 it was settled by three British sailors, from a whaling vessel, three Maori women and two boys. These lived there for some years, and were afterwards bought out, although they had no legal title, by two Sydney gentlemen, who settled there. The population in 1909 was about a hundred. A miirder was once committed on the island, but nothing else seems ever to have happened worth recording. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 295 of New Zealand.^ This movement was tlie expression of a feeling against Crown colony administration ; but it was weakened by the fear that, whatever benefits might be derived from association with the freer institutions of New Zealand would be fully neutrahsed by the possibiHty that the Parliament of that colony would prohibit the use by the planters of cheap coloured labour, which was unanimously agreed to be essential to profitable cultivation. This minor unionist movement, among islands which nature had doomed to disunion, was for the time hardly more successful than similar movements for Attempted federation in the West Indies.^ Nevertheless Political there were many who wished it well, both among Britisn officials, who soon realised the difficulty of ad- islands, ministering such widely scattered territories, and planters and merchants who understood the advantages of union and a settled form of government. But the opportunity of uniting all the islands of the Pacific under one administration had passed. Much had been lost by the reluctance of British statesmen to increase their imperial responsibilities ; and other nations, which had realised the value of the islands in the South Seas, had hastened to annex what territories they could when the impulse towards European expansion became urgent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. New Caledonia was occupied by France ; ^ several groups of islands and a large portion of New Guinea were taken by Germany, and high tariffs imposed which effectually excluded British traders.* The Sandwich Islands, the strategic key of the Pacific Ocean, ^ See pamphlet, T'he Federation of Fiji with New Zealand (1901). ' Vol. iv. bk. xii. ch. ii. ' It is a curious coincidence that New Caledonia as well as Nova Scotia should belong to France, and that New Britain in the South Seas should fall to Germany. On the other hand, both New France in North America and New Holland and New Zealand in the antipodes have become British. So much for the sanctity of names. ■• Solomon Islands Report, 1903. 296 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS were proclaimed the property of the United States in 1898.^ The Samoan chiefs who visited New Zealand in 1885 to request the annexation of their country by the colony were refused by the Imperial Government, although New Zealand wished to consent, ^ and Samoa passed to other hands ; while the New Hebrides group, where two generations of British missionaries had laboured, were administered by a joint committee from England and France. The largest and most valuable of all the islands in the Pacific Ocean might also have been wholly British had the Papua, British Government been alive to its value. The 1884. great country of New Guinea or Papua,^ which had been discovered by Latin adventurers in the early sixteenth century, had not been claimed by any European power when it was annexed by two captains of the English East India Company in 1793. But that great corporation, which objected to the enlargement of its sovereignty even in India,* had certainly no desire for territory so far afield as Papua ; and the Dutch eventually annexed the island in 1828, four years after the conclusion of that disastrous Treaty of London which forbade Britain to occupy any of the islands south of Singapore. The Dutch occupation, however, was more nominal than * These islands were annexed — without authority — by a British Naval captain in 1843 ; his act was promptly repudiated by the Imperial Government, which was certainly unaware of the value, and was perhaps not too precise as to the position, of the Sandwich Islands. Those who enjoy the melancholy task of studying lost opportunities will take pleasure in reading the Official Correspondence relating to the Provisional Cession of the Sandwich Islands (1843). "^ See Sir Robert Stout in (London) Review oj Reviews, January 1901. * Papua was the name given to the inhabitants by the people of the Moluccas, on account of their frizzled hair. The name New Guinea is supposed to originate from the belief that the island was opposite the African Guinea. The chief authorities are Moresby's Discoveries in New Guinea ; Thomson's British New Guinea ; and the voluminous correspondence of the Colonial Office. * See the second volume of this work. For the Treaty of London, vol. iv. bk. XV. oh. ii. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 297 real ; for that hardy commercial people already had their hands full in the Malay Archipelago. And when Captain Moresby of the British Navy explored the southern coasts of New Guinea in 1873, discovering in the important China Straits a new direct ocean highway between Australia and China, he found no sign of any effectual occupation by Holland. He therefore took formal possession, on 24th April 1873, in the name of Britain, of several islands, being persuaded that * these islands would some day become English homes ; for all the conditions were here — beauty of aspect, high land, unbounded fertiUty, position on an open sea, and at the entrance of the shortest route between Australia and China. I felt that the future might safely be trusted to time/ To time, perhaps, but not to the British Government, which refused to confirm Moresby's annexation, despite appeals from the people of Australia and the Eoyal Colonial Institute of England. But when the imperial authorities refused, the colonial authorities acted. Queensland annexed the islands lying between her coasts and the shores of New Guinea in 1878 ; and in 1883 the Queensland Government sought to force the hands of the Gladstone Cabinet in London by annexing in the name of the Crown the whole south-east of the island of New Guinea. The action was again repudiated by the British Government,^ but it had partly succeeded in its aim, for, on 6th November 1884, the proclamation of British sovereignty was officially announced over the district which Queensland had claimed. A few weeks later in the same year Germany occupied the northern coasts of the island. Had the British Government been more alive to its oppor- tunities, the whole of Papua might have been British territory ; but, as it was, that fatal indecision which had ruined imperial policy in the Malay Archipelago ^ threw away two-thirds of Papua. ^ See bk. xix. ch. iii. 2 yoi_ jy^ bk. xv. ch. ii. 298 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS For the first few years little was done to develop the potential wealth of the new British colony ; but white Its Slow planters gradually took up land ; and rubber, Progress. cotton, sisal-hemp, and coffee and sago were grown with some success. The cultivation of the island, however, had hardly begun when in 1906 it was placed by the British Government under the direct administration of the Commonwealth of Australia ; nor was the interior even yet thoroughly explored. The total white population, in- cluding numerous missionaries and officials, was about six hundred. This tardy development of Papua cannot fail to suggest that there were more valid reasons for the reticence of the Some Justi- British Government in regard to a forward Imperial ^ policy of annexation in the Pacific Ocean than Policy. its critics in Australia were willing to admit. It is evidently not sound statecraft to annex a country, be it island or continent, unless use can be made of it, either for human settlement, for commercial enterprise, or for strategic purposes. It increases the imperial expenditure on defence and administration to no purpose ; it enlarges the possible field of attack by enemies, and weakens the resources of the annexing power by spreading them over too large an area. In any case, the islands of the Pacific Ocean, remote as they were from Britain, and scattered as they were over so vast an area, were difficult to defend, perhaps even more difficult than the West Indies had been in the eighteenth century ; ^ and the necessity of defending them in time of war would have diminished the strength of the imperial defences else- where. Britain had secured the whole of Australia and New Zealand, the greatest and most valuable of the countries in the antipodes ; and while large portions of Australia were still unpopulated, and therefore still open to attack, it may well have seemed sound poHcy to secure the development ^ Vol. i. bk. ii. ch. vi. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 299 and consequently the safety of tlie island continent before annexing the islands of the Pacific Ocean, even with the knowledge that those islands would probably pass to other hands, and British traders be excluded from them.^ The empty spaces of the Australian tropics were the true answer to the advocates of wholesale annexation in the Pacific.^ CHAPTER II THE AUSTRALIAN TROPICS: 1824-1900 » The long northern shores of Australia, which face the Pacific Ocean and the isles of Malaya, across and from which Asiatic mariners had come and gone from time immemorial on regular visits to the southern continent, had and still have a peculiar place in the history of the English in the antipodes. The first parts of Australia to be discovered by Europeans,* they ^ As they were in the German protectorates by high tarifiFs, 2 Those who care for political parallels may notice that in the Pacific, as in Asia, Britain was first attracted by the islands — Tahiti in the former case, the Spice Islands in the latter — while the continents — India and Australia — were in some sort afterthoughts. But in each case the policy was subsequently changed. British traders had little success in the East Indian islands, their first objective ; but they conquered India (vol. ii. and vol. iv. bk. xv. ch. ii.) ; similarly, Britain secured the whole of Australia, which she had at first despised, and lost some of the Pacific Islands. She has had little reason to repent of her bargain in either case. * The chief materials for this chapter are to be found in the Official Reports of the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners for 1 842 and the following years; papers in vols, ii., iv., and ix. of the Geographical Journal ; Windsor Earl's Enterprise in Tropical Australia (1846) ; T. B. Wilson's A Voyage round the World ; The Northern Territory as it is, by W. J. Sowden (1882), a useful book; a chapter in Wood's South Aus- tralia (1894) ; the Report oj the Northern Territory Commission (1895) ; the Report on Hygiene in the Northern Territory, by W. Ramsay Smith (Adelaide, 1906), and the Report on the) Northern Territory of South Australia, by the National Association to federalise the Northern Territory (Melbourne, 1902). The two most interesting books on North Australia are Searcy's In Australian Tropics, a valuable work ; and Mrs. Dominic Daly's Digging, Squatting, and Pioneering Life in the Northern Territory. * Bk. xviL ch. i. 300 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS were the kst to be developed ; and their tardy colonisation was attended by troubles and vicissitudes hardly known elsewhere in the settlement of the continent. Physically among the richest territories in Austraha, they are poUticaUy among the poorest ; geographically among the largest terri- tories, they have remained in population the smallest of all. The causes of this curious contradiction will become apparent after a brief summary of the unfortunate and depressing annals of the AustraHan tropics. The first white settlement in northern Austraha, being founded in convict days, bore the mark of crime upon its Melville isice. In the year 1824 a small colony of British Island, soldiers and convicts was planted on Melville 1824-6. Island, a thickly-wooded and fertile country that looks as though it had been broken ofi from the Austrahan mainland, which here juts out far into the Indian Ocean. The party numbered about one hundred and twenty-six in all, and the settlement was a failure from the first day of its foundation to the last of its short existence. The convicts were no better colonists in the tropics of Austraha than they had been in its more temperate regions. The two supply ships that were sent to provide the garrison were both lost. The aborigines were certainly unfriendly, and were said to be ferocious ; ^ the chmate was hardly kinder than the aborigines. Even a devoted behever in the future prospects of the settlement could only say that the place was ' not very unhealthy ' ; more outspoken critics afl&rmed that it was as deadly as it was hot, and suggested that hell itself could hardly surpass Melville Island in either respect. After two short years the place was abandoned as hopeless ; but its failure did not prove that all white colonisation in tropical Australia must fail. A site was now found on an ^ It is believed that Malay pirates had carried off some of the islanders as slaves. Hence their suspicion of strangers. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 301 inlet of the Victoria Peninsula called Baffles Bay, and here the next experiment in colonisation was tried. It proved more successful than its predecessor, but Raffles Bay, not much longer lived ; and after four years this 1827-9, settlement was also deserted. Its abandonment led the way to a more ambitious scheme. A miUtary port was estabUshed at Port Essington, a few miles from Raffles Bay, in 1831 ; and although it p^j^^ was admitted that the place had few attractions Essington, to the casual visitor, it was suggested that it held ' " out great hopes of success to the permanent settler. Unhappily it failed to tempt either the one or the other. Official orders had been given that the settlement should be established on ' the most frugal footing possible,' but a Government House, a church, a storehouse, and officers' quarters were at once erected.^ These, however, were of less vital importance than settlers to cultivate the soil, and settlers were precisely what the colony never obtained. Land was offered at five shillings the half acre, a reasonable enough price in the circumstances ; but so little interest was taken in the place in England, that even had it been available at a halfpenny an acre it is doubtful whether there would have been many bidders. And Port Essington, lying on an almost land-locked har- bour, was as unhealthy for human beings as it was safe for vessels in distress. A few years' experience demonstrated that it had failed either to attract or retain settlers, and in 1849 it was abandoned — the third unsuccessful attempt to colonise the Australian tropics. ^ ^ So substantially were these built, in spite of the injunction to economy, that sixty years later Alfred Searcy found their remains in excellent preservation. And that in a tropical country. ^ Another small settlement was founded and abandoned at this time at a place named, after the then Colonial Secretary and future British Premier, Gladstone. Its story, which resembles that of Port Essington, has been told by J. F. Hogan in The. Gladstone Colony; an unwritten chapter of Australian history. 302 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS For some years enterprise now ceased ; but when the explorer Stuart made his great journey across the continent The from south to north in 1862, interest in the Terrtto^ neglected country once more revived. The fol- 1863. lowing year the colony of South Australia sought and obtained from the Imperial Government permission to incorporate the Northern Territory, to the extent of more than half a million square miles, in her dominions — an annexation which not only made the name of South Australia geographi- cally meaningless, but one which burdened the ambitious colony for more than forty years with an expensive and embarrassing possession that became popularly known as the white elephant of South Australia. For the tale of misfortune in the Australian tropics con- tinued with little intermission. The site of a town was Its con- chosen at Escape Cliffs, but abandoned as unsuit- tinued Mis- able ; gold was discovered, but not in paying unes. quantities ; and when the city of Palmerston was founded in 1869 on Port Darwin — a magnificent harbour that was proclaimed inferior only to Sydney and Rio de Janeiro — it had for some time neither inhabitants nor trade. A large part of the Northern Territory was now mapped out by surveyors, and land was offered at low rates ; but at Port Darwin, as at Port Essington, there were few bidders. In 1870, however, the luck seemed to turn. The first squatters arrived overland with flocks and herds. Large deposits of gold were discovered, and the vast mineral wealth of the Northern Territory was noised abroad. Its resources, which included extensive copper, silver, and tin mines, were not indeed exaggerated ; but the gold mining fever which now attacked the puny colony was almost more dangerous to its existence than the past neglect. Speculative companies were formed by the score to exploit the resources of the Northern Territory, and most of these companies failed, to the disgust of the too credulous pubUc, THE PACIFIC OCEAN 303 who, as usual, blamed anything rather than their own folly. The disillusioned miners, who had anticipated a second Ballarat, and had asked £5 a week wages and their rations during the boom, agitated for pubHc works to be started at the expense of the Government to employ them after the crash. And many of the squatters, hampered by the lack of water and the prevalence of cattle disease, abandoned their holdings after a few years, and left the country in disgust. Once more gloom settled over the unfortunate land. The most that could be said was that the settlement at Port Darwin was not abandoned, and that an overland telegraph Una placed that lonely outpost in communication with Adelaide after 1872, while the oceanic cable from Java and Europe, which terminated here, soon linked up the Northern Territory with the outer world. But when a party of politicians from South Australia visited their struggUng dependency in 1882 they found the total population of Palmerston no more than one hundred and seventy Europeans and three hundred Chinese, and many of the former were only temporary residents. And another township in the Territory, as one of the visitors ruefully confessed, consisted only of a tavern and a cemetery, both of which seem to have been well filled ; a more pretentious city boasted a hotel, a post-office, and a store, all situated in a malarial swamp. The cost of food, and therefore of labour, was high. The expense of communication and cartage in a land destitute of roads and railways was prohibitive ; ^ the produce of the country, for all its fertihty, was small, and every budding industry was hampered by the distance from a market and the lack of cheap and regular ocean freight. The laws, too, that had been passed by the South Australian Parliament on the other side of the continent to deal with conditions ^ One hundred pounds a ton h«d been demanded — and paid — for cartage to Port Darwin from a short distance inland. 304 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS of which it knew little were stigmatised in the Northern Territory as a mere worthless olla podrida of inapplicable regulations and futile restrictions.^ But that seems to have been almost the low-water mark of the Territory under South Australian rule. In 1886 a railway was begun into the interior, which was intended in time to stretch across the continent to Adelaide, but which in fact only reached as far as Pine Creek, some hundred miles inland, before it was temporarily suspended.^ Short as the line was, it had some efiect in developing the country. The pastoral stock increased,^ and the European population numbered 1110, and was increasing, in the year 1907. Three years later it had risen to 1418, of whom only 271 were women. It can hardly be suggested that a population of less than two thousand, smaller than that of many an insignificant Sparse English village, in occupation of a territory of Austoanan °^ °^°^® than five hundred thousand square miles, Tropics. could be regarded as a successful outcome of nearly ninety years of colonisation. Nor were the other tropical districts of Australia much more thickly inhabited. The vast northern division of West Australia had at the census of 1901 a total population of but 4727 males and 800 females.