Chapter XVII: Loyalty and Cynicism 200 (2)

It sometimes happens that the commonest circumstances of life in distant countries are scarcely realised at home because they are too much matter of every-day experience to be spoken about. I doubt whether people in England appreciate the fact that the greater part of Australia is, in its natural state, for eight or nine months in the year almost entirely destitute of water. To a new comer it sounds strange to hear an up-country Squatter remark that he has no water on his run yet, but he hopes he soon shall have. Although more rain falls in Victoria than in most parts of England during the year, there are hardly any springs, and few streams except the large rivers, which are few and far between, which run for any considerable portion of the year. Why the rain runs off so fast is not thoroughly explained, but its seems there is an incrustation of the subsoil which prevents the rain from penetrating to any depth. The creeks, as they are called, leave water-holes, some of which never dry up through the summer; but these, also, are far between; and so generally the first business of a Squatter in new country is to construct tanks to receive the rain-water from the roofs of his house and outbuildings, which is his drinking-water, and very good water it is; and the second is to build a dam from six to twenty feet high across the nearest hollow—for almost every hollow is a water-course after heavy rain—and in this way to make a reservoir containing water enough for his sheep to drink all the year round, and be washed in at shearing time. A dam is as much an essential appendage to a station as a barn is to a farmyard.

Probably it is this absence of moisture in the ground, and consequently in the air also, which makes distant objects in Victoria so marvellously clear, and gives such peculiarly brilliant colour to the landscape where the conformation of the ground admits of a distant view. I never saw such brilliant colouring anywhere in Europe. It is the one redeeming feature, without which the scenery, except in the mountainous districts, would be tame and dreary enough. The country is seldom undulating, as in Tasmania. The trees are generally small, stunted, and diseased, except on the ranges; the plains are almost destitute of any trees at all, and vegetation is scanty, except in early spring-time. There is a great plain extending for nearly a hundred miles westward of Geelong almost without a break, so flat and (unlike the fen country in England) so destitute of trees or other objects high enough to break the line of the horizon, that at the height of a dozen feet from the ground you may any day see a hill—and not a high hill either—full forty-five miles distant as the crow flies, looking not dim and misty, but a clearly defined blue patch upon the horizon.

To most people there is something intolerably desolate and repulsive in such a plain. Even to those who are most fond of open country it must be depressing under certain circumstances, notably during a rainy fortnight in winter, or on a hot-wind day in summer. But there is something indescribably grand and enjoyable in the continual contemplation of so vast a landscape. When the sun is high it is an expanse of turf, green in winter and brown in summer; but as the afternoon advances, earth and sky become faintly purple, and crimson, and golden; the colours deepen from half-hour to half-hour, till the sun sinks into its bed of turf in a gorgeous blaze of splendour. There are several shallow lakes upon the plain, some very large, and most of them salt. Coming suddenly upon one of them one evening from behind some little sand-hills which concealed it, the margin for some hundred yards in width dry and coated with mud and brine, no human being or habitation visible, and the full brilliance of the setting sun lighting it up, the scene was (except for the absence of mountains in the distance) singularly like the landscape in Holman Hunt’s picture of the ‘Scape-Goat.’ It is a pity that this kind of scenery is spoiled by cultivation. Cut up into little pieces, a plain loses its vastness, while its monotony is increased.

It is a pleasant life to have a station up the country (but not too far up), at least for a man not over gregarious in his habits and tastes, and whose mind is not set on those pleasures of town life which seem to possess the greatest attractions for the majority of mankind. It may be ten or twenty miles to the next station, or nearest doctor, or post-office, or church: and the owner of the next station may happen to be illiterate and uncongenial, the doctor generally intoxicated when sent for, and the post-mistress so lonely and dull that it is a necessity to her, poor thing! to read your letters and communicate their contents to her friends. But nobody thinks much of distance; there are plenty of horses, good or bad, and by going a little further afield you may be better suited. Then people journeying up the country drop in occasionally for a dinner and a night’s lodging. If the visitor is at all presentable he is entertained with the best the house affords. If he is a stock driver, or shepherd, or labourer, he is entertained at the overseer’s or the men’s hut. There are rather too many such visitors sometimes; nobody is ever turned away, and there are idle fellows pretending to be in search of work and refusing it when it is offered them, who go from station to station living upon the Squatters. The house is generally comfortable enough nowadays, usually built partly of bluestone, partly of wooden slabs, and with only a ground floor, a single sitting-room, and a great deal of broad verandah, which answers the purpose of a sitting-room in fine weather. People are beginning to take pains with their gardens, and there is generally a fair supply of vegetables to help down the mutton. There is always good bread, and damper has long since vanished from civilised regions. Near the house is the overseer’s cottage, and a little way off is the men’s hut. The latter is usually only a log hut, made of boards; it contains two rooms, a day-room and a dormitory, and looks comfortless enough. The furniture is a bench or two, a table, and perhaps a wooden arm-chair; and in the dormitory the only beds are wooden bunks, like ships’ berths, built against the wall in two tiers. The unmarried men about the station live here, perhaps half a dozen in all. The head of the establishment is the cook, whose business it is to keep the hut and prepare the food. In the old, rough days he needed to be a man able to hold his own and preserve discipline, and if necessary to prove himself the better man against anyone who complained of the dinner. He is generally butcher and baker to the whole station. At a short distance off is the wool-shed, the most important and imposing building of all, where the sheep are shorn and the wool packed. And there are a few outlying shepherd’s huts, each with its hut-keeper (unless the shepherd is married), whose only business is to cook and keep house for the shepherd, and occasionally lend a hand with the sheep pens. They all get good wages. The shepherds get from 40_l._ to 50_l._ a year, and the hutkeepers from 30_l._ to 40_l._, and they get a sheep a week between two, and the other usual rations. Strange to say, the men do not seem to care for vegetables, and seldom take the trouble to make a garden, though they might have as much garden ground as they liked for nothing.

There is not often very much to do except for two or three weeks at shearing time, when everything is once fairly set going. The toils and pleasures of stock-riding on cattle stations, of which we read in _Geoffrey Hamlyn_, are almost at an end in Victoria. For, alas! it is found more economical to divide the runs into paddocks by wire fences, and so to employ fewer shepherds or stock riders. And so, though you can see the place you want to ride to, or at any rate know in which direction to go, you must ask your way among the fences almost as if they were rows of houses. The black-fellows, and the wild dogs, and (except in thickly-wooded districts, where they are as numerous as ever) even the kangaroos are gone, which is an unmixed advantage for the Squatter, if not for idle and inquisitive friends who stay with him. Near a forest you may see scudding about little white clouds, which, on closer inspection, are discovered to be composed of white cockatoos; but their sentinel is generally too wary to let you get within shot, though you may get near enough to see them put up their yellow crests in disgust. Of sport there is not often much to be had. There may be some rabbits or some quail. On the plains there are sometimes bustards, commonly called wild turkeys, and you may get a shot at one with a rifle now and then, especially if you _drive_ after them, instead of walking or riding, for they do not expect hostilities from anything on wheels. Opossums are killed by thousands for their skins, generally by hunting them up trees after dark and shooting them there. But there is no sport to be got out of them; one might as well shoot a lamb, albeit indignant with them for scampering about the roof all night. I saw a large brown one one day looking at me from a bough about ten feet off, apparently only waiting for an introduction to offer me his paw to shake. I tossed a bit of clay on to his back to make him move. He only moved a yard higher up, and taking hold with one paw of a bough of the next tree, looked down with a countenance of mild reproof, as if meekly and generously affording me the opportunity to apologize before unwillingly quitting my society.

But a station is no bed of roses for a Squatter’s wife. Servants are difficult to get and to keep up the country, and especially when there are young children there is a good deal of work to be done by somebody. Then perhaps the shepherds’ wives will not condescend to do any washing, and there is no one else to do it. What with hot winds, hard work, solitude and anxiety, a wife transplanted from English luxury to the bush has a hard life of it, and too soon begins to look old and worn. It is almost impossible for her to get any attention paid to the little luxuries and prettinesses of life. Perhaps the cook persists in throwing the sheep’s bones into a great heap just outside the garden gate; or nobody can be spared to bury the cow that died in the home paddock, and her white skeleton has been lying there for months. To be sure, a hot wind is an effectual deodoriser, and there is only the look of the thing to be considered; but that is something, and I don’t know anything that strikes a person fresh from home more than the number of carcases he sees by the roadside everywhere.

The Squatter party has been for some years powerless in the Legislature. No Squatter has much chance of being elected for the House of Assembly, and is derisively _bleated_ at on the hustings if he offers himself as a candidate. Even in England I observe that a writer speaks contemptuously about their ‘great ideal’ being to ‘cover the continent with sheep-walks.’ Surely, as regards all but a small proportion of the continent, this has been, and for some years to come will be, the ideal of every reasonable person, whether Squatter or not.

What else is to be done with the soil? Somewhere about 300,000 acres, which collected together would be equivalent in extent to a block of land a little more than twenty-one miles square, ought surely to grow enough wheat to feed the whole population of Victoria. For a quarter of wheat for each head of population, which is, I believe, the ordinary allowance in England, is probably much more than is consumed in Australia, where meat is eaten in abundance by the labouring classes. And eighteen bushels to the acre is about the average in Tasmania, where there is certainly no superabundance of capital or skill employed in farming; if Victoria cannot farm as well as that, it had better import its corn. Something must of course be added for other crops, but this amounts to comparatively little, for wheat may on most of the land be grown year after year without any rotation of crops, and with the help of subsoil ploughing without any present prospect of exhaustion. It must be remembered that meat is in England chiefly a product of agriculture, whereas in Australia it is a pastoral product. There would be no use in growing turnips or mangold (even if the climate admitted of it, which I believe it does not) in a country where there is no winter, and where stock will fatten on pasture alone. In South Australia large quantities of wheat have been grown for exportation chiefly to the other colonies, and also in one or two years to England. But in Victoria, till inland communication is very much more developed, there is no probability of its being exported to any extent; indeed I never heard of its being even suggested.