* The Cape York division of Queensland reckoned fewer than 3000 white settlers all told ; the total white 1 The Northern Territory Times Almanac and Directory. " The Northern Territory Commission reported in 1895 in favour of entrusting the completion of the transcontinental line to a private com- pany, which should be financed on the land grant system that had proved so successful in Canada. The idea was unfortunately dropped. ^ In 1891 the live stock comprised 11,919 horses; 1259 milch cows ; 212,835 horned cattle ; 45,902 sheep ; 3056 goats, and 1806 pigs. Between 1881 and 1900 gold to the value of £1,639,908 was exported ; also some copper, tin, and silver. * The northern coasts of West Australia were opened for settlement in 1863, the State Government granting free stock runs of the enormous extent of one hundred thousand acres each. Two small parties of settlers went to the Roebuck Bay district, and found good land ; but the colony grew very slowly and was abandoned after some years, owing to alternate drought and floods, and the small profit on sheep-breeding. Its meagre annals are described in a pamphlet printed at Perth, West Australia, in THE PACIFIC OCEAN 305 population of tropical Queensland north of Capricorn was about 33,000 men and 17,000 women m 1901.1 The failure to colonise the tropic north of Australia was too clear to be disputed. It had not shared in the development of the temperate south, nor had it advanced so rapidly or so far as many other tropical countries under European control elsewhere. But the reasons for this stagnation are not difficult to find. Four main factors affect the success or failure of a colonial settlement : (1) The natural resources of the country must offer a reasonable prospect of success ; (2) its causes of government must be moderately good ; (3) its *^® Failure, climate and health conditions must offer a fair chance of life ; and (4) these things secured, it must attract a sufficient population for its needs, and, under the complex conditions of modem industrial life, it must also attract a certain amount of capital from outside. 1. As regards the natural resources of tropical AustraUa there could be no ground of complaint. Much of the country was luxuriantly fertile ; many of the precious metals were found in abundance. The most serious drawback was the lack, in some parts, of permanent water ; but in many places that were hardly inhabited at all water was abundant.^ 2. Less important than either the natural resources or the climate of the AustraUan tropics, but still important, was the question of their government, which admittedly left much to be desired. The few settlers in the northern parts of West Austraha were remote from the administrative centre of the 1864, called The Northern Territory of Went Australia ; and by Despeissis, The Nor'- Wett and Tropical North, published by the West Australian Government Department of Agriculture, 1911. Roebuck Bay itself was perhaps better known for its pearl-fishery carried on by white men and native divers. An account of the industry is given in Taunton's Aualralind. ^ For the Queensland sugar industry see the next chapter. ^ Despeissis remarks that millions of acres of rich grass plains wonld be available for settlement in West Australia alone, if the rivers were dammed. VOL. V. U 306 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS province at Perth ; the little colony at Port Darwin was out of touch with Adelaide ; and in tropical Queensland an agitation was set on foot for a separation from the authori- ties at Brisbane.-^ In each case the facihties for communica- tion were few ; the State Governments, whose capitals were situated in the temperate zone, had little money to spend in developing their tropical provinces either in the building of railways or irrigation works. And the laws made in temperate regions by men who knew httle or nothing of tropical conditions were not always suitable ; it would certainly have been better for the Australian tropics had they been amalgamated into one large province imder one control^ with a boundary-line running east and west, instead of north and south. The Northern Territory in particular suffered considerably from this cause. 3. Even under an inefficient or a thoroughly bad Govern- ment, however, men will often find it possible to live and prosper, as the example of some South American republics attests ; but a thoroughly bad cUmate will do more harm than the worst government in the world. And many hard things were said against the cUmate of the Australian tropics, but not always with justice. Like many, if not most, tropical countries, the north of Austraha gained the reputation of being unhealthy ; and that reputation was not wholly un- deserved. But in this respect the ignorance or carelessness of the settlers was more to blame than any radical defect in the climate or the country itself. The colonists' houses were generally badly built, often of corrugated iron without verandahs, which made them resemble an oven more than a human habitation ; and the sites were badly chosen. If a man makes his abode on a swamp he usually pays the penalty in the shape of rheumatism in a cold country, malaria in a hot one. Yet the cUmate and the country both had defenders. One enthusiastic lady remarked that the climate * nearly resembled ^ See bk. xix. ch. hi. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 307 the Slimmer of Rome ; it was better than that of India, and far superior to that of Adelaide, Melbourne, or Sydney.' ^ A new-comer to tropical Queensland declared emphatically that ' I would not leave my little wooden hut where the sun shines, to go back to the snows of England ' ; ^ and if his words were discounted as those of inexperience, an official of many years standing in the Northern Territory held that the cUmate was splendid, the rainfall excellent, and that ' all who had lived there for any lengthened period deeply regretted leaving, and had the craving to get back again/ ^ And a pohtician who visited Port Darwin in 1907 on a tour of inspection saw white men and women who had lived there for thirty or forty years, who looked in splendid condition, and agreed that the climate was healthy for those who led an active life.* A more definite statement as to the health conditions in the Northern Territory was made by a medical investigator, and supported by statistical evidence.^ He found the death rate among whites lower than that among Kanaka labourers, and ascertained that a few white famihes had been reared during three successive generations in that country ; and in a notoriously unfavourable place in tropical Queensland the same comparison again held good. At Mackay, whose climate was ' more or less that of a Turkish bath all the year round,* the annual Kanaka death rate was from twenty-six to thirty- two per thousand, and the white death rate only twelve per thousand.' ^ Mrs. S. E. Abbott in Empire Review, February 1912. A summer in Rome is not, however, an unmixed joy. 2 London Globe, 15th July 1908. ' Searcy's In Australian Tropics. * J. C. Watson, sometime Commonwealth Premier. ' Report on Hygiene in the Northern Territory, by W. Ramsay Smith (Adelaide, 1906). " Some Notes an the Tovm and District oj Mackay (1905), quoted in Nineteenth Century, February 1910. ' It is possible, however, that a good many whites who found the place unhealthy left tho tropica and died elsewhere ; the Kanaka labourer could not do so. This deprives the statistics of some of their value. 308 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Other official evidence stated that white children in tropical Queensland, even at Cooktown in the north of Cape York peninsula, showed ' a marked capacity for steady and sus- tained hard work,' ^ and there was no indication that these northern children were less industrious or healthy than those in the temperate south. ^ This evidence, however, was discounted by sceptics, who claimed that the white man had never lived permanently in the tropics, that he had never laboured there or reared his children there, and that therefore he could have no permanent hold on the tropics.^ This was the traditional view, and it could have been supported by much good evidence from other colonies elsewhere ; * while it might have been said, perhaps with justice, that the evidence adduced by those who held the contrary opinion was too hmited to controvert the united testimony of white men in India, in West Africa, and in the East and West Indies. The fact that a white schoolboy learnt his lessons in tropical Queensland, or that a white schoolgirl had a hving grandmother in the Northern Territory, although interesting and possibly even edifying, scarcely supplied a final answer to the problem — a problem, however, whose whole aspect was changed by the foundation of a school of tropical medicine at the opening of the twentieth century.^ But whether or not the white man could Hve permanently in the tropics and rear his children there, all experience showed ^ Thirty -third Report of Secretary for Public Instruction (Queensland, 190S). 2 Professor Gregory, Nineteenth Century, February 1910. * See, for instance, Are the Laws of Nature transgressed or obeyed by the continuous Labour of White Men in the Australian Tropics, a pamphlet by M. Macfie. Despeissia (The Nor'- West) also holds that Englishmen cannot colonise in the tropics ; and, since coloured labour is forbidden, advocates the importation of Southern Europeans as specially suited to arduous labour in hot countries. * See the fourth volume of this work. ® Vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. iv. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 309 that he could live there himself for some years and prosper as a master of coloured labour. And neither in Queens- land nor the Northern Territory was coloured labour pro- hibited before the year 1901 ; but while in Queensland some advance was made in the cultivation of sugar with Kanaka workers, in the Northern Territory not even the permission to import cheap labour attracted white colonists in any number.^ 4. The conclusion therefore seems irresistible that the failure to colonise the Australian tropics in the nineteenth century was due neither to a poor soil nor to a bad cUmate, nor yet altogether to bad conditions of local government, although that was a contributing factor of considerable importance, or to the absence of cheap labour, which could have been imported far more largely had the prospects of founding new industries been more promising. The first unfortunate failures in the Northern Territory helped to discredit the country ; the lack of a trunk railway or of steamship accommodation discouraged the intending settler ; but the real trouble, here as in the West Indies,^ in West Africa,' and in Mauritius and Seychelles,* was that British tropical enterprise generally was under a cloud during the greater part of the Victorian age, partly owing to the adoption of the free trade system by Britain, which hit tropical industries with peculiar force,® and partly on account of the contemporary discovery of natural or chemical substitutes for tropical produce. While that handicap prevailed, the capitaUst and the settler found better oppor- tunities elsewhere, and the flowing tide of men and gold which Britain exported year by year directed itself to Canada ^ For the laws controlling indentured coloured labour, see the follow- ing chapter. ' Vol. iv. bk. xii. oh. ii. ' Vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. i. * Vol. ii. bk. viii. ch. iv. ' This was precisely the effect that Cobden had desired. Vol. ir. bk. xvi. ch. ii. r 310 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS and the United States, to New Zealand and the temperate regions of AustraUa, while the tropics were left unpeopled and undeveloped.^ CHAPTER in THE WHITE AUSTRALIA POLICY: 1841-1910 In the early days of British colonisation in the antipodes, an EngUsh writer who discussed the future of the tropic Commercial ^^rritories of Austraha remarked that the pioneer Develop- settlement at Port Melville was hke a friendly ™'" ' hand stretched out towards India and Malaya, openly inviting Asiatic immigrants to enter into possession of the vast northern regions of the southern continent.^ Nearly a century later, an Austrahan writer of some prominence declared that what had become known as the Opposed to White Australia PoHcy, the pohcy of excluding Develop- Asiatics and all coloured races from the continent, ment. was ' not a poUtical theory, but a gospel ; a doctrine based on the necessity for choosing between national existence and national suicide/ ^ Between these two conceptions lies a whole world of differ- ence. The older writer thought of the commercial develop- ment of the country, the later writer put commerce for the moment on one side, and looked at the national development of the people. The one thought in economic, the other in poHtical, terms ; the one doubtless had a conception of plantations controlled by European proprietors and worked * Despeissis remarks that it is ' hopeless to expect that the North will be populated by the residents there, and until the South -West produces an overflow of population that province must remain an empty territory.' Another way of saying that the South-West was more attractive. 2 Journal of the Royal Oeographical Society, vol. iv. On some old maps of Australia the north is marked Australindia, as showing its suitability for Asiatic settlement ; the south-west is called Anglicania. Neither name came into common use. ' Editor of Sydney Bulletin in London National Review, July 1911. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 311 by coloured labourers, a replica of Jamaica and Java on a larger scale ; the other would have none but whites in the Australian tropics, and, failing white labourers, he would have no labourers at all. He would willingly have suffered a temporary commercial loss for a permanent national gain ; the enormous natural resources of the Northern Territory might lie idle sooner than Australia, by importing Asiatics to do the work which Europeans could not or would not do, should endanger her ideal of * one race, one language, one Government.' There is conceivably much to be said for both points of view. The profitable development of a new country on commercial lines is not necessarily ignoble ; the rule of one race by another is a form of government that has always existed, and, unless the varying capacity of human beings gives place to the dead equality of the early American Democrats,^ always will exist. Nor has it necessarily been productive of bad results, as the examples of the Roman Empire and British India sufficiently attest. On the other hand, the rule of one race by another obviously shatters the democratic ideal at its base, and democracy is instinct in Australian nationalism. The demo- white cratic instinct in Australia was born before Australia ... .... • , • 1 Policy botli Australian nationausm, it grew with it and Demo- ahead of it as an elder brother, and it triumphed cratic— with it in the Commonwealth Constitution of 1900, which is at once a democratic and a national expression of public opinion. The White Australia ideal in its final shape was at once democratic and exclusive, postulating a white Australian nation as an aristocracy of humanity, untouched —And ex- or uncontaminated by the admixture of its ciiisive- blood with any inferior breed from without, yet a nation * ' All men are created equal,' according to the Declaration of Inde- pendence. Any midwife could have taught the authors of the Declaration better than that; but tho real trouble is that men will not remain equal. 312 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS organised on democratic lines from within. The equality which it desired between man and man in the antipodes could only be attained by the exclusion of those who were branded as inferiors.^ But three distinct and practically successive stages marked the development of the White AustraUa ideal from its crude •^ ^ . . and even brutal beginnings in early colonial Its Origins. . . . days to the full enunciation of the policy under the Commonwealth. The presence of the aborigines on Australian soil, sometimes friendly, often treacherous, and frequently open enemies 1 TTie from the start, was the first fact that attracted Australian the attention of European explorers and settlers bo gines. ^ ^j^g antipodes. Here was an admittedly inferior race already in possession of the lands which Britain aspired to populate. They were easily dispossessed, but mere dis- possession did not necessarily mean extinction ; and had the Australian blacks shown the same tenacity of life and fecundity of race as the African aborigines — who multiplied even when transplanted to American soil — the question of a White Austraha, of keeping Australia a purely white man's country, would never have arisen. It would quickly have become a land hke the southern United States, the West Indies, and South Africa, a land of white proprietors and coloured labourers ; a land of two races, the rulers and the ruled ; and the white labourer, with his high standard of life and wages, would never have gained a footing in the antipodes. There were some who worked for the formation of society ^ It has sometimes been said, and not unjustly, that democracy can only level down. But the democracy of Australia, like many other products of the antipodes, has in some ways reversed the rule. It may be added that the agitation against the transportation of British criminals was largely a labour protest against the importation of inferiors, who worked for low wages or none at all, and thus directly as well as in every way indirectly lowered the standard of life. The idea of selection and exclusion, naturally repugnant to a democracy, probably originated in that agitation against low-class whites. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 313 on those lines in early Australia, many good men who hoped to teach the aborigines the doctrines of Christianity and the habits of regular industry, and who looked for the co-operation of white invader and black aboriginal for all future time.^ But their hope was vain. The Austrahan blackfellow, like the American redskin and the brown Pacific Islander, vanished from the land with the coming of the white man. His race was incapable of regular industry ; European civilisation and education both meant death to him.^ Before the first half of the nineteenth century had passed it was evident that his doom was sealed ; but the end was hastened by the quarrels with the white settlers, who now pushed him further and further into the interior, and who often waged a war of extermination upon him.^ In that war, waged by civilised men against barbarians, the old barbarous but effectual methods, of the primitive man and the animal kingdom, were repeated ; the males were slaugh- tered and the females saved for the conqueror,* and the unfortunate half-caste children of the unequal union were * In a curious book {The Friend of Australia, by a retired officer of the Hon. East India Company's Service, 1830) the suggestion is made that the future flag of Australia should contain ' a black and white hand clasped.' That flag would certainly have been repudiated by the next generation in Australia ; but one who had served m India had not the same idea of colour exclusiveness that developed in the antipodes. ^ See, for example, the section on Tasmania in bk. xviii. ch. i. Despeissis {The Nor'-West arid Tropical North, 1911) observes that the Australian blacks degenerated in contact with white settlers ; and imported disease was as potent a factor in thinning their numbers as among the Pacific Islanders. He records a tradition among the tribes of the North that a deadly epidemic of small-pox swept through their country about forty-four years before. It is usually ascribed to infec- tion brought by the Malays ; but it is significant that the first white explorers and settlers appeared there in 1866, almost precisely the date of the epidemic. ^ See the section on Queensland in bk. xviii. ch. iii. * In Sowden's Northern Territory it is stated that the settlers often took young black women to live with them, passing them off as boy attendants. Other cases are mentioned in previous chapters of this volume. When the English settlers killed the male aborigines and took the females to wife, they were but repeating the methods of the old Saxon invaders of England — vol. i. bk. i. ch. i. 314 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS often victims of the Europeans' carelessness and lust or the hatred of the mothers' kindred.^ The miserable remnants of the aborigines were in time cared for by devoted missionaries, and protected by the laws of the colonial parUaments, which recognised a duty to a race that was no longer a danger ; but the blacks died almost as fast from kindness as from severity. In Tasmania they were already extinct ; in Australia, save for those who derived a wretched subsistence from the desert, they num- bered, at the beginning of the twentieth century, only a few thousands.^ The prophecy of an old settler fifty years before, that there was no room for two races in AustraUa, was coming true. It was a prophecy that went a long way towards ensuring its own fulfilment. But even before it became clear that the aborigines were a diminishing and finally a negligible factor in the future of 2 Asiatic AustraUa, the second phase of the White Australia immigra- question was entered upon. The free settlers ^°^' who had now begun to occupy the country, the squatters and pastoralists who were spreading over the grass lands of the interior, needed labour for the development of their estates ; and since the cessation of transportation to New South Wales in 1840, labour was scarce and therefore dear. Failing the aborigines, the importation of cheap coloured labour was suggested, and several shiploads of Kanaka labourers were now brought in from the Pacific Islands ; but the supply from the South Seas was inadequate, and the recruiting of indentured kulis from India was consequently suggested. This proposal was naturally received with resentment by ^ The half-caste children were often killed by the aborigines ; and in the Official Report on the Northern Territory for 1911 comment is made on ' the sad condition of the half-caste females, who are considered by many a proper prey for their passions.' 2 At the census of 1911, only 19,139. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 315 the white labourers in the colony, who at once realised that the whole standard of life would fall with the introduction of the cheap kuli ; but it was from England that succour came. In 1843 the Imperial Government refused to sanction the scheme. The authorities in London, who had no special reason to anticipate any objection to coloured labour in Australia,^ had regarded the question from the Indian rather than the colonial standpoint ; but for the time the Imperial Govern- ment had unconsciously supported what was now beginning to take practical shape as the White Australia doctrine, the doctrine that Australia should be reserved for the white man — a doctrine with which for some time subsequently little practical sympathy was shown in England.^ The question now lapsed for some years. But it revived in more acute form after the discovery of gold in Victoria and New South Wales in 1851. Among those who took part in the general rush to Australia at that time were numerous Chinese immigrants, whose virtues and whose vices, whose industry and whose ^ Apart from the fact that the original suggestion to import kulis had itself come from New South Wales, the West Indian colonies were experimenting with indentured Asiatic labour at this time — vol. ir. bk. xii. ch. ii. * England would certainly have sympathised more with Australia had her own labour market at home been disturbed by cheap imported labour. And there are clear enough indications that it would not have taken very much persuasion to raise at least as much prejudice against the Chinaman in England as in Australia. Everybody who was in England at the time of the 1906 election remembers with what success the Liberals used' the cry of Chinese labour in South Africa to discredit their opponents, who had sanctioned its introduction (vol. vi. bk. xxvi. oh. iii.) ; a year or two later the presence of a few Chinese laundrymen at Liverpool led to very high feeling in that city. And not very long ago, when addressing a meeting in the East End of London, I happened to touch on this very question of the Chinese in Australia. Forthwith a wrathful beery voice surged out of the maze of smoke from a hundred pipes. * Never mind their troubles,' it said. ' W^ot abart the (roseate) Chinamen in the West India Dock Road rahnd the corner? Doin' honest men art of jobs, they are ; skunks every one of 'em, I calls 'em.' And in truth the owner of that voice called them sundry other unprofitable but excessively adjectival things, but he got the cheer of the evening. 316 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS social habits, both combined to make them extremely un- popular. Riots broke out ; and as soon as the colony of Victoria obtained responsible government in 1855, an Act was passed to exclude Chinese immigrants.^ It provided that no ship should bring more Chinese into the colony than one for every ten tons of its tonnage, and that for each immigrant so landed the shipmaster should deposit the sum of £10. The Act, with certain small modifications, was adopted by South AustraUa in 1857, and by New South Wales in 1861. A few years later these laws, which had effected their purpose, were repealed. But in 1877 a Queensland measure, imposing a special fee on Chinese gold-miners, was disallowed by the Imperial Government on the ground that * exceptional legislation calculated to exclude from any part of Her Majesty's dominions the subjects of a State at peace with Her Majesty is highly objectionable.' ^ This was the first interference by the Colonial Office in London with the colonial laws of exclusion. Further legislation of similar character was, however, allowed after some demur ; the only stipulation being that the exclusion laws should not operate against British subjects of Chinese race from Hongkong. The whole position was nevertheless so unsatisfactory, as regards the right both of the Imperial Government to veto and the Colonial Governments to exclude, that in 1897 the then Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, adopted the definite attitude of persuading the colonies not to discriminate ^ It was called, on the ' lucus a non lucendo ' principle, ' an Act to make provision for certain immigrants.' * It may be recalled, as a curious example of changed policy, that Queen Elizabeth promised the Emperor of China free entry for all his subjects into all the dominions of England (vol. iv. bk. xv. ch. vi.). But the British dealings with the Chinese were far more merciful than those of the Spaniards in the Philippines. In those islands, whenever the number of Chinese rose beyond the number that the Governor thought desirable, they were expelled, slaughtered, or so heavily taxed that they left the colony. In 1763 the Spanish Governor ordered every Chinaman in the island to be hanged — a comprehensive edict. It must be said in his defence that the Chinese had helped the British to conquer Manila (vol. iv. bk. xv. ch. it). THE PACIFIC OCEAN 317 against any nation by name, but to exclude ' undesirables ' of every nationality. Laws were now passed, modelled on the new Natal Restriction Act,^ prohibiting the immigration of paupers or persons likely to become a public charge, idiots, lunatics, diseased, immoral or criminal persons, and all persons who, when asked, failed to write in some European language, appUcation for admission to the colony. This last provision allowed practically every European to enter Australia, but excluded every Asiatic. This legislation had practically settled the future of the temperate regions of Australia as a white man's country. Despite some attempts to evade the laws and to reintroduce Asiatics in order to obtain cheap labour, the number of Chinese in the country had fallen considerably.^ There yet remained the Australian tropics, and here more hesitation was shown in regard to the prohibition of coloured labour. Asiatics had been excluded from the south as far as possible, because they lowered the standard of living for the European ; but in the tropics there was as yet no standard of 3. Asiatics living for the European except as the proprietor ^* of coloured labour. The novel and unorthodox Tropical view that white men could do or should do manual A'lstraiia. labour in a tropical land found no place in the early history of northern Australia. In 1860 Bowen, the first Governor ^ See vol. tI. The Australian law is the Immigration Restriction Act, 1901. '^ From 38,287 in 1861 to 27,760 in 1907. The number of Japanese had also fallen slightly from 3571 to 3284. In neither case was there much danger of natural increase, for the number of females was under five hundred— a fact which the moralist might deplore, but the politician rejoiced over. But indeed the wretched oriental was between a cross-fire in this matter of his womenfolk. The few that were married were hated because they increased the number of their race ; the majority who were unmarried were hated because their single status allowed them to take lower wages. Some marriages took place between Chinese men and European women, but public opinion strongly condemned such unions. 318 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS of Queensland, had advised the introduction of Asiatic kulis for the cotton fields which he hoped to see planted in the north of the colony ; ^ at one time the importation of Japanese labourers into the Northern Territory was pro- jected ; and the introduction of Indian immigrants was authorised for plantation labour and public works in 1882 and 1890. Neither Japanese nor Chinese arrived in any number in the unfortunate Northern Territory ; but in tropical Queens- Queensland land a flourishing sugar industry was built up on Sugar and coloured labour between 1864 and 1900. Kanakas Coloured . i i i • Labour, were imported to work the plantations, and the 1864-1901. product of the cane, which fetched high prices, was protected by a tariff in AustraUa from the bounty-fed sugar beet of Europe. But the exclusive tendencies of Australian democracy, which had now elevated the White Australia doctrine into a gospel, soon saw a danger in the presence of these coloured labourers in Queensland. The humanitarian and the mission- ary in the Pacific Ocean had in vain attempted to remove the evil features connected with the traffic in indentured labour ; ^ but when the two forces now combined to prohibit the importa- tion — the latter from interest in the aborigines, the former from interest in themselves — the alliance was irresistible. One of the first acts of the new Commonwealth Government was to prohibit the importation of coloured labour in Queensland.^ Many of the sugar planters protested that they would be ruined ; it was retorted that it was better they should be _^. ruined than the White Australia ideal perish. Labour in Most of them stated that the white man could the Tropics, j^gygj. ^q manual work in the tropics ; it was retorted that this had yet to be demonstrated, and that the experience of other countries did not determine the ^ Bowen'a Thirty Years. - See ch. i. of this book. ' Pacific Islands Labourers Act, 1901 THE PACIFIC OCEAN 319 question for Australia.^ It was advanced that, even if white men could labour in the tropics, their labour would cost so much that they could not compete with coloured labour elsewhere. And to this it was answered that even with coloured labour, Australia had been unable to supply her own demand for sugar ; and that if white labour cost more the Commonwealth was ready to pay the price by giving the industry heavy protection against outside competition. The bold experiment was tried. Nor was it so lacking in success as its opponents had desired. It was said, indeed, that the white labourers were costly, that they were inefficient, that they often struck work and the Kanaka never struck work ; ^ and there was some truth in the contention. But here again it was answered, and with justice, that the acreage of the sugar plantations had increased under white labour from a total of 95,700 acres m 1901 to 133,148 in 1907, that the production had increased during the same time from 93,000 tons to 195,000 tons ; and that the imports of foreign sugar had fallen from 84,000 tons to 8000 tons.^ Up to a point the experiment had succeeded during the first ten years that it was tried ; and it was indeed a fortunate thing that the trial of white labour in the Austrahan tropics was contemporary with the foundation of a school of tropical medicine which helped to make the tropics habitable and healthy for the white man.* Had it not been for the better * Agent-General for New South Wales in London Times, 17th February 1908. As a fact, white labour of a low or even criminal class had been employed in the early West Indies and in V'irginia with some success ; bat it went under because negro slave labour was cheaper and in many ways better. See vols. i. and iv. ^ See Empire i?eyiew;, October 1911. ' The details of the experiment, which can only be briefly summarised here, may be followed month by month in the Atistralian Sugar Journal. •* See vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. iv. for the foundation of the new school of tropical medicine. It must, of course, be remembered that the ignorance of white men as to the best way of life in the tropics was largely respon- sible for the view that they were unhealthy. The temperate zone was almost equally unhealthy before the introduction of modem methods of hygiene and sanitation, as recurrent epidemics of smallpox and plague sufficiently attest. Mediaeval Italy was as deadly to the European as modern West Africa. 320 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS knowledge of sanitation, hygiene, and tropical diseases which now began to be diffused by this means, not even the united forces of the national and democratic instinct would have availed to keep Australia white. Yellow fever had changed the poUty of the Church in West Africa ; ^ malaria might have altered the policy of the State in Australia. But if the experiment of developing the tropics by white labour had not failed, it had not yet succeeded on anything Australia like a sufficiently large scale. The Australian Asiatic^" tropics were still empty. Yellow and brown man Invasion. had been excluded by law ; but the white man had not occupied the land he had forbidden to others. And now there came a terrible doubt whether the law of exclusion was sufficient permanently to maintain the White Australia policy on a continent whose upper haU was empty. For a great and unforeseen revolution had occurred in Asia since the first exclusion laws were passed against Asiatics. In the middle of the nineteenth century, when a British army was pushing its way through China as easily as a fork through a potato,^ and a British colony was forbidding Chinamen to put foot upon its soil, the idea that any oriental could retaliate on any European would have been scouted as ridiculous. The Asiatic was the weaker man, and he had to pay the penalty of weakness. The possibility that he might also have some views upon the subject, some objections to the theory that he was to be compelled to admit the white man to his country while he was himself excluded from the white man's country, was not seriously entertained. But since then Japan had emerged into the front rank of the great powers of the world. In the war with Russia in 1904-5, her fighting men had been tested against Europeans on land and sea, and had conquered. China, too, perturbed and restless, had, like Japan, a vast population that was ^ Vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. i. - Vol. iv. bk. xv. ch. vi. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 321 already spreading over Malaya/ and was only kept out of Australia by severe exclusion laws. But laws are only paper securities unless there is force behind them. Australia had, indeed, the full force of the British Empire behind her small population ; but for two reasons she did not altogether trust that force to deal with this question. The first reason was that, if Austraha was all-white and all-British, the British Empire was not. It included India as well as Austraha ; and there were some who And dis- even thought that the destinies of the three hun- trusts ti^e dred miUion people of India were as important as oovern- those of the four milhon of Austraha.^ In any °^®°*- case, the Imperial Government, which had to consider its Asiatic as well as its European subjects, was compelled to take a wider view of general policy than the Australian Government ; ^ the statesman in London had to consider Calcutta and Hongkong, while the statesman in Melbourne had to consider only the Commonwealth. The maintenance of a White Australia might be vital to Australia ; it was not vital to the British Empire. And there were many' EngUshmen who doubted whether the Austrahan tropics could be permanently populated on a purely white basis. The one question for which Austraha would have seceded from the Empire was the White Austraha question ; * the one question on which she doubted whether the Empire would stand by her was the White Austraha question. ' Vol, iv. bk. XV. chs. ii., iii. and iv. 2 There were many, too, to whom the whole idea of a racial or colour bar in its Australian form was abhorrent. 'The British Empire,' said the Sydney Bviletin, the most bitter of the anti-Asiatic press, ' is a nigger empire run by Jews. ' One is sometimes tempted to wonder why that journal has not issued a revised edition of the Bible, explaining that when God made man in His image, it was only the white man who was so favoured, and that although not expressly, so stated in Genesis, the rest of mankind was patterned after an inferior model. * The Anglo-Japanese alliance, for example, was heartily disliked by Australians. * T am but repeating the words which Australians have used to me. VOL. V. X 322 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS The second reason was a practical one. The British fleet was seldom seen in strength in the Pacific ; the British army was hardly ever seen at all in Austraha. For a hundred years, indeed, the colonists in the antipodes had rested secure in the power of the British Empire to defend them against aggression. But soon after the twentieth century dawned they no longer felt secure. For the first time since Trafalgar the naval supremacy of Britain was challenged in Europe, by the building of the new German navy ; and England was henceforth compelled to concentrate her fleet in European waters, and practically to withdraw from the Pacific, at the very time when the future control of that ocean was exercising the minds of men who dwelt along its shores. The withdrawal of the British fleet from the Pacific and the emergence of Japan as a new naval and mihtary power, She Under- capable of battling with a European Empire and own° ®^ worsting it,^ entirely altered the balance of inter- Defence, national relations in the Pacific. Both Australia and New Zealand,^ the two new Enghsh nations in the South Seas, saw the menace to their independence ; and both were compelled henceforth to rely partly on their own resources, as well as on those of the British Empire. There were only two means by which the danger could be averted. The first was for the Commonwealth to increase her population, and to fill her vacant spaces ; the second was to organise an effective defence force by land and sea. ^ After the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 many Russians claimed that they could have conquered Japan in the end, had not the revolutionary movement in European Russia forced them to conclude peace in 1905. I was in Russia a few months before the end of the war, and from my not very exhaustive knowledgo of the conditions, I am inclined to agree. But Chemulfo, Mukden, and Tsu-shima are forcible arguments that cannot easily be disposed of, and it was these, and not the ultimate resisting power of Russia, that Australian statesmen observed. ^ See bk. xxi. ch. iv, for New Zealand defence. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 323 The second means was not shirked. The warning of General Bevan Edwards as to the inadequacy of the defences of Australia to resist attack ^ had not been forgotten ; ^^^ and it was reinforced by the authority of the Australian greatest soldier of the age, the victor of Omdur- °*^* man, the general who had brought the South African War to a close,2 and had since reorganised the mihtary forces of British India. On the invitation of the Federal Government, Kitchener visited the Commonwealth in 1910 to enquire into its mihtary condition ; and he reported that the existing forces were inadequate in number, training, organisation, and munitions of war ; while the railways, which had been built to facihtate the occupation of the interior by settlers, were for that reason more favourable to the invader than to the defence. The young men of Australia were good fighting material, in his opinion, but they needed regular training to withstand a Regular Army. And he recommended the formation of a land force of 80,000 men, half to defend the cities and ports, and half to be free to operate as a mobile striking force anywhere in Australia. This force should be composed of 84 battalions of infantry, 28 regiments of hght horse, 56 batteries of artillery, 7 communication companies, and 14 companies of engineers. The annual cost of main- taining it was to be £1,742,000.3 The AustraUan Defence Act of the previous year had made provision for the compulsory mihtary training * of every young and able-bodied man between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, and a previous training as a cadet from twelve ^ See bk. xix. ch. iii. * For Omdurman, see vol. iv. bk. xiv. ch. iii. ; for Kitchener in South Africa, vol. vi. bk. xxvi. ch. ii. •' See Memorandum on the Defence of Australia, by Field-Marshal Viscount Kitchener (Sydney, 1910). The whole memorandum is a model of lucidity and clear thought. ■• Australia rejected the voluntary system which was still maintained in Britain and the United States; and South Africa followed Australia's lead in adopting compulsory service in 1912. 324 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS to eighteen. This was generally approved, with certain additions and amendments, by Kitchener, as forming the basis of a citizen army which would in time become a powerful force. The creation of an army on these considerable hnes was necessarily a work of time ; but Austraha, conscious that an The invasion of her territory could only be made by Australian sea, had already begun the construction of a ^*"^" Commonwealth Navy. In 1908, the year after the question had been discussed at the Imperial Conference in London,^ it was decided to build immediately six destroyers, nine submarines, and two depot ships as the nucleus of an Austrahan Navy. The cost was to be £1,277,500, and Austraha was also to meet the expenses of pay, provision, and maintenance of 79 officers and 1125 men, who were to be provided by the Imperial Government, it being stipulated that as many as possible of the recruits should be Australians. The expenses of maintaining this flotilla were estimated at £186,000 per annum ; and this was to be the first part of a large programme of construction spread over twenty-two years, which, when completed, was to give the Common- wealth the respectable fleet of eight armoured cruisers, ten protected cruisers, eighteen destroyers, twelve submarines, three depot ships, and one fleet repair ship ; all of which were to be manned by a body of fifteen thousand men,^ On the question of administration and control the scheme was open to much criticism, both from the Imperial and the Australian point of view. The officers and men were to form a recognised part of the Imperial Navy, and to be subject to the King's Regulations ; but when stationed in Australian waters — and this was certain to be the normal home of the ^ The whole question was again discussed in more detail at a specially- convened Imperial Defence Conference in 1909, and again at the Imperial Conference of 1911. The proceedings were wisely kept secret. ^ See the Coiunionwealth State Paper, Recommendations by Admiral Henderson, 1911. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 325 fleet — they were to be under the control of the Common- wealth Government ; and although in time of war the fleet was to be placed under the orders of the commander-in-chief of the Imperial Navy, it was not to be moved from Australian waters without the consent of the Austrahan Government. Here was at once a conflict of control, and an element of possible friction ; and the fear was very generally expressed that in time of war no Austrahan Government would allow its fleet out of its own waters, on the principle that it was needed for home defence, and in order to allay anxiety among its own people. In that case the Australian fleet would not be available for the real work of the Imperial Navy, which is to search out the enemy and destroy him, and the Imperial Navy itself would no longer be a single great fighting unit under a single control. When completed, the Commonwealth fleet would probably be an efficient defence of the Australian coasts, and it would do much to revive the dechning British prestige in the Pacific Ocean ; but it would be a means of defence in the narrower sense that it would only be available to repel attack, not a means of defence in the truer sense that the only real defence in naval war is to take the offensive. This essential duty of defence AustraHa undertook without reluctance, on behalf of her national ideal, and it is a measure of her patriotism that she did so. But more .pj^g oppoBi- hesitation was shown in another and not less tiontoim- urgent national duty, the peopling of her vacant territories. So far back as 1897 the Attorney-General of Queensland had warned his countrymen that the only effectual means of keeping the yellow man out of the continent was to bring the white man in, and that in default of that being done all laws were as useless as a sticking-plaster to cure a cancer ; and Kitchener had more recently stated that the ineffective occupation of the country imperilled the stability ol the Commonwealth. But this candour, which was no 326 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS more than a self-evident truth, aroused immediate opposition from a powerful quarter. The real driving-force behind the White Australia ideal had always come from those labourers who objected to the importation of cheap labour, whether it was transported convicts from Britain, Kanakas from the Pacific, or indentured kulis from Asia ; and these labourers, who by this means had enjoyed a high standard of comfort and practical freedom from competition in the wage market for many years, had been able to invoke the high principle of national purity and racial improvement in favour of their action. It was now seen how far they were sincere. The powerful trade unions into which they had organised themselves had indeed supported the White Australia policy strongly so long as it suited their purpose, so long, that is to say, as it was a question of excluding men of colour ; but the moment it became a question of including white men they were up in revolt. However great the ultimate peril to the young British nation, they had no wish to see a large popula- tion in Austraha, since that might diminish wages and increase competition ; ^ they thought more of their own present and immediate interests than of the national future. And during the twenty years from 1890, when their organisation and power had been steadily growing, they had done much to retard the development of Australia. If the immigration of yellow men had been brought to a standstill, the assisted immigration of white men had also been checked.^ The objections of the trade unionists were in time, however, overruled by the remainder of the community, which was fully alive to the national danger. Despite considerable opposition, ^ The correlative developments of the anti-competitive school are dis- cussed in bk. xxii. ' The financial crisis of 1893 aided them in their opposition to im- migration for some time, as Australia was forced to exercise great care for some little while afterwards ; the drought of 1903 furnished a similar argument to the anti-immigration school. THE PACIFIC OCEAN 327 an Immigration League was founded ; the assisted immigra- tion of approved and desirable settlers from Britain again appeared as a piece of Government policy after 1910 ; and so successfully was it carried out by the Agents-General in London that the regular shipping accommodation between England and Australia was soon found to be inadequate. It was in the steady flow of this new blood into the Common- wealth that the best hope for the future of the White Australia policy and the young English nation in Australia lay. Book XXI THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND: 1769-1911 CHAPTER I TRADERS AND EVANGELISTS: 1769-1838 Over a thousand miles from Australia, and at the very- antipodes of Britain in the South Pacific Ocean, lies a group of two large islands and several smaller ones. They have kept their old Dutch name of New Zealand ; but they have given birth to a new English nation, smaller but not less vigorous than that which has grown up in Australia. And these islands and this nation are in many ways of peculiar interest in the history of the English people overseas. Australia is a land of strange contrasts to the European ; but in New Zealand the physical conditions, the climate, and even the variety of landscape characteristic of England have been most nearly reproduced in the southern seas. It is there that a nation which loves the ocean can make its home with least disturbance of the old traditions. The exquisite beauty of the land appeals strongly to a race who, whatever their other faults, have deep reverence and love for Nature ; and the beauty of New Zealand is but a visible index to the richness of its soil. The fertihty of the country had not escaped the accurate eye of Captain Cook ; but although he advised the planting of a settlement there, his words were neglected and forgotten 328 THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND 329 by the British Government and people for half a century .^ Neglect, however, was not altogether a misfortune for New Zealand at that time ; for if the country was overlooked, it at least escaped the criminal taint that stained the earlier years of AustraUa. Yet if no colony was planted there. New Zealand was no longer isolated from Europe after its rediscovery by Cook in 1769. English adventurers and traders now The Early called at the islands from time to time, some of British them whalers, but most of them merchantmen, *'*®^8. who were attracted by the wealth of timber that flourished on that fertile soil, and found a ready market at a good profit in Britain. Of these visitors, those who put in for wood or flax seem to have been reasonably honest ; but many were of very dubious character. And they were joined, here as in the other islands of the Pacific Ocean, by desperate men, escaped convicts from Australia, naval and military deserters, and all the scum of the old world that found an asylum from law or prison in the safe distance of the remoter south. Deeds of violence were frequent among them. A chance disagreement with the warlike Maories, whose savage char- acter had been remarked by Tasman, Cook, and other travellers in the antipodes, would end in a fight, a rush for the boats or for shelter ; the sailors would ravish the native women, or their captain carry off some Maori beauty from her father's or even her husband's home ; ^ and the outrage would be ' Cook's favourable account of New Zealand, bk. xvii. ch, ii., appears to have aroused Benjamin Franklin's interest. The American philosopher approved a scheme to carry the conveniences of life to the islands, which was discussed in a pamphlet dated 29th August 1771. But the idea seems to have been abandoned, and in any case the outbreak of the Im- perial Civil War soon gave Franklin a more pressing occupation. ■'' The fault was by no means all on one side. An early traveller noticed (Dr. Fonter'a Obftervationsduriyig a Voj/age round the World, 1787) that the natives sold their women to visitors against their will ; and this degrad- ing practice, common among savages in many parts of the earth, was a regular thing in New Zealand. In Johnson's I'lain Truths, 1840, it is stated that the Maories came aboard his ship, crying, ' White man, yon wantee womanee, little one, big one, old one, young one?' Johnson 330 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS revenged by the aborigines on the next ship that cast anchor along their coasts. Watching an opportunity, they would seize the innocent captain and crew in an unguarded moment ; the unhappy victims would be killed, cooked, and eaten ; and reparation was thus made by an orgy of blood for the honour of their women or the lives of their men. Or, in more merciful mood, the Maories would spare the life of their captive to enslave him. Tattued from head to foot, forced to observe their customs and to acquiesce in their habits, the luckless wretch who fell into their power henceforth led a precarious existence whose continuance depended on the changing whims of a barbarian master. But, apart from the ravishing of the native women, a grave scandal was caused by the sale of firearms. Nothing tempted the beUicose Maori like a gun, and there was no lack of traders to supply his wants. In vain were proclamations forbidding the traffic issued by the Governor of New South Wales, who asserted but could not impose his authority over New Zealand ; Sydney was over a thousand miles away, and the dealer was on the spot. In this miserable condition New Zealand continued during some years, a bloody and lawless land, until Christianity brought the beginnings of civilisation and order in its train. savB that every Bailor accepted the offer ; he modestly omits any account of his own proceedings. Nicholas, however (Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealavd in Company with the Rev. S. Maraden), thought the native women worse than the men. He condemns their immodesty, and remarks that many of them cast alluring eyes upon him. In that case he must have been more attractive as a man than as an author, but he implies that he preferred the company of the parson to that of the ladies. De gustibus non est disputandum. The native women were famous for their beauty ; one writer {Address on Coloimation of New Zealand, 1823) waxes eloquent and even senti- mental on the congenial topic, remarking that they were 'as fair as Spaniards ; the softness of their large dark eyes spoke the natural tenderness of their souls ; they felt how ficklfe the European lover was,' etc. To which it is sufficient to add, on the authority of the Journal of the Statistical Society, 1838, that forty-nine out of every fifty Maori women had contracted syphilis from the white sailors, and that scrofula and influen2a, were rampant. THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND 331 The apostle of the islands was a Yorkshireman. Samuel Marsden, the son of a tradesman of Horsforth, at that time a village not yet swallowed by the smoke of Leeds, THe had taken Holy Orders in the Church of England, EvangeUst . of New and been appointed chaplain in New South Wales, Zealand, when accounts of the disorders in New Zealand ^^i*- moved him to the heroic enterprise of converting the Maories. It proved impossible to obtain much help at first from the great missionary societies of England ; but, unshaken in his idea, and at the cost of some pecuniary inconvenience to himself, Marsden purchased a vessel, the Active, and set sail from Australia. His destination was the Bay of Islands, the spot which Captain Cook had indicated as the most promising place for settlement. In December 1814, being then in his fifty-first year, Marsden arrived in New Zealand, and was courteously welcomed by the Maories. He was accompanied by three families and a single man, about twenty-five persons in all ; he likewise brought with him three horses, a bull and two cows, and poultry. On Christmas Day the British flag was hoisted, and the first Christian service was held, Marsden preaching from the text, ' Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.* A native chief translated the purport of his discourse to the listening people ; and when they complained that its meaning was not clear to them, he bade them wait in patience for further lessons. From that day Christianity never lost its hold on New Zealand. But the work of conversion was terribly slow. Marsden was forced to return to his duties in New South Wales within a few months ; but while those whom he left ProgrreBs behind were zealous in their work, it was ten years Digcoi^. before a Maori was baptized. And though hoes, agement. spades, and axes were given to the natives as ' the silent but sure missionaries ' of civilisation, they still preferred their old life, in which war had been more common than industry. 332 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS cannibalism a frequent incident, and work a rare accident. It seemed, indeed, useless to preach the gospel of peace to the people when chiefs such as Hongi dwelt in the land, who said, ' There is but one king in England, and there shall be but one in New Zealand,' and drenched the island with blood to fulfil his desire.^ Nor was the little mission colony itself free from evil influences. A few of the evangelists were unworthy their high calling.^ Ruffianly traders — men who trafficked in preserved human heads, and even hired assassins to procure their wares — took up their abode at the station ; sometimes, too, there were misunderstandings with the natives, and both homes and lives of the evangelists were in danger. But in spite of all discouragements, the heads of the mission never for an instant lost heart, and in the end their work began to tell. Marsden, tied to his post in Australia, still found the opportunity to make seven journeys to and fro across the ocean : on his last visit in 1837 the now old and feeble pastor was borne in a litter by the natives. One was rebuked for gazing too long and too intently on the aged evangelist ; he answered simply, * Why should I not ? I shall never see him again.' His words were prophetic ; the apostle of New Zealand died within the year. But the seed he planted seemed at last to have taken firm ^ Hongi had been taken to England, where he was flattered and given many presents by foolish admirers. The flattery he seems to have swallowed as readily as most of us ; the presents he sold in Sydney for guns and ammunition. 2 Lang, not a very trustworthy witness, it is true, declares that the first head of the mission was dismissed for adultery, the second for drunkenness, the third for an even worse crime (Lang's ^ew Zealand in 1839). It is undeniable that some scandals occurred, and the London Punch for 28th June 1845 has some comments, which are believed to be by Thackeray, headed ' Stiggins in New Zealand.' But Darwin, who spent a month in New Zealand in 1835, bears testi- mony in the Voyage of H. M.S. Beagle, to the 'gentlemanlike, useful, and upright character' of the missionaries, whom he thought well suited to their high office. He remarked the contrast between them and the other English residents, who were ' the very refuse of society.' THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND 333 root. A few months after Marsden's death, when the Bishop of Australia visited New Zealand, he saw ' the chief and the slave stand side by side with the same holy volume in their hand, and exert their endeavours each to surpass the other in returning proper answers to the questions put to them/ He found the missionaries treated with respect as white chiefs, and their advice often sought and taken in domestic disputes. The Bible and the Prayer Book of the Church of England had been translated into the Maori tongue ; and if the sanguinary deities of the native creed were still worshipped by most of the islanders, the gentler God of the Christian faith had found acceptance in the hearts of many of the savages. Time and the stress of changed conditions had yet to demonstrate the strength and the weakness of Marsden's work. CHAPTER II THE WHITE SETTLERS: 1839-65 In the year 1837, when the evangelist of New Zealand visited the country for the last time before saiUng on his longer voyage across the wide ocean of eternity, the j^^^ islands contained, besides their aboriginal Maori Zealand population, about two thousand white men of European descent. Of these the vast majority were British subjects ; a few were Americans. Some, possibly a hundred all told, were missionaries or their wives and children ; it was calculated that one hundred and fifty-eight were runaway convicts or sailors ; the bulk of the remainder were men who picked up a precarious livelihood by trading with the vessels that put in for water and provisions, or flax and timber, in the various natural harbours of the islands.^ 1 Journal of the Statistical Society, 1838. The same authority states that in 1836 New Zealand was visited by one hundred and fifty-one ships, mostly British and American whalers. But strict accuracy in such a reckoning was impossible. 334 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Most of these men had taken to themselves, by force, persuasion, bargain, or consent, Maori wives ; and a mixed population was growing up in their rough homes, hardy and strong of physique, daring and adventurous in character, but ignorant and lawless as their parents. This strange scattered community — if indeed the word community be allowable for a collection of men with no interests in common — recognised no government save necessity and force. Lynch law, said one who knew something of their condition, was their only law ; all debts, said another, were debts of honour, and honour was the scarcest of all commodi- ties in the antipodes.^ These renegades of civilisation naturally disliked the mission- aries, whose endeavour it was to civilise as well as christianise the natives ; the missionaries cordially returned their dislike, for the lawless settlers were a poor testimony to the religion and habits of the white man. On one point only were they agreed, and that was in the common desire to prevent more white men from coming to New Zealand. But the traders and missionaries wished to keep the colony to themselves for exactly opposite reasons. The lawless settlers knew that the easy license of their Hves would vanish with the planting of a regular white colony ; and there is little need to wonder that the missionaries dishked the prospects of white colonisation. They knew that contact with the white man had proved fatally demoralising to the coloured races in many countries ; they knew the type of white man that had been transported to Australia, and they had seen something of that type in New Zealand. And they had no wish for the Maories, whom they had begun to influence for good, to be brought within the evil orbit of the blackguards and prostitutes who made up so large a proportion of the population of New South Wales. * Lang's New Ztaland ; Campbell's Present State, Resources, and Pro- spects of New Zealand (1840). THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND 335 But another and less creditable reason was advanced for the missionary objection to colonisation, a reason which it is impossible to gloss over and difficult to excuse. Europeans While the evangelists were showing the Maories j^q^^ the road to heaven, they had not forgotten that Lands, the good things of earth had a value for themselves ; while they preached the vanity of worldly possessions they bought land from their attentive disciples. It was advanced in justification that the missionaries administered the land as trustees for the natives. In some cases they may have done so ; but they appear to have lost nothing, and to have gained much, by bartering the Bible for the soil of New Zealand. Other white men, however, were now competing with the evangelists in the acquisition of land in this desirable country. If a missionary could boast that he had bought a strip of land with a five miles' frontage on a river for a couple of shirts and an iron pot,^ a secular company operating on a larger scale could claim that it had purchased a milUon acres for no more than fifty pounds sterUng.