But even if this rough estimate be altogether too small, suppose that a million acres, equivalent in extent to a tract of country nearly forty miles square, or even double that quantity, were required, it would still be but a small portion of the area of Victoria. And Victoria is by far the most thickly inhabited colony. Its population is in the ratio of about seven to the square mile. As for the rest of the continent—which the Squatters are found fault with for wishing to ‘cover with sheep-walks’—New South Wales contains nearly a square mile for every inhabitant, and South Australia about two and a half square miles. In England and Wales there is less than two _acres_. In speaking of the Squatters, it is only fair to remember that the colony owes its origin and existence simply and solely to them. It was they who opened up the country and made it habitable. In their hands the land, if it does not produce much, steadily improves in quality. No doubt at first they got the use of it for a merely nominal payment, but nobody else wanted it at any price, and so they paid the market value. As it become more valuable, this payment was from time to time increased. Occasionally their stations were sold, and they had the power, if they had the means, of purchasing them and becoming the absolute owners of what they had hitherto held on an uncertain tenure. If they had not the means, they had to submit to be turned out. All this was fair enough. Where land is plentiful enough, everyone should have the opportunity of purchasing it. It may be that at one time it was put up too slowly for the requirements of the growing population; but if so, the reaction was extreme. A cry was got up and fostered for party purposes that everybody ought to be a landowner; placards were posted along every road, stump orators vociferated, and there was a mania for getting land. From that time legislation has been unfairly directed against them. Instead of the simple plan of putting up Crown land in small blocks to the highest bidder, which in the long run would have ensured its getting into the hands of the man who would get the most out of it, elaborate Land Acts have been passed, drawn with the intention of preventing the Squatter from purchasing land at any price, even on his own run, and of parcelling his run out to different purchasers without any regard to his rights of previous occupation.

Shortly, the procedure is as follows. The district is surveyed, and blocks of a square mile each (640 acres) mapped out. Notice is given that the blocks will be put up, and numbers apply for them, the applicants hoping, if they are lucky enough to get one, to make a good bargain of it somehow, though they may not have a shilling of capital to farm it with. Amongst the rest, the Squatter on whose run the blocks are of course applies; and as amongst so many applicants his chance is small, he often increases it by engaging any one he can to make application ostensibly on his own account, but in fact as dummy for _him_, and with a view to his transfer of his interest to him should he obtain a selection. A ballot takes place on the appointed day, and the successful applicants select each his block. The Selector (or ‘Cockatoo,’ as he is nicknamed) thereupon obtains a seven years’ lease of his 640 acres on the following terms. He is to pay a rent of one shilling per acre every half-year, in advance, to expend on improvements not less than 1_l._ per acre within three years, and to build a habitation on the land, and reside on it during his tenancy. He also covenants not to alienate. If he has fulfilled these conditions, he has the option of purchasing the freehold at the end of three years at 1_l._ per acre. If he does so, therefore, he will have expended altogether 1,472_l._ besides what his stock, &c., may have cost him.

Clearly, therefore, a Selector without any capital is practically a man ‘without ostensible means of subsistence.’ Yet the chance of the ballot brings many such, and how are they to live, except by stealing the Squatter’s sheep and preying upon him in various petty ways? Often a Selector may be a former servant of his discharged for misconduct, who now has ample means of revenge. These additional annoyances are often worse than the original one of being deprived of large portions taken out of the midst of his best pasture. But in any case he is put to the expense of fencing in the new comer, or else letting his stock stray and feed all over the run. This alone costs about 55_l._ a mile, or 220_l._ for each selected block. And so he is often driven to throw up his run altogether, or to endeavour to evade the Act and buy out the Selector at all hazards. And the hazards are very great, for by the terms of his lease the Selector is interdicted from alienating his interest in his land, so that any bargain he may make to do so is legally void; and thus, if he happens to be a rogue, he may take the price of his block from the Squatter, and at the end of the three years refuse to give up the land to him, and snap his fingers at him. And even if the Selector who sells be an honest man and anxious to carry out the bargain fairly, the Squatter still runs a great risk; for though he can perform the requisite conditions of paying the rent and expending the 1_l._ per acre in improvements (probably a sheer waste of money to him) he cannot fulfil the other condition of residing on the block itself—for he cannot live in two or three places at once—and must trust to the forbearance of the government inspector to overlook this non-performance, otherwise the lease and the title at the end of the three years will be forfeited and his whole expenditure thrown away.

And so, as time goes on, the Squatter of moderate means is being (prematurely and needlessly, as it seems) ‘civilised’ off the face of Victoria. Large blocks of land have been bought up by a few of the more fortunate among them, and more often by rich merchants or speculators from the towns. Politically, as well as socially, it may well be doubted whether it is not a change for the worse. The old-fashioned Squatters were many of them sons of English gentlemen, with less wealth but with more education, knowledge of the world, and refinement, than those who are supplanting them, and they fell naturally into a position and duties in some degree resembling those of country gentlemen at home. As for the ‘Cockatoos,’ they have little, if anything, to be grateful for to their patrons. They have been tempted to embark in an undertaking in which three out of four have small chance of succeeding honestly. It is only in the neighbourhood of towns and markets that they are likely to do well. Already, though the last Act has hardly been three years in operation, a deputation of them has been to the government, declaring their inability to pay their purchase-money and petitioning for an abatement.

I am very far from pretending to possess a complete knowledge and understanding of the land-questions and the land-laws in Victoria. But the present system seems so patently and obviously bad that he who runs may read that it is so. The possibility of obtaining land by the chance of the ballot is unsettling and demoralising, just as in a greater degree a public lottery is. Its tendency is to hand over the soil, not to skilled and thrifty agriculturists, but to speculators or to idle men who have failed at other trades, and who try their luck at the ballot on the chance of making a good bargain somehow or other if they draw a lucky number. The blocks are so large, require so much capital, and are often at such a distance from a market, that they are quite unsuitable for a peasant agriculturist, who can seldom obtain any labour but his own and that of his children. The discretionary power, which in certain cases is vested in the Executive, of selling or not selling land on particular runs, gives it an immense and undue influence, and is liable to lead, as experience has shown, to gross corruption amongst members of the Assembly and others who have influence with the Ministers for the time being. Eventually the system will, it is believed, after great waste of labour, and after ruining a number of Squatters, throw the land into the hands of the monster capitalists far more certainly than if a much less extent, favourably situated, had been put up to auction in much smaller blocks. In the meantime, the class of agriculturists, or quasi-agriculturists, has been artificially increased so as to be out of proportion to the rest of the population. And as one political fault, unrepented of, soon necessitates another, a protective duty on corn has been imposed, which helps, as far as it goes, to prop up the land laws.

But neither Protection nor an artificial land system will do the agriculturists much good in the end, not even if a clause could be introduced and enforced obliging everybody to eat two quarters of wheat a year instead of one. A few good big ships full of immigrants do more for them than all the land laws in the world. For what they want is more mouths for them to feed. And in the long run new mouths will go most to countries where, _cæteris paribus_, industry and labour are left, not only unfettered but unpampered, to find their own level in their own way.

The present land laws savour of unjust class legislation, of tyranny of the majority over the minority. Yet so little confidence is placed in the present Legislative Assembly, that it is expected that any change which may be made will be for the worse. Democracy has made a bad beginning in Australia. At this rate, what with bad legislation and the far worse and more fatal vice of corruption, it will be well if the word ‘democracy’ does not in course of time earn for itself in this part of the world a _special_ sense as derogatory as that which the word ‘tyranny’ did in Greece of old.

V.

POLITICS IN VICTORIA.

Strange to say, it is a fact notorious in Victoria that a proportion of the Legislative Assembly, sufficient to sway its vote on almost any measure that may be introduced, is altogether corrupt and amenable to bribes! How long this has been so I know not, or how long it has been a matter of notoriety; but attention has been particularly drawn in this direction lately by the scandalous disclosures made in the case of _Sands_ v. _Armstrong_, which was tried in May. The plaintiff was a member of the Assembly, against whom charges were made in a local paper of so serious a nature that he was compelled to bring an action for libel, to endeavour to re-establish his character. The trial lasted several days, and resulted in a verdict of a farthing damages—practically, of course, a verdict for the defendant—as nearly all the charges against the plaintiff were fully made out. The following extracts from a leading article in the _Argus_ of May 6, 1867, describe his operations:—

For years past there has been a prevalent belief that rank jobbery
and corruption infested our governing system, and from time to time
circumstances came to light which confirmed and strengthened this
belief. But outside political circles the facts were not known with
certainty, while as to the extent of the evil the general public
could not even form a guess. At last we have got at the truth, so far
as concerns the operations of one honourable member. For the first
time the veil has been completely lifted, and the life of a jobbing
legislator fully exposed to view. And the reality is immeasurably
worse than any but the initiated could have imagined. Scheme and
trick and dodge are proved to have been the constant practice of
the person whose conduct has been investigated, his public position
a mere agency by which he could work out, by means of wholesale
corruption, sordid plans of personal aggrandizement.... Using his
influence with the Government, and pretending to greater influence
than we are willing to believe they ever permitted him to exercise,
he seems to have meddled in every kind of public business transacted
in his locality, and turned it to account for his own pecuniary gain.
Nothing was above—nothing beneath him. If a poor labouring man wanted
a bit of land under the 42nd Clause, it was ten shillings to Sands;
if there was a returning officer to be appointed, that was an affair
of 30_l._ if it could be managed. Circumstances rendered one piece
of local preferment particularly desirable during the currency of
his operations, by reason of its great profitableness, and that he
apparently tried to keep in his own hands altogether, appointing a
dummy official representative (though on this part of the case the
evidence is necessarily incomplete, the only persons fully cognizant
of the facts having been accomplices in the transaction). But there
is no doubt of his having professed to be able to influence the
administration of the law.... Is the Attorney-General to be worked by
such as Sands? No one will for a moment believe so; but his claiming
to possess such influence shows how hardened he had become through
long immunity from exposure and punishment.... He has a newspaper,
and he has also a public-house, both of which seem to have served as
tolls for the collection of corruption-money. But in aid of these he
established an agency far more efficient than either. This was in
the form of a testimonial to himself, and the subscription lists
being kept open for a year and a half were a constant appeal to the
generosity of all who had anything to gain from the favour of the
Government or to fear from its displeasure.