^ Nor were these transactions isolated or peculiar. Many of the whites who had settled in New Zealand had bought a few acres from their original owners, or quietly taken posses- sion of uninhabited tracts to which no native claim was made ; and the process of purchasing the Maori lands now showed signs of increasing year by year until the whole cultivable area of both islands should pass into the hands of Europeans. The aborigines, who parted with their rights in the fruitful ^ The transaction is recorded by Laug. But as a good Presbyterian, be hated the Anglican missionary. * Another purchase of land by an American about this time led to a complicated legal dispute which was only settled in 1911. Curious terms of purchase were often arranged. Some years later a case came to light in which four thousand acres were exchanged for a horse, saddle, and bridle, five double-barrelled guns, and a pair of trousers. Thanks to the guns, the native was probably as well satisfied with his bargain as the white man. 336 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS soil for petty sums of money or a few valueless presents, parted also with the right of ruling the country. No white man Absence of would submit to barbarian government if he could Goveni- avoid doing so ; yet no alternative system of ment. civilised administration had been introduced. Every settler was a law to himself, and too frequently a scandal to others. But some system of civilised administration was becoming an imperative necessity in New Zealand if worse scandals were to be avoided, if the aborigines were to be protected against the whites, and the whites against each other.^ The missionaries and the traders between them had broken down much of the old authority of the Maori chiefs, the former by paternal control, the latter by the traffic in spirits and weapons ; but they had set up nothing in its place, and neither missionary nor trader was able to evolve a system of government that the other would accept. The European residents, in fact, separated as they were from one another by long distances, jealousies, and suspicion, formed no more than a collection of mutually irreconcilable units. And no European power had yet annexed New Zealand. Holland had never attempted to occupy the islands to which a Dutch explorer had given the name of a Dutch province. The formal proclamation of British sovereignty which Captain Cook had pronounced in 1769 had long since lapsed by neglect ; a similar proclamation of French authority which the Gallic sailor Crozet made two years later had also led to nothing. The British Government had, it is true, been often urged to take possession of the country which British traders and missionaries were beginning to occupy, and had as often refused to do so ; ^ but events now combined to force its unwilling hands. * One writer of the time declares that the killing of a white man by a Maori was rarer than the killing of a white by a white. * In 1823, and again in 1828, acts were passed by the Imperial Parliament extending the jurisdiction of the New South Wales Courts of THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND 337 The fervent apostle of British colonisation, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, whose scheme for a South Austrahan settlement had been grudgingly consented to in 1836 by the The New Colonial Office,^ turned his attention in the same ^ssodla- year to New Zealand as a promising field for his tion, 1837. ideas. To the alarm and disgust of the official world, which had no desire to see the national possessions enlarged, he stated that ' the country was one of the finest, if not the finest, for British settlement,' and he condemned the * slovenly, scrambhng, and disgraceful manner ' in which its soil was being transferred from the Maories to the whites. To a man of Wakefield's energy and conviction, action follows speech as inevitably and quickly as day follows dawn. Under his direction, a New Zealand Company was formed in 1837, plans of land purchase and land settlement were drawn up, and a vigorous agitation in favour of annexation was carried on against the stagnant Colonial Office of the time. Now the Colonial Office already hated Wakefield for dis- turbing its peaceful inactivity as much as Wakefield hated the Colonial Office for its sloth and enmity to his plans ; and it steadily opposed the New Zealand Company's scheme, as it had opposed the South Austrahan scheme, and the early occupation of Victoria.^ But a Colonial Office which Justice to all British subjects in New Zealand. They remained inoperative. And in 1833 a British Resident was appointed to live at the Bay of Islands. But he was given no power and no escort ; and when he per- suaded the Maori chiefs to sign a treaty granting protection and facilities to British subjects in New Zealand, he was reprimanded from Sydney for committing a ' silly and unauthorised act ' and perpetrating ' a paper pellet. ' ^ See bk. xviii. ch. iii. - See bk. xviii. ch. iii. The then Colonial Secretary was Lord Glenelg, whose action in Canada is described in vol. iii. bk. xi. ch. iv. ; in South Australia and Victoria in bk. xviii. ch. iii. His opposition to the New Zealand project was influenced largely by the Church Missionary Society, which objected to colonisation in the interest of the Maories. Some of its agents in New Zealand, however, thought as much of their own interests as of those of the Maories. VOL. v. T 338 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS opposes colonisation is an anachronism ; a government which sets its face against the natural growth of the nation sooner or later finds itself in an impossible position. Wake- field's determination carried the day ; and although his Company possessed no charter of incorporation/ his patience was exhausted, and he announced his intention of forming a settlement in New Zealand, with or without the British Government's recognition. Shortly afterwards, on 12th May 1839, the preliminary expedition left England ; in the following September the first body of emigrants sailed from Gravesend. The Imperial Government was conquered. But to mark its displeasure at being forced to act when it wished to idle, British it decided to accept the inevitable with as bad procUito^d^ a grace as possible. It sullenly instructed the 1840. Governor of New South Wales to declare New Zealand British territory, but it determined to obstruct the Company in the antipodes as well as at home. Yet Wakefield had not forced the hand of the Colonial Office any too soon. Rumours of a French expedition to New Zealand had reached him in 1839, and he had passed them on to the dull ears of the authorities, apparently with no more effect on the Ministry in Downing Street than on the stones of its pavements ; and soon those rumours were trans- lated into fact. On 30th January 1840 Captain Hobson of the British Navy hoisted the Union Jack at the Bay of Islands ; on 17th June British sovereignty was proclaimed at Cloudy Bay over the Middle Island of New Zealand ; on 11th August the British flag was flown at Akaroa. Two and five days later two French vessels arrived at Akaroa with 1 The Company was oflfered a charter if it would change its character into that of a joint-stock company trading for profit. But the Colonial Office knew perfectly well that it was the very essence of Wakefield's scheme that the Company should make no profit, but devote all its funds to settlement. It is this mixture of folly and obstinacy in the official attitude that makes one understand why Wakefield's criticism of the Colonial Office was invariably bitter. THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND 339 fifty-seven emigrants to found a French colony under French sovereignty — two days too late. A contrary wind, a chance delay to the British agent, and part of New Zealand would have belonged to France ; a little hesitation in Wakefield's mind, and the whole country would have been lost to England. On such accidents may the fate of a nation depend.^ The little band of Frenchmen decided to remain at Akaroa. They settled on the peninsula that had been named after Sir Joseph Banks, the naturaUst, who accompanied ^^^ French Cook on the first of his voyages in the Pacific ; at Akaroa, and for some years they retained their nationaUty ^^^' under a French governor. But their numbers, unsupported by fresh recruits, were too few to prevail against the steady influx of British immigrants ; and when the city of Christ- church was founded a decade later on the other side of the peninsula that shelters the province of Canterbury from the rough gales of the Antarctic, the vision of a New France in the antipodes had long since faded from their hearts.^ But already the city of Wellington, the first British city in New Zealand, had been founded in 1839 by the New Zealand Company, even before British sovereignty was The city of proclaimed over the island.^ And whatever other fo^^ed " mistakes the Company may have made in its active 1839. career, it made none in the choice of a site for its first settle- ^ Those who wish to rake over the dead ashes of the controversy between Wakefield and the Government may find all the materials in the Annual Reports of the Neio Zealand Company, the Blue Books of the Colonial Office and the Parliamentary Debates, and Heale's New Zealand and the Company. The missionary attitude is defined in the Britiah Colonisation of New Zealand, a moderately worded statement published by the Committee of the Aborigines' Protection Society ; and some additional light is cast on the subject byj Yate's An Account of New Zealand, 1835, and Beecham's Colonisation, 1838. An article in Black- wood's Magazine for 1837 also repays exhumation. ■'' Some facts relative to the French colony of Akaroa will be found in Fisher's Colonial Magazine, vol. iv. 3 There are two good accounts of early Wellington : Petre's Settlement of New Zealand Company (1841), soberly optimistic ; and Wood's Twelve Months in Wellington (1843), sour and pessimistic. 340 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS ment, which was intended to be the future capital of the colony. The twelve hundred pioneer emigrants from England who arrived at Port Hardy towards the end of the year 1839 under the auspices of the Company found the hills that surrounded the harbour at that place almost too high and steep for easy building ; and under the direction of Gibbon Wakefield's brother, who was in charge of the settlements in New Zealand, they pushed along the coast to the haven that was already known as Port Nicholson. On this splendid harbour, which was central and easy of access from every part of the islands, and which was surrounded by hills and forests in the midst of a district of rare fertility, the city of Wellington was founded. The aborigines of the district, who had sold the site to the agent of the Company a short time before, were naturally astonished at the imposing size of the invading party, and enquired whether the whole of the Enghsh tribes had not deserted their own country in a body ; but they were perfectly frank and friendly towards the new-comers, and none of those unfortunate and often accidental colUsions which have too fre- quently destroyed the mutual goodwill between two different races occurred in these early days at Welhngton. The colonists behaved with praiseworthy reticence and fairness to the Maories, and the Maories in turn began to dismantle the stockades around their camps as a sign of confidence, and even to dispense at times with the beloved gun as they walked through the primitive streets of Wellington. Large as was the first party of immigrants, it was followed by others a few months later. By 1843 the city had four thousand inhabitants, and was growing steadily ; a moderate estimate reckoned the value of its houses at £18,000, and of the merchandise in the place at £200,000. Wellington, indeed, although disappointed for the time of its desire to rank as the official capital of the colony, was rapidly becoming the focus of THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND 341 New Zealand trade, its central position and excellent natural facilities seconding the energy of its people in maintaining a lead over the other settlements that were now springing up elsewhere in the islands. So rich was the land that good crops were raised even from indifferent soil, while the vine, the olive, the mulberry, and the peach all flourished, and the sheep fattened on the lush- green pastures. Nevertheless, there was much grumbling, and some cause for grumbling, among the colonists. None were indeed subjected to any real privations, but grave in- convenience was caused by delays in conveying the titles of the land to the cultivators. And it was some time before any regular government was established, or courts for the recovery of debt and the punishment of serious crime set up. These matters may be laid to the door of the British Govern- ment, which not only refused to recognise Wellington as the capital, but obstructed the New Zealand Company in its work, and neglected its own duties withal ; but the Company itself was open to some criticism. All land was sold at the same price, but it inevitably happened that not all the land was equally valuable. And redress on this point was found impossible when the purchase money had been paid in England, and the purchaser only discovered his mistake in the antipodes. * With New Zealand,' wrote one tearful critic of the colony and the Company, ' we have been partially disappointed ; by the New Zealand Company not a Uttle deceived. Many who relinquished a moderate competency in England are now suing for charity in New South Wales ; numbers have returned to Europe, and nearly all would return if they could.' It is not necessary to take these doleful words too literally ; but the mistakes of the Company and the prejudice of the British Government against Wellington as a Wakefield- founded town certainly combined to aggravate the inevitable difficulties of opening up a new country. After a time the 342 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS discontent attained rather serious proportions ; a panic ensued, and some in desperation even suggested the removal of the whole colony to Chile.^ Better counsels ultimately prevailed ; and while sufficient reforms were introduced to convince settlers that their complaints had been justified, grievances enough remained unredressed to make government- baiting the most popular sport of the day. But as the city obstinately refused to abate its steadily increasing size and commerce year by year, and new roads were driven further into the interior to open up fresh lands for settlement, even the pessimists were convinced against their will that Wellington might have a future. If it was not destined, as its founders had hoped, to become the metropohs of all Australasia,^ it was at least to come into its heritage in the second generation, and to be recognised as the official capital of New Zealand. One of the roads out of Wellington led directly to the younger colony of New Plymouth two hundred miles away New ^^ ^^® north-west, a colony founded, as its name Plymouth, implies, by a Devonshire Association under the ^**®' auspices of the New Zealand Company, and largely pioneered by Devonshire men.^ A quiet but pros- perous community established itself here in 1840, almost under the shadow of the noble Mount Egmont ; and the proud title of the great Devonian port, which has seen so many emigrants from England bear out of its ample Sound, was given, affectionately but rather absurdly, by the Devonians in the antipodes to their capital, whose harbour ranks among the poorest in New Zealand. But what New Plymouth lacked at sea was more than * I have nought diligently to discover why Chile was suggested, but can find no indication whatever. ' For the origin of the name of Wellington, see bk. xviii. ch. iii. ' For New Plymouth see Latest Information from New Plymouth, a pamphlet published in 1842 ; Petre's Account of Settlement, which gives the population in 1841 as 534 ; and Hursthouse's Account of Settlement of New PlymotUh, 1849. THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND 343 recompensed on land. The rich light soil of the place was found to be as fertile as any on earth ; the black mould of this New Devon bore fruit at least as fine as the good red fields of old English Devon. ' I have seen earth on the clifis twelve or fifteen feet deep/ wrote an enthusiastic farmer from New Plymouth ; * no rocks or stones have yet been found. The potatoes I brought out with me are growing well, and all the garden seeds ; there is wheat and barley doing well, and Indian corn, and fine timber growing.' The whole colony was purely agricultural, and the city of New Plymouth itself was more like a scattered village than a town. But within ten years of its foundation it could boast a granite church, a couple of chapels, an equal number of taverns, a gaol for its rare criminals, a police station and a hospital, three flour mills, two breweries, a tannery, and two whaling houses. This rapid growth showed its prosperity as clearly as the fact that it was already producing more than enough for its immediate needs, and was beginning to seek an outside market for its goods ; while the settlers of New Plymouth were now spreading their homesteads over the magnificent district of Taranaki, which in a few years more was transformed from virgin forest to a smiling and happy countryside of farms and fields and pastures. The city and colony which was founded at Nelson in 1841, and which formed the first English settlement on the South Island of New Zealand, was expected to grow Nelson, even more rapidly than New Plymouth and i**^' Taranaki.i The settlers were intelligent and industrious, the surrounding country was good, and the situation all that man could desire. An enterprising sheep squatter had even preceded the regular colonists, so attractive did the place * There ia a poor account of Nelson in vol. vi. of the Colonial Magazine ; and a much more adequate description by Fox, Report on the Setthtnent ofNthon, 1849. 344 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS appear ; and by the year 1843 the city, then only fifteen months old, already counted three thousand inhabitants, among whom were many retired Anglo-Indians. It was an ambitious community, which talked of establishing a college and a church, and of devoting a large fund to building bridges and roads in the district ; but at this point the progress of Nelson was unexpectedly checked. The trouble might have been foreseen by any student of economics who knew the conditions under which Nelson had been founded. The place contained too many labourers and too little capital, the landed settlers having crippled themselves in purchasing their estates, with the result that wages fell when funds grew low ; unemployment increased rapidly, and by August 1844 the colony was in the throes of a crisis and the scene of a riot. From this unfortunate condition Nelson did not recover for several years. Many of the labourers left the town for better wages elsewhere, and the natural increase of the population hardly kept pace with the loss by emigration — a rare and unhappy condition for a young community that had no parallel elsewhere in New Zealand. Nelson was the least prosperous of the Wakefield settle- ments in the antipodes ; Dunedin, its next successor in the Dnnediii South Island, was less unlucky and more indi- otago, vidual in character.^ But the difficulties surround- ing the inception of the Dunedin enterprise occupied Scotland for several years before the new Scots colony was ultimately planted in the South. Individual Scotsmen had emigrated to New Zealand, and done well in the past ; but no purely Scottish settlement had yet been made, or seemed likely to be made there, until the fecund mind of Wakefield brought the idea to the front. The scheme appealed to all the clannish emotions of the ^ The best account of the founding and early years of Dunedin is Hocken's Settlement of Otago. THE DOMINION OF NEW ZEALAND 345 north ; but it was a time of spiritual stress and industrial trouble in Scotland, and the project fermented long before maturing in the cautious Caledonian mind. The lack or the irregularity of employment, the grinding poverty of wage-earners in the big lowland cities, and the miserable prospects before gillie and crofter on the bleak countryside, certainly inclined men to emigrate from Scotland ; but the main tide of Scottish emigration had long since set steadily towards Canada, and it was not easy to change its direction to the far South when men had friends and the promise of opportunities awaiting them in the West.^ The great schism, too, in the Scottish Presbyterian Church, which separated family from family, and even father from son, rendered united national action impossible ; and the first project for a Scottish settlement in New Zealand got little further than a discussion as to the name and the site of the proposed colony.