If the case of Sands had been a solitary and exceptional one, it would not have called for remark. But his course of conduct seems to have been singular chiefly in having been found out. Opinions differ slightly as to the number of Members, who, if not quite as bad as Sands, nevertheless lay themselves out for bribes outside the House, and are ready to sell their votes in the House for a sufficient consideration. The _Argus_ (if I recollect right) reckons about ten or twelve. But nobody, except a Member or two in a parliamentary and perfunctory way in the House, seriously attempts to deny the existence of such a set, most of whom are as notorious as if they occupied a special bench to themselves. Nevertheless, I was surprised to hear a well informed and moderate man, not specially connected with politics, express his opinion that almost any measure might be carried through the House for the sum of 15,000_l._ judiciously expended in bribes. I repeated this with some hesitation, lest he should be sensitive to such a reflection on his colleagues, to a Member. He answered by coolly counting up the purchasable Members on his fingers, and concluded that it could be done for a less sum, remarking that a clever, unscrupulous man, possessing great wealth and popular manners, might obtain almost unlimited power in the Assembly. Nor is the blame of this disgraceful state of things to be laid specially to the charge of the present Ministry. They have indeed been content to let things go on in the old groove, and in the matter of the Sands scandal have not appeared very anxious to promote an investigation. But their personal integrity, and, on the whole, their ability, is well spoken of by men of all parties. Even the Opposition, opposed as it is to their ultra-democratic and protectionist policy, confess that their places could not well be supplied, should they have to quit office, and that a change is more likely to be for the worse than for the better.

Jobbing in Government patronage is one source of corruption. Under the O’Shanassy Government (in some respects considered to have been one of the best) it is said to have been almost impossible for any but Irish and Roman Catholics to obtain any place. Even the porters on the railways completed at that time are Irish almost to a man. But this is comparatively a small matter. It is the Lands Office which is the focus of corruption, and it is the unsettled state of the land laws and regulations which affords such opportunities for roguery. For instance, under a clause of the Land Act of 1865, any person residing near the gold-fields may, subject to the sanction of the Lands Office, select and purchase, at a fixed price, any portion of Crown land within a certain distance, not exceeding a certain quantity. This clause the Minister of Lands has seen fit to extend to Crown lands (which are in general Squatters’ runs) at any distance from the gold-fields—in fact, almost anywhere. Other clauses leave a somewhat similar discretion with the Minister. Thus, he continually has in his own hands the power of selling or refusing to sell Crown land, and practically he generally gives or withholds his sanction in each instance according to the recommendation of the Member for the district, or, if this Member happens not to be a supporter of the Government, of some other who is. Thus, a Squatter may sometimes be deprived of a block of land in the middle of his run, if he prove troublesome to a Government candidate. It is unnecessary to point out what a temptation this offers to a needy Member, and how it almost forces the Squatter to illegal practices for his own protection. I once heard a Squatter, an honourable and much respected man, say that, wanting to purchase a part of his own run which was Crown land, he had sent orders to a land agent at Melbourne to apply for it for him, and that his instructions were to obtain it, if possible without, but if not possible by, the help of _parliamentary influence_. I innocently asked him what parliamentary influence meant. He answered simply that it meant a fee of 5_l._ to one or more members to urge and support the application.

People seem to resign themselves to the existence of a corrupt House of Assembly as to a necessary evil, a thing inevitable. I have heard the free-trade party blamed for not _buying_, as it is said they easily might have done, sufficient support to enable them to establish their policy. Such an opinion sounds horrible enough in the mouth of an honourable man. It reminds one of the purchase of the Irish Parliament in 1800, which few will say was not necessary to be done, and which was done by honest men, though it would puzzle a casuist to justify it. The judge who tried the case of _Sands_ v. _Armstrong_, in his summing-up declared that the evidence had made him a convert to the proposal of payment of Members, for that, as they gained no credit or social distinction by their membership, they expected a pecuniary consideration for their trouble, and it was better for them to get it honestly and above-board than dishonestly. The House, it seems, thinks so too, for by a majority of 22 to 10, the other day, they patriotically voted that they ought to be paid. The Council will probably throw out the Bill, for it may be doubted whether a moderate salary would suffice to induce a rogue even to confine his rogueries within the bounds of decency.

These things being so in Victoria, and being no secret, but in every man’s mouth, it is not a little humiliating to find the peculiar institutions under which such abuses thrive, held up, in a volume of _Essays on Reform_, apparently as a pattern by which England may profit in remodelling her own. I have neither space nor inclination to examine the essay in detail. The account which it gives of Australian prosperity is, no doubt, true enough. Indeed, as regards Victoria, nobody need be otherwise than sanguine about the ultimate prospects of a colony of such extraordinary natural wealth. It will require very bad legislation, and a very bad legislature indeed, to inflict any irretrievable blow on its material prosperity. The Council is as yet sound, and works well. Above all, the Bench is excellently filled. It is true that there are many unrefined and wholly uneducated persons in the wealthiest class; the largest proprietor (in fee) of land in Australia, and probably in the world, was once a retail butcher. But this will right itself by degrees. And, on the other hand, the lowest class in Victoria is decidedly superior in energy and intelligence to the same class in England, as is to be expected of the first generation of colonists who have come out each of his own individual will, and not forced in a promiscuous mass by any political convulsion. It is a pleasure to see a man breaking stones on the road, he does it with such vigour, and one knows he is earning thereby about five shillings a day, and not only a pittance at the workhouse. Victorian society is like English, with a thick slice cut off the top and a thin slice off the bottom. There is, perhaps, more to be said for universal suffrage in Victoria than in most countries.

But admitting all this, the utmost that the writer of this essay has proved by it is that these colonies have not been retarded in their growth by their peculiar institutions. He does indeed contrast the excellent judges of the present time with a drunken Judge-Advocate under Governor Bligh. But in those days New South Wales had scarcely ceased to be anything more than a huge prison, and he might as well compare a judge of the Court of Queen’s Bench to an Old Bailey practitioner. The press of the present time, no doubt, is superior to that of fifteen or twenty years ago. So is the press of London to that of Birmingham or Dublin; but is that because London has a better political constitution than they have, or because it has many times their population, and is able to demand and pay for better and more expensively conducted publications? As to public expenditure, it is idle to compare old and burdened countries with new ones in this respect, but is it so great a triumph for a Legislature which entered upon its labours with no debt, no foreign ministers, no pauperism, almost no military or naval expenses, no possibility of war, a population extraordinarily wealthy, and millions of acres of land to sell when it pleased, not to have exceeded its income (though in Victoria the Government has fallen back on Protection for revenue), while England, with more than a third of her revenue going to pay interest of debt, with the pauperism of an overcrowded country, and with foreign war constantly threatening, has yet managed, however little, to continue paying off her debt?

Nobody disputes the desirability of representative institutions for colonies which have reached a certain stage of development. The point is whether they have worked the better in Australia for being so democratic, and this the essay scarcely even attempts to prove. Still less does it prove that such institutions, even if they are the best it was practicable to obtain for Australia, would be equally applicable under utterly different circumstances in England. With respect to the glaring evils I have alluded to, the writer may perhaps agree with the author of another essay in the same volume, that corruption in the Legislature is, ‘except in extreme cases,’ merely ‘an annoying and offensive, and not a dangerous disease.’ This is the old cry of ‘measures, not men,’ revived. For my own part, I believe that the tardiest and feeblest legislation is far less pregnant with fatal consequences than the habitual contemplation of dishonesty in high places and amongst public men. This is an ever-present pattern and incentive to evil, which, entering every household, offers its drop of poison to every ambitious and aspiring man, and slowly and imperceptibly brings all that is sterling and honourable into disrepute.

VI.

TASMANIA.

The heat, and drought, and dust of summer begin to make Melbourne unpleasant by December. In Sydney and Adelaide it is hotter still, and in Queensland there is almost as great heat as in India, without all the elaborate Indian appliances and luxuries for making it bearable. Christmas holidays and lawyers’ Long Vacation are just beginning. Hence there is a considerable migration about this time of year of Australians on the mainland who may be ailing or wanting a holiday, to the cool fresh air of Tasmania; and well filled steamers go about twice a week from Melbourne to either Launceston or Hobart Town, and once a fortnight from Sydney.