^ Some of the original supporters of the idea now withdrew ; but poor men who saw no chance of a living in Scotland were still appealing for a free passage to the colonies, and a trifle of land for their own cultivation, ' if only for a cow's grass and a kailyard/ Even that modest prospect in a remote and savage district, it was felt, would be better than a prolonged and hopeless struggle at home. The project for a Scots settlement in New Zealand was therefore never wholly abandoned, however gloomy the prospect of ultimate success. A site had been selected by Wakefield's agent at Otago in the far south of the South ' For the Scots emigration to Canada, see vol. iii. bk. x. ch. iii. and bk. xi. chs. iii. and v. It might be interesting to speculate how far the V' course of history would have been changed had J. A. Macdonald emigrated to New Zealand instead of Canada. ' Various names were suggested, among those rejected being New Reekie, Edina, Ossian, Bruce, and Bums. New Edinburgh was unfor- tunately reminiscent of the Darien failure (vol. i. bk. iv. ch. iii.); but Dunedin, which was finally chosen, was said to be the old Celtic name of Edinburgh, and it had the more important recommendation that bcott had sanctioned its use in the Lay of the. L™y- heads to heaven in New York City and Chicago ; but in Australia, remote from the old world, and with a population that was small and did not grow very rapidly, it found less competition, and consequently more favourable conditions. ^ When the two forces, of the New Humanity and the New Industry, met, the results were sometimes curious. The missionaries often pointed out that the conversion of the Pacific Islanders and the African negroes would redound, not only to the glory of God, but to the profit of the British merchant ; and that excellent person sometimes subscribed to the funds of missionary societies with that end in view. The missionaries taught the natives everywhere to assume European clothing — imported, like religion, from England. ^ For the Industrial Age in England, see vol. iv. bk. xvi. ' I have given so many instances of unemployment in England leading to emigration that I need here only refer to vol, iii. bk. xi. ch. iii., and to the account of the Wakefield settlements in the present volume, bk. xviii. ch. iii. and bk. xxi. ch. ii. VOL. V. 2d 418 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS The straggle for life was slowed by the very fact of Australia's position on the map. And the first action of this surplus, when it had organised itself into class consciousness, was to rebel against the con- ditions which had driven it from the old world. There the work was of greater consequence than the worker ; in Austraha it was determined that the worker should be of greater consequence than the work. The New Humanity of England had decreed that the welfare of the slave was of greater value than the sugar he trod or the cotton he picked ; the New Humanity transplanted to Australia declared that the welfare of the white workman was of more moment than the produce of his hands.^ The whole mental attitude of Australia towards this side of life was in fact a revolt against the harsh strife of the Industrial Age in England, a contradiction of the current poUtico-economic teaching of the day. Those who had sufEered on the battlefield of industry in Britain determined to make for themselves a haven of peace in Austraha. In very many ways this revolt made itself felt. The old English theory of competition held that both master and man should have full freedom of contract, each to make the best bargaia with the other that he could. The penniless emigrant who was assisted to a new life in Australia knew by bitter experience that this freedom was a fiction, a cruel he that pressed heavily on the economically less powerful bargainer ; the workman had in most cases to accept the employer's * ' If a man cannot maintain his enterprise without cutting down the wages which are proper to be paid to his employees— at all events that are essential to their living— it would be better that he should abandon the enterprise.' — Judgment of Commonwealth Court of Conciliation, 1909. Extremes meet. The Manchester school in England, from which Australians had revolted, held that if an industry could not be main- tained without protection, it had better be abandoned. The real difference was that they thought of the consumer, Australians of the producer. BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 419 terms, or face the impossible alternative of unemployment and starvation. And the Australian therefore determined to cast aside that tradition of old England in the building of the new English nation in the South Seas ; the work- man was to be protected against the stronger party to the bargain. The Austrahan saw that the leading EngHsh politicians and economists deprecated the intervention of the Govern- ment in commercial and industrial affairs. He saw the many abuses which sprang from that theory in England and America, where the same conception prevailed ; and when, therefore, he found himself in a land whose future was still to shape by human hands, he turned a favourable eye on Government intervention. The Austrahan beHeved in enlarging the power of the State very largely because the Enghshman at home believed in limiting that power ; the Australian believed in co-operation very largely because the EngHshman beheved in individualism. Again, the Australian saw that the English workman lost much when he was not organised, and gained something when he was organised, in one of those trade unions strong which the English law for long refused to recognise, ^qq*^^' The Australian worker therefore organised himself Labour, into powerful trade unions, whose strict discipline made for strength ; and when a Labour Party arose in this political democracy in the last decade of the nineteenth century, it too was organised and drilled as no poUtical party had ever been organised before.^ Australian democracy lost much, but it gained more, by this action ; it tended to crush individual abihty, but it gained cohesion and driving power. The trade unions were often tyrannical, and sometimes their tyranny was such * Every member had to take a pledge to obey the will of the majority, which meant in effect always to vote as directed by the heads of the party. 420 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEESEAS as to set independent public opinion against them, and even to endanger the public peace ; ^ the Labour Party in politics tended to crush out the ideas of its members, to make them obedient units rather than independent mem- bers ; but it was the strength of the organisations that emerged from this discipline which gave them victory. A body of men without discipline is a mob that can do nothing ; with discipline it is an army that can do almost anything. The first generation of labourers, it is true, had matters very much their own way in Australasia. ' There are eight hours for sleep, eight hours for labour, and men require some little time for themselves,' said one of the pioneer labourers in Wellington ; ' therefore there must be eight hours for recreation.' The would-be employer laughed at the man, but there were none other to do the work, and the labourer had his way.^ The eight-hour day became a recognised in- stitution, an accompHshed fact rather than an ideal, in the skilled handicrafts of AustraUa. The importation of cheap labour was constantly advocated by the employers ; but the increasing strength of the White Australia doctrine prevented the inmiigration of the cheapest of all labour, that of Asiatics, in the temperate regions where ^ In one of the Queensland strikes, outrage and arson were resorted to ; in a strike in Victoria, the whole railway service was to be brought to a standstill — a threat which was promptly dealt with by the Government. A general strike, a more modern weapon than the old sectional strike, was declared in Brisbane in 1912 in consequence of a petty dispute on the tramways ; but the trade union minority which had threatened society failed against the united action of town and country. Sometimes, however, the Government quailed before the trade unions. Once when the shearers in New South Wales struck work, the Attorney- General of the State lacked the courage to admit the fact, and declared that ' The shearers have not left their work. They have only refused to begin,' — a piece of legal casuistry that at once became famous. The name of the author of this stupendous qnibble should be immortal ; it was Bernhard R. Wise. He subsequently wrote a book on Australia, but modestly omitted to mention therein his own contribution to the world's wit. ^ The incident is related in Drummoud's Life of Seddon. BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 421 the white workman lived. And while Australian industry- was steadily expanding, it was in many trades a question of employers finding employees rather than of employees seeking employers. But even under these favoured conditions, there were some who fell below the average of efficiency. Not worth employing at the high wages in force, they had to accept what employ- ment they could get at whatever price was offered ; their own helplessness, in fact, caused them to be rated even lower than their real value. The sweater, that horrid parasite who feeds and fattens on the defenceless members of his own species, fastened on various employments, particularly on the clothing and furniture trades ; and about the year 1882 public opinion in the antipodes was shocked to find that the creation of a submerged class after the European model was in active development. The evil symptom of unhealthy growth, exposed by the newspapers, was at once vigorously attacked ; but for more than ten years one expedient after another was tried, only to collapse, mainly through the difficulty of protecting those who were too weak to protect themselves ; but during those years democracy learnt to organise itself. Such victories as the trade unions had in the fight for better conditions were an encouragement to further advance ; the defeats — and they outnumbered the victories in the years immediately before and after 1893, when a financial crisis overwhelmed hundreds of employers and workmen alike — were lessons in the method of perfecting the organisation. But the democracy sought a political solution of the ques- tion. ' A weapon,' said Seddon in New Zealand in 1890, ' has been placed in men's hands in this colony, and if they use that weapon at the coming general election, they will do a great deal towards restoring the colony to a more prosperous condition. The remedy Ues with the people. They will find it in the ballot-box.' The poUtical power of 422 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS the majority, in short, was to make up for their economic weakness.^ The broad hint was taken. The now thoroughly organised democracy, which was in a position to exercise its power in Its Ad- most of the Australasian colonies after the elections vantageoua of 1890 and 1891, was in many respects in an °^^ °°' enviable situation. Except in New South Wales, the one British colony which had followed the free-trade poUcy of Britain, the infant industries of Australasia were protected by tariffs from outside competition ; the workmen were protected from inside competition by exclusion laws against cheap Asiatic labour. And the assisted immigration of settlers from Europe was also opposed by the trade unions, since that would have resulted La competition ; for twenty years the flow of new colonists to the antipodes practically ceased. The new democracy not only held the field ; it enclosed it with a fence which few could pass. There were two aspects to its activities — the ideal and the practical ; the former led by Utopian thinkers whose schemes were sometimes tried and often failed ; the latter led by men who knew exactly what they wanted, and in many cases achieved their ends. One of the first results of the increasing power of the democracy in the legislatures was that a series of Factory Expert- Acts was passed in most of the colonies, which traiasian insisted that cleanliness and sufficient air should Legislation, be ensured to every factory worker ; that the construction and appointments of every factory should be ^ It is pointed out in St. Ledger's Australian Socialism that very much the same thing was said in the Brisbane Worker, a Socialist journal, a few months before. It would not be the first time that the same thought had occurred to two independent people almost simultaneously. Over twenty years later, when Lloyd George was British Chancellor of the Exchequer, he remarked that ' it had taken (Britain) forty-five years to realise the enormous lifting power of the engine of which they obtained the control by the franchise.' The same doctrine, in slightly dififerent words. BKITAIN IN THE SOUTH 423 approved, by Government inspectors ; that every factory should be registered by the State, and its equipment approved before registration was allowed. Any place where six, four, or, in one colony, even one, person was employed, was con- sidered to be a factory. These provisions were accompanied or followed by regula- tions forbidding any child under thirteen years of age to be employed, and stating that the hours of labour for women and children under sixteen should not be more than forty-five per week, and that the hours for men should not exceed forty- eight per week. In cases where overtime was required to be worked through pressure of business, the government inspector could give a permissory certificate when satisfied of its necessity. Other regulations were made to deal with offices and shops ; but this aspect of social reform was more difficult, because, as one colonial politician ingenuously remarked, shopkeepers were so much more numerous than factory-owners that their votes had to be seriously considered. It is one of the incidental disadvantages of triumphant democracy that it may revolt its own supporters ; dogs have been known to eat their own tails ere now. The thorny subject, however, was bravely tackled ; timid legislators consoled themselves with the reflection that if shopkeepers were numerous and might possibly vote against them, shop-assistants were more numerous and would certainly vote for them. A complicated series of laws indicated the hours at which shops, offices, and banks should be closed. Certain exceptions were dictated by policy or interest,^ and the net result of the change was not that less business was done, but that the same business was done in fewer hours. More daring innovations were those which established a * Offices engaged in transport work were excepted ; apothecaries, subject to certain conditions, and newspaper shops. Politicians cannot afford to lose the support of the press ; the press cannot afford to lose its customers. Hence the exception in their favour. 424 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS minimum wage in certain trades ; wages boards composed of masters and men in equal numbers, with an impartial president to decide the rates of wages, in others ; ^ and a compulsory arbitration law to prevent strikes and lock-outs, which was passed in New Zealand in 1894, and subsequently imitated in various other colonies. These enactments were for the able-bodied and active ; but democracy was not merely concerned with the young and the fit, it busied itself likewise with the old and feeble.^ ' It is equitable,' said the Parliament of New South Wales in 1900, ' that deserving persons who during the prime of life have helped to bear the public burdens of the colony by the payment of taxes, and by opening up its resources with their labour and skiU, should receive from the colony pensions in their old age/ The Old Age Pensions Act of that state, framed on a non-contributory basis, came into force in 1901. New Zealand had already been the pioneer with a similar law, passed three years previously by the Seddon Cabinet. ^ Those who objected to the state regulation of wages on the ground that it had always failed in England, were faced with the answer that in Australia it had abolished sweating in three years. As a fact, it had not always failed in England, but the parallel was not accurate. The general principle was laid down in the Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration in 1909. ' I cannot conceive,' said the President of that Court, ' of an industrial dispute being settled effectively which fails to secure the labourer enough wherewith to renew his strength and to maintain his home from day to day. He will dispute, he must dispute, until he gets his head above the water. ... In finding tlie living wage I look therefore to find what money is necessary to satisfy the normal needs of the average employee regarded as a human being living in a civilised community. ' The actual amount determined on was fixed at seven shillings a day. No living wage was fixed by any tribunal in Britain, but some English economists recommended that it should be considered as not less than twenty-four shillings a week. Prices averaging much the same in England and Australia, the two amounts give perhaps a fair comparison between the status of labour in the two countries. The average wages of skilled workmen in both cases were of course much higher. * Incidentally, too, the old and feeble were voters. Australian poli- ticians were honourably free from corruption ; but they were human. And the politician has a touching faith in the gratitude of the voter for past favours that is not always well founded. BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 425 The general effect of this legislation was variously estimated. There was a considerable and able body of opinion in Australia which distrasted the whole trend of the poUcy t 1 ^ .- -t • 1 1 1 Its EesultB. oi state action and co-operation ; but the authors of the experimental laws were ever ready to carry on a contro- versy in their own defence. But it was quite evident to onlookers that the disputants on current and recent policy could not determine the ultimate effect of the measures which they approved or condemned ; and it was the ultimate effects, not the immediate benefits or difficulties, of the poUcy which alone could determine its wisdom.^ The more immediate results of the legislation may be easily summarised. The laws regulating industry certainly raised the cost of living by increasing the cost and diminishing the output of the labourer. They admittedly pressed rather hardly in certain directions, for since the employer was com- pelled to pay good wages he took care only to employ good workmen ;^ the indifferent were not worth employing at all. In these directions, therefore, the laws tended strongly to increased cost, probably less strongly to increased efficiency ; to diminished hours of labour ; and therefore to diminished output.® The compulsory arbitration laws * discouraged, if they did * The best views on either side are in State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand, by W. Pember Reeves, sometime member of the Seddon Cabinet, in which he was responsible for the law of compulsory arbitration ; later Agent-General for New Zealand in London, and sub- sequently head of the London School of Economics ; an ardent but sane advocate of State action. The other side may be seen in Atistralian Socialism, by A. St. Ledger, a Commonwealth senator who writes with much force. ' There were provisions in the minimum wage law, and in other Acts, permitting the employer to pay less than the statute wage to workers incapable of doing the average of work. * Statistics have been published on these points. They have been useful to controversial disputants intent on proving a case ; they are hardly conclusive enough for the cautious judgment of history. * voluntary arbitration laws had been passed, and had failed. The age was one indeed in which the voluntary principle, once so highly esteemed in England, was losing its force. 426 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS not abolish, strikes ; but tbey were charged with increasing the number of petty and irritating industrial disputes between master and man, and with giving an opportunity to the agitator of bringing continual cases before the arbitral boards on the chance of a favourable decision. There was some truth in this objection ; but, even so, that was not necessarily a fundamental flaw. It is conceivable that a small ailment of frequent occurrence may be less harmful to the industrial, as to the physical, body than a terrible and almost fatal malady of rare occurrence. On the whole, the Arbitration Acts were a success, but not an unqualified success ; but they might have been more of a success had they been more popular at the start with the masters and less popular with the men ; or later, had they been less popular with the masters and more popular with the men ; ^ but in later years, when the trade unionists wished to foment a strike and agitated for the repeal of the Acts which tied their hands, these had so far proved their usefulness that independent pubhc opinion insisted on their retention in the statute-book. But admittedly Australasia could not compete with foreign labour which was not bound by these restrictive regulations ; she might export her natural products, she could never export her manufactured articles, save to territories, such as Papua, under her own control. How far Australasia could have competed with other countries under other conditions could never be ascertained ; but the real gain to the English people in the antipodes, the gain for which they had bound them- selves by such strict regulations, could also not be definitely ascertained. The iQcrease in the general measure of pleasure and comfort cannot be reckoned in statistics ; ^ the improve- ^ The explanation is simple. The awards were at first mainly in favour of the employees ; but when wages had been raised by this means the awards after a time went largely in favour of the employers, aud the employees sometimes refused to accept them. * A German traveller, Count Fritz von Hochberg (An Eastern Voyage; a Journal of Travels through the British Empire, 1910), doubted the happiness of Australian life. He remarked that the people showed BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 427 ment which was looked for in the national physique could not be accurately determined until a full generation had been brought up under those conditions. One test, indeed, may be applied. If long life is in truth a boon — and perhaps few of those that have not been unduly strained upon the rack of human fate will deny Human Life it^ — then Australasia was indeed happy. The Prolonged, death-rates and indices of mortality in all the states of the Conmionwealth and in New Zealand were the lowest of any civilised countries in the world ; ^ and, low as they were, they had decreased since the new gospel of comfort and happiness had been sought, despite the fact that the actual average age of the population had increased.^ Shorter hours and better conditions of labour, the assurance of a fair wage in working years and a decent pension at the close of active labour, had begun to show their effect. The easier conditions of existence told their own story ; the struggle for life had 'insolent, dogged, daring, bad-tempered, sulky expressions, half assumed to hide the pathetic, 3'earning unhappiness in their faces, yearning for colour to rest their tired eyes on, green fields and fresh foliage, and a cheery, happy country in thi-f land of desolation.' The author had been one day in Australia when he drew this character ; but subsequent experience did not induce him to modify his opinion, which was not, however, confirmed by the experience of other travellers or by Australians themselves. * The historian Lecky, however, laid it down as his opinion in that extremely interesting but little appreciated book, The Map of Life, that life is long enough as it is. But historians are not, as a rule, a long-lived class. The search for truth in time exhausts the strongest constitution. 2 The death-rates in 1909 were : New Zealand, 9-2 per 1000 : Australia, 10"2 ; Norway, 14'5 ; Ontario, 14"8; United Kingdom, 15"1 ; German Empire, 18'0 ; France, 19"0 ; Japan, 20*9 ; European Russia, 30'0. * The index of mortality, the most accurate way of ascertaining the actual death-rate, had fallen between 1902 and 1909 : — In New South Wales from 15 45 to 13-41. lu Victoria ,. 1589 to 1374. In Queensland In South Australia In West Australia In Tasmania 15-85 to 13-80. 15-12 to 12-57. 17-66 to 15-07. 14-26 to 13-14. In New Zealand, taking the figures for the year 1908, they were the lowest of all, 11-67. 428 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS indeed been slowed, and human life had thereby been prolonged. The democratic majority in Australia on the whole approved these legislative experiments and applauded their results, ^g But there was a party, an active minority of this conunuiiiat majority, not without power, for whom these Movemen . jg^^g^ which were sufficiently novel to draw the attention of the rest of the world, were altogether too mild a revolution. They saw and approved the idea of co-operation among the whole community ; but they would have gone still further and proclaimed general communism, a sharing of all goods and all labour in common for the pubhc advantage. A brilliant journalist, William Lane, Canadian by birth, English by extraction, Australian by adoption, preached this gospel week by week in a Brisbane newspaper, The Worker, whose motto was ' Socialism in Our Time ' ; and he found no lack of followers. Able and eager, an active propagandist of a cause he passionately believed, the fluent and persuasive style of his literary work easily convinced those who were not unwilling to be convinced that a new heaven could be created out of the old earth when men held all their goods in common, worked each for all and all for each, and pooled the results of their labour for the common benefit. While the world lasts there will always be such spirits ; and while the world is as it is they will always fail.^ Communism is an attractive creed, in some ways even a noble creed ; at least it rates human nature high. Too high, indeed ; for the ruck of mankind will work for its own advan- tage, and for no other end. Such was the lesson of previous ^ The Pilgrim Fathers began as a communistic community, but speedily abandoned it (vol. i. bk. ii. oh. ii. ). A similar experiment was tried at Brook Farm on a larger scale in 1847, and abandoned. I need hardly mention the communistic experiment among the early Christians. It failed ; but I do not know that the advocates of in- dividualism have much the best of the argument from that case, for Ananias and Sapphira, both convinced individualists, had a worse fate than the communists. BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 429 experiments in communism ; William Lane's own enterprise showed no different result. A number of enthusiasts, converted by his teaching, followed him in the year 1893 to found a New Australia in Paraguay.* A large estate, nearly half a million acres in New extent, well watered, heavily timbered, and very p^agus^'" fertile, had been granted to the promoters of the i893. enterprise by the Government of that Republic ; nearly £30,000 was subscribed by the disciples of the movement — and every "Idherent was bound to cast all his possessions into the common treasury — and all were equally pledged to do all they could for the common cause, as ' free men and women on their own free land.' The constitution of the community declared that all land, tools, and means of production in exchange and distribution should be held in common ; the community was its con- to save all the capital it needed for its enterprises, stitution. and the surplus wealth was to be equally divided, without regard to sex, age, office, or physical or mental capacity ; the children were to be maintained and educated by the community under the guardianship of their parents.^ The sexes were to have equal poUtical rights, and a ballot vote of all adult members was to be the supreme authority of the community ; a director, elected by a two-thirds majority of the general ballot, was to be the sole executive authority, but all regulations affecting the community at large were to be confirmed by a two-thirds majority of all adult members — a form of referendum which was further modified by the pro- vision that all regulations were to be submitted annually to the popular vote, and all offices were to be vacated annually, or whenever the holders ceased to retain the confidence of their constituents. ^ See also vol. iv, bk. xii. ch. i. ^ Lane did not, like some socialistic and communistic thiukcrs, hold with the possession of women and children in common. I imagine that few, save the bachelor and the hen-pecked husband, go so far. 430 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS Disputes were to be settled by an arbitrator mutually agreed upon ; but ' the individuality of every member in thought, religion, speech, and leisure, and in all matters whatsoever whereby the individuality of others was not affected, was to be held inviolable.' Such was the imposing machinery of a constitution which was never given a chance of working. One of the first acts of Lane, even before the new settlement was founded, or even reached, was to suspend the constitution he had drawn up ; and, armed as }^ was with proxies from intending settlers in Australia who were to follow the first party in due course, none could dispute the un- expected and unwelcome revolution in Paraguay. And one of the first acts of some of his followers on landing in South America was to get drunk ; thereby breaking a regulation which bound all to abstain from intoxicating liquor until the initial difficulties of settlement had been overcome, and proving by indisputable evidence to sober but envious colleagues in the common enterprise that some at least had proved unfaithful to the pledge that all private property should be cast into the common stock. Thus was sown the seed of distrust and dissension where all should have been peace and love ; absolutism reigned where freedom had been promised, and jealousy thrust her jaundiced head where all should have worked for the common good. The colonists came to found a Utopia, said one who visited them a few months later, and they had only succeeded, to use their own words, in creating a hell upon earth. ^ Many now abandoned a place where failure was already seen to be inevitable ; a schism of opinion divided those who remained ; but when it was found that Lane had reserved the best ground in the territory for himself and a few chosen friends, the indignation and resentment of the wretched ^ M. de C. Findlay, Foreign Office Report, 1894 (No. 1357) ; see also Foreign Office Beport for 1895 (No, 358) for later information. BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 431 communists whom he had deceived knew no limits. A special revelation from heaven, it was asserted, had assured Lane of the justice of his action ; but it had, unhappily, omitted to convince his disillusioned disciples. In these miserable circumstances, deserted by a leader whom they no longer trusted, and surrounded by converts in whose sincerity they no longer believed, the remainder of the colonists, half starved, hardly clad, and badly housed, struggled on for a while under an elective Board of Manage- ment, which had neither authority nor capacity, business instinct, nor administrative abihty. But the disastrous end of the experiment was at hand. Many had bought their experience dearly, and had already left this New Australia once more for the old ; others, with shattered hopes and bruised ideals, remained in Paraguay, reluctant perverts from the communistic creed they had recently believed. They were generously assisted to begin life anew by the Government of the Republic ; but henceforth communism was abandoned, and each man profited from the fruits of his labour.^ If there were no more communists in Paraguay there were still some enthusiasts for the ideal in Australia, whose faith had not received the rude shock of practical experience. And these might well have attributed some, if not all, the responsibility for the collapse of the New Australia movement to the personaUty and not the principles of its founder ; they might have pointed out with some force, had not the topic been too painful, that Lane's character had clearly changed with the initial success of his scheme, and that it was largely his own unbalanced ambition which had ruined it and him. The suspension of the constitution before it was inaugurated, the attempted tyranny over those who had been promised ' Lane himself left Par'\guay for England before the final change. Eventually he settled in New Zealand. He still posed as a prophet of labour, but he seems never to have gained another following. 432 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVEKSEAS full freedom, and the subsequent justificatory vision from heaven had had a share in destroying whatever chance of success the settlement might have had ; but these defects might have killed any enterprise and any leader. But the village settlements which were founded in Australia during the same period on communistic principles showed commun- much the same defects as the notorious enterprise istic Settle- in Paraguay. The South Australian Government Australia, was the pioneer of these enterprises, which were 1894. begun in the year 1894 for the benefit of un- employed townsmen of that colony. A large tract of good country was set aside for their use along the Murray River ; money was advanced from the State, stock and seeds were provided by the interested but rather sceptical farmers of the district. The head of every family received an allotment of ample size, for the cultivation of which he was responsible ; but every member of the community was to help the other ; each was to work for all, and all for each, after the approved communistic doctrine. The official figures of the experiment supply their own comment. In 1894 there were eleven settlements. In 1897 eight remained. In 1898 only four still survived. In 1910 there were but three, and two of these were to be aban- doned. The number of settlers had shrunk from 1700 to 182. None had ever proved very successful ; a few had held their own for a while ; the majority failed rather badly.^ A private writer, not unfavourable to the principle on which these communes were founded, deplored the intolerable friction and the continual quarrels between their members ; ^ even in the sedate language of an official report it was admitted that the settlers could not agree among themselves. Bickering ^ Parliamentary Papers, South Australia, 1897-8-9, 1908-9-10-11, each under heading ' Village Settlement. ' '^ W. Pember Reeves's State Experiments. There is an account of the beginning of these settlements in Michael Davitt's Life and Progress in Australasia ; a useful work. BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 433 was the chief occupation of every village ; and it was observed, as a strange anomaly, that those who had been helped by the State could not even help each other. The communal system, in fact, proved a failure. It was said that the village settlements were composed of bad settlers, and the unsuccessful townsman is certainly not the ideal raw material from which the successful farmer is evolved ; ^ but the single excuse will not cover the general failure, and it is significant that the one change in the constitution of these settlements that was seriously advocated as giving them a real chance of success was the introduction of a new -rule, by which each settler should receive the due reward of his own labour. Here, as in Paraguay, it was the shirker and the work-shy who profited from the labour of his fellows.^ Had these experimental village settlements succeeded they might have changed the history of the world and the future of humanity, for they were intended to replace the imme- morial struggle between human beings — a struggle so generally wasteful, so commonly brutal, so frequently harsh, demoral- ising, and palpably against the best interests of the coromunity — by a system of mutual help and brotherly love. Such was the beautiful ideal, and I for one can only regret that frail human nature was unequal to the task it set itself. But in practice it was found that communism led to more quarrelling and less work than the old individual conflict ; and when the village settlements came to an unlamented end, so weary were their promoters of the incessant friction that not a Government inspector shed a departmental tear, not even a Government printer risked a larger type for the official announcement of the demise. ^ The recent experience of farm colonies for the unemployed in England may be cited as additional proof of a rather evident proposition. * H. G. Wells remarks somewhere in one of his essays that the shirker will always contrive to live on the labour of others. True ; but it is only in the close, regular, and intimate association of communism that the unpleasant fact is so clearly visible. VOL. V. 2 E 434 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS If communisin failed, co-operation came by its own. Quite early in their history, Australians found that they could borrow Co-opera- the capital they needed to develop their resources state*"^* more cheaply on the security of the whole com- Action. munity than on the security of a private company of individual settlers. This was in itself ^a strong incentive to co-operation and State action, to which the British in the antipodes were not in any sense opposed on general principles. The first Australian railways were begun, indeed, by private enterprise, as in England, the United States, and Canada. But the unfortunate companies were bankrupt before they had succeeded in running a single train in the antipodes ; and since railways were a necessity if the continent was to develop, the various states were forced to pledge their credit and undertake the work.^ The control of the means of communication by the State was thus brought about by accident rather than design. But in other matters the State undertook more definite functions advisedly and with full understanding of the road on which it was travelling. Some of the AustraHan Governments actively assisted the poorer settlers ; experimental farms were established for the trial of suitable crops, and help was freely given to those who desired it. The State in time undertook the inspection and grading of farmers' products according to quality, and its guarantee was soon of recognised value to producer and purchaser alike. And in some instances the State even granted a bonus on certain products and manufactures which it wished to encourage.^ Each of these developments of State policy was directly in favour of the small man. The great agriculturist, ^ Unfortunately in those early days — the first Australian railway was not opened until 1855 — the various states had not yet learned the need of co-operation with each other. Each built its railways with a different gauge, to the endless inconvenience and expense of the public. 2 The State of Victoria, for instance, granted a bonus on butter production. BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 435 pastoralist, or manufacturer can set up his own standard and guarantee it, and establish his own experimental farm ; the smaller man is dependent on united action. And since co-operation with his fellows and with the State did not destroy his direct interest in his own labour as communism had done, since it served as a convenient halfway house between the sheer individualism which persisted in England and the full communism which had failed in Australia, it came to play an important and successful part in the building of industry in the antipodes. And co-operation harmonised well with the general trend of Australasian policy in its attempt to substitute united and corporate action for the individual conflicts and competition of other lands. The struggle for life, and the eternal fighting of man against man in the northern world, had been slowed from the first by the distance and remoteness of the south ; it was still further slowed when the state regulation of industries and co-operation found their recognised place in the economy of Australia. But not entirely could man make hinoself superior to the conditions in which he worked. If communism failed from lack of faith in himself and in others, the co- variations operation of the many small men did not destroy g^^ ^^^ the advantage of the few who operated on a larger climate, scale ; and from time to time forces other than human, still potent and untamed, crossed and perhaps in part destroyed the path which man had hewed for himself through the thicket of human circumstance. For nature herself would not always co-operate with man. The struggle for life had been slowed by man's own efforts ; but a visitation of nature, a prolonged drought or sudden flood, at once renewed and enlarged it on a vaster and more terrible scale against a far more pitiless adversary. Soil and climate, rainless skies and pitiless sun, sometimes fought against man in the antipodes with a blind enmity that man himself could never equal ; 436 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS and this bitter struggle for life against nature itself intro- duced a further variation in the character of the new English nation from that of old England than was due to merely human circumstance — a variation due to soil and chmate, and their unceasing but unhurrying action in moulding man to suit his environment. Australia was at once a harsh and a kindly mistress. Almost any one might prosper on her soil — for a while ; but a drought knocked out all but the strong, and many even of the strong went down before a long period of rainless years. Those who survived had learnt their lesson — it was no easy one — for the struggle had bitten into them a power of resistance which formed the very backbone of the people ; they were men who could fight a losing fight in which all the odds were against them, while creeks and pools and rivers dried, stock and pasture died, and all the land lay still in silent suffering as beneath a curse from God. But when the rains came at last, and the rivers filled again, the recovery was quick ; and those who had outlasted the drought had gained something for their losses. They might have lost thousands of sheep and cattle, and have almost to start life afresh ; but they had gained a hardness and resihence of character, a habit of stoic endurance in the time of trial, that no unbroken prosperity could ever have given. They had wrestled with drought and despair and not been worsted. ' Pallid of face and gaunt of limb. The sweetness withered out of him. Sombre, indomitable, wan. The juices dried, the glad youth gone.' So an Austrahan poet ^ described the man who had fought a pitiless drought to the end. It might be a true picture ; but it was not a complete picture. Glad youth might indeed be gone ; but in its place was a man capable of enduring the * A. H. Adams's The Australian. BEITAIN IN THE SOUTH 437 hardest knocks of fate, of giving blow for blow, and of getting the last blow in himself. Such men, who had fought with nature and not been conquered, had an individuality and strength of purpose that no struggle for economic equahty could ever deprive them of. PoUtical hberty was an inherited instinct among the British in AustraUa, social Hberty the gift of circumstance, economic equality the unavailing struggle of two generations, unity of But it was the sheer necessity of the many small AustraUan 11-,. 