Our long narrow vessel, crowded with passengers and incommoded with an unpleasant deck-cargo of two or three hundred sheep, which makes her roll like a porpoise, steams swiftly away from Melbourne down the dirty sluggish Yarra-Yarra, between flat marshy banks, more malodoriferous than the worst parts of the Thames in its worst days. By sunset we are out of Port Phillip and in Bass’s Straits. Next morning we pass high jagged rocky islands, rising abruptly and precipitously out of deep water; then through Banks’s Straits, which seem to be a funnel for collecting the wind, for it is almost always blowing hard there from the west; and in the afternoon we glide suddenly out of the rough water into the serenest and calmest of seas, protected from the fierce westerly winds by Tasmania, the east coast of which lies a few miles off to starboard, a pretty peaceful shelving shore, with bold mountains rising up in the distance. Another night at sea, and we wake up at daylight as the vessel is rounding the fine precipitous headlands of Cape Pillar and Cape Raoul, with basaltic columns like those in the cliffs of the Giant’s Causeway, and is entering Storm Bay with its wooded islands, narrow-necked peninsulas, and deep inlets running far into the country, till the eye is puzzled to discern where our course will be, and to distinguish island from coast. Two hours more and the estuary of the Derwent is reached, broad, but as we proceed wholly land-locked by hilly shores, rising gently from the water’s edge, and green with cultivation near their base, their summits dark with trees and half-cleared bush. I can think of nothing to compare it with unless it be the Lake of Thun without its snow mountains, or the Dart at its widest near Dartmouth; but both are bad comparisons. Soon after, the dark blue-grey wooded mass of Mount Wellington faces us, rising up four thousand feet and more; and on the sloping shores of the little bay below it lies Hobart Town, with wharves along the water’s edge, and water deep enough for a man-of-war within two hundred yards of the shore. Sea, river, mountain, forest, farm, and city, are before the eye almost at once. It is the most beautiful spot for a city I ever saw in the world.

The steamer comes alongside a deserted looking wharf, occupied only by two or three drays and carriages, and a knot or two of lounging, ill-conditioned porters; and with the picture of busy, thriving, restless, eager Melbourne fresh upon our minds, we land, to find ourselves in what looks like a pleasant, neat, old-fashioned English country town, perhaps twice as large and straggling as Dorchester, Ipswich, or Bury, but ten times more stagnant, dull, and lifeless. A greater contrast in every way to Melbourne could hardly be conceived. At Melbourne most people seem to be there only for business, that they may accumulate and save money and retire with it to England. Of Hobart Town the most conspicuous and characteristic feature is the number of small, quiet, comfortable houses in small, pretty, gay gardens, such as men with incomes of from 300_l._ to 800_l._ might inhabit, and which look like the abodes of retired sea-captains, merchants, or tradesmen. The House of Assembly and Custom-house, the Post-office, and other public offices, are very well placed in a central position not far from the wharves—handsome, stone-faced, neatly-finished buildings, free from attempts at florid ornamentation, and though small and unpretending, more appropriate, and in better taste, than many of the public buildings of Melbourne or Sydney. They were planned and begun, most of them, in the days when there was any amount of convict labour available, and have been finished since, at heavy cost owing to the dearness of labour, by the help of loans, the interest of which presses somewhat heavily on the colony. But so seldom is anyone to be seen passing in or out of them, that one doubts at first sight whether they can be in use.

The streets are almost empty. Nobody looks busy. Nobody is in a hurry. Converse with anyone about the state of the Colony, and the word _depression_ is one of the first you hear, and it will come over and over again till you are weary of it. Different people mean different things by it, and feel the tendency from prosperity to adversity in different ways, but few or none dispute the fact. Elderly ladies lament the old days when there was more society, and a more abundant supply of soldier and sailor ball-partners; merchants and tradesmen the time when Hobart Town promised to be the emporium if not the metropolis of Australia. It is seldom indeed that anyone can be heard to speak cheerily of the present, or hopefully of the future of Tasmania. Nor is the colony suffering merely from one of those temporary checks in the advance of prosperity, which always occur from time to time in young colonies,—such as, for instance, the wide-spread ruin in Queensland, which was mainly, and so strangely, caused by the commercial panic in London, and which is already passing away. Tasmania (or Van Diemen’s Land, as it was originally called—the name was changed to efface, if possible, the very memory of its identity and existence as a convict colony) is the oldest next to New South Wales of the Australian colonies, and till twenty or twenty-five years ago was still, next to it, the most important. Now it is thrown completely into the shade by Victoria, South Australia, and even by Queensland. For the last fifteen years the revenue, the trade, the shipping, and the general prosperity and enterprise of the colony have been steadily decreasing. And although the population has increased, the increase has been due solely to the excess of births over deaths, and not at all to immigration—the number of persons who have left the colony during this period being considerably in excess of those who have arrived in it, in spite of very large sums spent out of the public money on immigration—and hence the population of adults has remained nearly stationary, while only that of old people and children has increased. A settler of twenty or thirty years’ standing, especially in the southern part of the island, can perhaps point to only one or two houses in his township which have been built since he came.