1 • ^ r Democracy men holding together agamst the few strong men gives it that had made democracy so compelling a force strength. in Australia. The Commonwealth owed its land laws and much of its other legislation to the enforced unity of its democratic organisation ; and this again emphasised its variation from the parent stock in Britain, where in the nineteenth century no such unity of purpose prevailed among the new-born democracy. In England democracy was not merely distrusted by the governing classes and the old aristocracy ; it distrusted itself. The contemporary denunciations of the party system in the mother country, with its obvious waste, its conscious unfair- ness, and its avoidance of vital issues were, in fact, nothing more than rather timorous methods of condenming popular rule. Men on both sides of politics uttered complaints not only of their opponents — that was an old story — but of their own party, and spoke rather sorrowfully of a generally decreasing grip of principle and an increasing urgency of vote-catching cries. The complaints were directed in form against the party system, because few politicians had the courage or the insight directly to question the virtues of popular government ; but, none the less, the complaints were in reality directed agaiQst popular government itself. If in Australia there was no such distrust of popular govern- ment, it was not because popular government furnished a perfect method of ruling an imperfect world, but because 438 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS there was here no avoidance of vital issues. The fact that the struggle between squatter and small farmer, between old pastoral aristocrat and new agricultural democrat, was fought on economic lines gave it life.^ The whole future of the English people in the antipodes was bound up in the demand for the division of the great estates, for the closer settlement of the small farmer on the land, and for the maintenance of a White Australia and all that it impUed. It was for these three things that Australasian democracy came to stand ; and it was from the insistence on these three things that it drew its strength. But while AustraUan democracy derived its strength from the principles, vital to the Commonwealth, for which it came Its Diver- to stand, those very principles tended to differ- American™ entiate it in essentials from the democratic move- Democracy, ment in the rest of the world. The Austrahan admired the democratic American citizen and the constitution of the United States ; ^ but the specialised form of democracy which developed in the antipodes was altogether different from that which had taken root in the great English repubhc. The American democrat held it a self-evident truth that all men were born free and equal ; ^ the Austrahan saw that not all men were free, and that the equahty which the American proclaimed in theory had no existence in fact.* ^ It may be noticed that this democratic unity did not prevail in purely political questions such as federation (bk. xix. ch. iii.). Discussion on that topic was necessarily rather academic and philosophic and much more remote from the public attention than matters, such as the minimum wage, which touched daily life ; hence the public indifference. * See bk. xix. ch. iii. ' See the Declaration of Independence, quoted in vol. iii. bk. ix. ch. iv. A good many Americans in time came to question this self-evident truth laid down by Thomas Jefferson, the putative parent of modem democracy. An ancient and somewhat musty lie declares that the truth is great and will prevail ; appaiently it does not refer to the Jeffersonian variety. * Indeed, Jefferson was a slave-owner at the very time when he penned the celebrated sentence. But it is fair to say that he disliked the system. BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 439 The American democrat welcomed every man as his brother and his equal, and invited aU mankind to cross the ample threshold of the United States ; the Australian democrat, who saw the grave inconveniences attending on this excessive hospitahty, rejected every man who was not of European descent, and even then he again introduced the principle of selection and exclusion among Europeans. It was a profound conviction with those who were watching, and to some limited extent controlling, the formation of the new Australasian nations in the nineteenth and The twentieth centuries that in order to obtain good Nation *° results they must use good materials. They knew built upon that a great deal of human rubble as well as sound a,nd*^ ^°^ human bricks had gone to the building of the Exclusion. United States, and the results of a century's labour in the making of the Republic were admitted by many thoughtful Americans to be unfortunate ; and Austrahans therefore determined to guard against the danger of using every hetero- geneous human material in the delicate and difl&cult task of building their own Commonwealth. It was the first principle of those who engaged in this task that Australasia could support, and indeed required for her advance, a larger population than existed at that time in the antipodes. That principle could not be denied by anybody acquainted with the conditions ia Australia and New Zealand.^ The second principle hardly obtained unanimous assent. It opened with the obvious and incontrovertible statement that the distance of the antipodes from the great centres of the world's population prevented any large flow of immigra- tion thither, such as was irrigating the waste spaces of the United States with a great human river year by year. If ' It was denied, however, by many of the Australasian trade unions, who feared that the arrival of more immigrants would reduce the high rate of wages. Their influence in opposing assisted immigration was considerable between 1890 and 1910, but the Commonwealth in time woke up to the urgency of the need for more population. 440 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS immigrants were desired in Australasia they must be attracted by the offer of inducements, a free passage, a free title to land, or kindred privileges. But if Australasian statesmen had to offer special induce- ments to attract the population they desired, that very fact gave them the opportunity to pick and choose their men. And this led directly to the practical apphcation of the second principle. Selection implies exclusion : those who confer a gift have the right to withhold it from the unworthy. And the men whom Australasia assisted had to be of sound and strong physique, of British descent or easily assimilable in a British community, men who would fall into line with their fellow- citizens in social and pohtical activities, and not tend to form a state within a state, a population within a population. Australasia refused to purchase her industrial development at the price of a permanent poUtico-racial problem in the shape of a large alien element. She would have no immigrants of non-European blood, working for a low wage, keeping out white workmen, and in time controlling by steady weight of numbers the labouring market ; she determined to protect herself against their competition by a tariff and penal laws, while she assisted white men and women approved by her agents-general in London to settle in her territories.^ By this means, by using only the best materials available in the white world, and by securing them the best conditions for their healthy development, mental and physical, Australasia hoped to build up two new British nations in the antipodes, ^ The process of selection was fairly strict. The unfortunate London barber whose occasional duty it is to scrape my chin applied for an assisted passage to Australia in 1912, but was rejected on the ground that he had a varicose vein, a malady almost as common among barbers as a talkative tongue. An emigration agent who recommended persons of bad character as suitable emigrants was imprisoned about the same time for obtaining money (as commission) by false pretences from one of the agents-general (London Truth, 28th February 1912). BEITAIN IN THE SOUTH 441 better than the old British nation in Europe, because built of more carefully selected materials and reared under more favourable conditions.^ This second principle postulated the rather large assumption to which every Briton, but not every European, would have given ready approval, that the best type of mankind was the British ; while it proceeded to declare what every European, if not every Briton, would admit, that even that type could be improved. The full working of this second principle in all its bearings was not indeed grasped at first, even in Australasia, and the principle itself was not often stated in its entirety. It was slowly arrived at rather than definitely postulated ; it was a gradual development, not an intuitive instinct. The theory of selection and exclusion may have been perfect, the principle of using only the best materials thor- oughly justified as a means of building a new nation .^ But every theory and every principle must be tested by its practical results before it is approved. And a very remarkable conse- quence or accompaniment of this theory soon called for serious inquiry and comment in Australia. A young nation is nothing if it is not virile. Economic pressure may bring down the birth-rate in older and more crowded countries, but in a young community The FaUing and an empty land there is no such check on Birth-rate, reproduction. Large families were the rule in the early American colonies of Britain * and the old Dutch colonies in South Africa.* They had been the rule in early Australia, ^ See, for instance, a speech made by Sir George Grey in 1879, in which he remarked that ' we shall succeed in laying here the foundations of a race which shall be in every respect a monument to those who have striven to build it.' ' Massachusetts had applied the same principle with success, to judge by the stalwart breed of New England. The Puritans deter- mined to take ' only the best ' with them to America in 1629 (vol. i. bk. ii. ch. ii. ). * Vol. i. bk. ii. ch. ii. But infantile mortality was also high. * Vol. vi. bk. xxiii. ch. iv. 442 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS when its white inhabitants were selected indeed, and selected by good judges — but judges of criminals, not of the respectable freemen of Britain. Large families had likewise been the rule among the first two generations of free settlers in the y antipodes. But in the third generation, towards the close of the nineteenth century, a sudden and alarming drop occurred in the birth-rate of the Australian colonies.^ Until the year 1880 the birth-rate was relatively high. Between 1880 and 1889 it fell very shghtly, but on the whole it remained nearly level. In 1889, however, there was a sudden fall ; and this fall continued in subsequent years. Between 1890 and 1900 the crude birth-rate in New South Wales fell 20*8 per cent. No obvious statistical reason could be adduced for this sudden and alarming change. The proportions of the sexes had not substantially changed. The marriage-rate, so far from declining, had increased.^ No continuously effective economic cause, no great drought or depression of trade, could be assigned. There was no evidence to show that the AustraUan climate, or conditions of life, had a sterihsing effect on men and women ; ^ on the contrary, medical evidence showed that the white natives of Austraha were more fecund than white immigrants. It also showed that when both partners to a ^ See the Report and Evidence of the Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birth-rate (1904). The first volume alone was circulated ; the second, of which only a dozen copies were printed, was suppressed. But the first is bad enough. See also Report on Secret Drugs, Cures, and Foods (1907), and Beale's Racial Decay, an exaggerated and alarmist volume. Coghlan's Essay on the Decline of the Birth-rate is more moderate, as is also a paper read before the Australian Mutual Provident Society in 1904. ** The divorce-rate in Australia was also high, a fact which was ascribed to the large number of hasty marriages. The proportion of marriages legally dissolved to the marriages solemnised was 94 per 10,000, as compared with 11 per 10,000 in the United Kingdom, and 612 per 10,000 in the United States. * I have seen statements to this efTect by one or two Australian writers. But they were not supported by evidence, and I do not think they have ever been endorsed by any responsible authority. BKITAIN IN THE SOUTH 443 marriage were antipodean-born there was more chance of offspring than when only one was antipodean-born ; while in the latter case again there was less barrenness than when both husband and wife were immigrants. It was true that the average age at which women married was later, and that their active period of child-bearing was thus diminished ; but this fact had little bearing on the declining birth-rate, for it was discovered that the decline in fertihty began with the younger women and proceeded to the elder. And the birth-rate had declined ia each age- group in turn, until all alike were affected. In some classes of life, indeed, the birth-rate had not fallen. In agricultural famiMes, where the children had a direct value in farm work at an early age, the average number of offspring to each marriage was six or more. Among the industrial classes, where the economic value of children was rather less, the average offspring were somewhat fewer ; the average offspring here were five. But among the professional and trading classes it was low, not more than two or three children being born on an average to each marriage. No apparent decline could be discovered in the physique of the women or the stamina of the men. Sexual diseases, the terrible price man pays for illicit and lustful love, were not more prevalent, and certainly not more severe, in Australia than elsewhere. It therefore became an irresistible conclusion that the causes of this decline in the birth-rate were entirely within the control of the people. Men would not face the risks of cauBeaof supporting a large family ; women would not face *^® ^*^ the risks and pains of child-birth. A large, indeed an overwhelming, mass of medical evidence supported this irresistible but shameful conclusion. The practice of prevention, usually by artificial and often by filthy and revolting means, was conmion among all classes. Un- natural vice was rare, but the manufacture and importation 444 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS of preventives was common. The demand for such preven- tives was steady ; and, thanks largely to the advertisements of such goods in the newspapers and magazines, it was enormously increasing. If the direct preventive failed, induced miscarriage was often resorted to, notwithstanding its danger to the unwilling mother. A large number of professional abortionists found profitable employment at their murderous trade, and these were seldom if ever interfered with by the authorities. Ignorance of the consequences might have been pleaded by many of those who thus outraged nature ; but the doctors saw that the continual use of preventives gave rise to nervous diseases and even to insanity ; while the practice of inducing miscarriages and abortion had its inevitable consequence in increasing the diseases of women, and frequently rendered them sterile for life. Nor was this all. Sometimes the wretched offspring of unwilling parents was born ; but here it was no welcome messenger from heaven, its helpless cry awoke no answering chord in its unnatural mother's breast. The fierce joy of servitude to her children had given place to the desire to be rid of an incumbrance ; a nursing home was requisitioned, the unwanted infant was neglected by its mercenary nurse, and too frequently the httle life that might have helped to build a mighty nation faded, flickered, and vanished from the earth. Or there were other and even darker methods. The number of still-bom children was so large that suspicion was aroused ; and the fact that these unfortunates, doomed to death before ever they had lived, could be buried without a medical certifi- cate was a strong presumptive proof that steps had been taken that they should not live. There were many who made it their business to bury these children without enquiry ; and evidence was given that people * would bring a child wrapped in a brown paper parcel, or leave it ia a cigar-box BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 445 or a stable ; it would be left on the shelf, and be buried perhaps a week or a fortnight later, three or more in the same coffin/ 1 These unpalatable facts, which could not be denied, threw an ugly light on the policy of selection and exclusion, the attempt to check the struggle for existence, and the attain- ment of the gospel of comfort and happiness. The policy of exclusion had not only excluded adult immigrants from Australia ; it had excluded children from being born. The check on the struggle for existence had checked the unborn infant on its unseen journey from love to being ; it, too, had struggled to live, and failed. And the gospel of comfort and happiness had been translated by too many to mean sheer selfishness and avoidance of parenthood. Perhaps both parties to the contract of sterility lost more than they gained by burking the central fact of life ; but whatever joys or sorrows her people had missed, the Australian nation had lost a quarter of a million births in the previous quarter-century, and was still losing every year. Nor were some, at least, of the leaders of opinion in the antipodes unaware of the ultimate direction of the primrose path of parental ease. Old men may advise and direct a nation, they may save it from the mistakes of younger blood ; but it is the younger blood that a people needs to renew its strength. The house that knows no patter of little feet along its corridors, or hears no shrill treble of children's voices, must pass in time to others ; the nation that repudiates its ojBEspring is likewise surely doomed. The able and fearless statistician of New South Wales,^ who first drew public attention to the spreading evil of which every private citizen was aware, pointed out that the maintenance of the White Australia poUcy was contingent on 1 Evidence given before the Commission of 1904. '^ T, A. Coglilan, afterwards Agent-General in London. The fact that all official statistics in Australia are quite exceptionally valuable and trustworthy is in no small part due to his labours and example. 446 THE ENGLISH PEOPLE OVERSEAS the maintenance of a high birth-rate ; if the British would not or could not populate the continent they had claimed, another race would seize it from them. Others saw the grave social troubles which must arise in the future if the decline was not checked. The practice of prevention was relatively greatest among the wealthier classes, for it is a marked and evil peculiarity that social diseases of this kind attack first those who have prospered ; and the inevitable consequence of restricted parentage allied with wealth is that m two or three generations riches accumu- late in few hands, and those few too often degenerate and unworthy, to the peril of the state and society. But secret social evils are the most difficult to cure, since they go far deeper than mere political discontents. They are often beyond the power of the greatest statesman, and on the petty stage of Australian provincial parliaments they were certainly beyond the power of politicians dependent on a majority vote.^ The clergy of all denominations, who saw and deplored the evil, and ascribed it to a lack of moral fibre among the people, were too respectful of the traditional reticences of English public life to denounce it from their pulpits. The press, which had in some sort aspired to usurp the place once held by the pulpit in English communities, was likewise dumb ; it profited from the advertisements of preventives and the procurers of abortion, and silence was here the price of shame. The medical profession, too, which had the most cogent reasons for condemning a practice of which it alone could realise to the full the disastrous conse- quences, was divided. Reputable practitioners set their faces sternly against prevention, but they could only refuse ^ In England, where the same evil had shown itself, no politician so much as hinted at the indelicate subject. In the United States, where the evil was rampant, only Theodore Roosevelt had the courage to denounce it. But in the United States prevention and its filthy accom- paniments was actually raised to a cult, and exploited under the guise of a secret religion. I have myself seen some of the disgusting literature of this movement, which is almost incredibly revolting. BRITAIN IN THE SOUTH 447 to assist, they could not stop the abuse ; and there were degraded doctors, the disgrace of their noble calling, who made a horrible profit from abortion, and lived by preventing others from living. A slight but hardly perceptible improvement was noticed after the report of the Royal Commission was published ; but Royal Commissions are too often themselves abortive to cure abortion in others. A fall was certainly seen in the rather high figures of infantile mortality, from 103*61 per 1000 in 1901 to 71-56 in 1909. Some few lives were thereby saved ; but the birth-rate itself remained at the low level which had now become normal, and that was in itself sufficient evidence that the social disease was uncured. And on that sterile rock the otherwise so fruitful white democracy of AustraUa, which had destroyed its black pre- decessors on the continent in the nineteenth century, seemed likely to destroy itself in the twentieth. END OF VOLUME THE FIFTH Printod by T. and A. Combtablb, Frinterii to Hii M^Mty at the Kdinbnrgh University Press SITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY .--'— '^ ^ ? ' ^ }^ Los Angeles ^ \— ,^T*\_(5lWiis Qwik is DUE oil the last date stamped below MAR 1 8 19655, . ^ ^ f^ECEIVu 191 i6 AM 7-4 A-9 pWV \0 URL API J W/\/? 2 8 ?975 ^et «I? 1<^ AJTT Form L9-32w-8,'58(5876s4)444 ucsou'-sj;'"' °j|f,,'. A 000 959 782 4