It is not difficult to account for this state of things. Wool first, and then gold have been the two principal causes of prosperity in Australia. Of gold there is not sufficient quantity in Tasmania to pay for working it. Wool it does produce according to its capabilities; but it must not be forgotten that the island is comparatively small (roughly, about as big as Ireland), that much of it is thickly timbered or for other reasons useless, and only a small proportion available for pasture. What there is has been almost all taken up and made the most of, for nearly thirty years past. And so mere excess of numbers drove men, and young men especially, away from Tasmania, to become Squatters in Victoria, and in younger colonies where there was more room for them. For the most profitable sheep-farming, according to the present system and condition of things, is that which is done on a large scale. Ten thousand acres is a very small station. I have heard of as much as seven hundred thousand acres, the size of a large English county, belonging to one cattle-station in a remote part of Queensland. It is said that sixty thousand sheep is about the best and most economical number for a Squatter to have, that being large enough and not too large for him to manage, with the assistance of his overseer and shepherds. And sixty thousand sheep take a great many acres of the thin thirsty Australian grass to keep them alive through the summer droughts.

It is true that Tasmania with its excellent and temperate climate is especially suitable for agriculture. According to the government statistics the average produce of an acre of wheat is about eighteen bushels. In England the average is said to be twenty-eight, in Ireland twenty-four, and in France only fifteen and a half.[5] And bearing in mind that in a new country the cheapness of land and dearness of labour and of capital renders farming almost of necessity slovenly, this may be considered a comparatively large yield. But there are great difficulties in the way of the agriculturist. Most of the rich chocolate-coloured soil in the north is very heavily timbered, and requires much labour to clear it. It is seldom indeed that farming is made remunerative, even by settlers who have had many years’ experience, except in the immediate neighbourhood of a large town. For it must be remembered that the population of an Australian colony is very small, comparatively, and its market soon glutted; and that as the town and manufacturing population is small compared with the country population, the tendency is always in the long run rather towards over supply of agricultural produce, and consequent low prices. Now and then of course there is a violent reaction; but the great fluctuation in price is of itself an evil and a difficulty. The crop that pays best one year may, however abundant, be a loss the next.[6] A farmer needs something of the judgment and experience of a merchant and of a speculator to enable him to succeed, as well as skill to grow good crops. And often capital is thrown away upon a soil which is too poor to repay cultivation; for it is difficult to form a correct opinion of the value of land which has never been cultivated. One often passes fields which have been abandoned, and in one place I saw a whole valley left to return into its original condition of bush.

Tasmania has suffered, too, more perhaps than even New South Wales, though in a way that is less likely to be permanent, from the abuse of the convict system. I say the _abuse_ of it, for looking upon transportation to Australia as a whole, I find it impossible to avoid the conclusion that it has been a great and conspicuous success. But poor Tasmania was very hardly treated. In 1840—rashly and needlessly as Lord Grey thought[7]—transportation to New South Wales was suddenly stopped, and the whole stream turned on the unfortunate island. For many years after this the convicts far outnumbered the free population. In 1845 there were 25,000 male convicts in the island, and the country was simply a huge penal settlement without even sufficient room for expansion, the moral sink and sewer of England. It is true that in this colony the convicts were seldom able to marry or leave children, or settle on the land, as they did in New South Wales, and that the great majority left the country as soon as their sentences expired, so that considering the immense number brought there, the number now remaining is surprisingly small. It may also be true, as is asserted (though I hardly believe it), that crime measured by the number of convictions is now not more frequent than in England, in proportion to the population. Still in one way or another they have left a curse behind them. The settlers were demoralized by the assignment system, which while it lasted gave them almost the power of slave-holders. A convict could be hired for little more than the cost of maintaining him; sometimes in consideration of leisure allowed him, he even paid money to his master in addition to his services; and the master could get him even punished at the public expense by sending him to the nearest magistrate with the written message, ‘Please give the bearer twenty lashes, and return him to yours truly.’

Free labour, as is always the case, suffered from contact with forced labour. The convict taught the free labourer many bad lessons, and one of them was how to do the least possible amount of work for a day’s wages. The accepted standard of a day’s work became a low one. Wages might fall, but such labour was dear at any price. All this time the Home Government was spending about half a million annually in the colony, and was making roads, harbours, and wharves, on a magnificent scale by convict labour; so that the cost was not felt in taxation. Government originated everything, planned everything, paid for everything. An unhealthy artificial condition of society was produced which tended to enervate all classes, and left the colony ill prepared to stand against, or profit by, the events which followed. In deference to the general outcry at its gross abuse, transportation was suddenly stopped, and with it ceased most of the annual half million from England. At this time Victoria had for some years past been attracting from Tasmania many of the most enterprising and adventurous of its population, but from the moment when the wonderful news of the gold came, it seemed as if none would be left behind but old men, women, and children. Most would indeed have done better to stay behind and cultivate the land. For wheat rose till it sold for five to six pounds a quarter in Melbourne, and hay at from twenty to forty pounds a ton. A great trade sprang up with Melbourne in corn, timber, vegetables, and fruit, and there was a hope that Tasmania would establish itself as the granary of Victoria. But year by year this trade has been diminishing, and now American flour and even American timber undersell Tasmanian in the Melbourne market. Some fortunes indeed were made in those years of gold, but they were comparatively few and small, and those who made them have for the most part invested them elsewhere, or been content to live quietly on the interest of the money rather than risk their capital in doubtful enterprises.