of the house. So does the Maori. Both in Ireland and in Maoriland the cultivation of the potato is the form of agriculture most practised. To complete the parallel, the Maories have a land grievance. Like Paddy, they are idle, voluble, rollicking, emotional, hospitable, ready to fight or kiss at a moment's notice. They are partially converted to European ideas about costume, and the dress of a great number of them would do credit to Ballyporeen. The statement looks odd at the first sight of it, but their adoption of European dress is killing the race as surely as if it was a pestilence. They get wet through, and have no idea of removing their clothes, and, as a natural consequence, consumption, which has no native right in the country at all, is rife among them. I am writing at a distance from my books, or I should like to cite a legend or two from Sir George Grey's collection to illustrate the mental characteristics of this surprising race of savages. They are sometimes generally, and even exquisitely, poetical. One of them relates how the heavens and the earth were at the beginning of things united in marriage, and how the sky was torn away from the partner of her love by her own children, the storm winds. Every night she weeps over her lost husband, and her tears are the dew. Sometimes the stories are very quaintly and oddly imaginative, as where the tale is told of three brethren who took a canoe to fish, and went far, far away out into the open sea, when one of them, who had prepared a magic hook, caught what was supposed to be a great fish at the bottom, and drawing it up to the surface, found that he had discovered New Zea land. That was how the land came into being, and the Maories point to two or three of the great mountain ranges as the stone canoes in which their giant ancestors came from some far-off country to people the land. The mixture of childish naïveté and high imagination makes the collection actually fascinating. One legend which reached me lately, though, for aught I know, it may have been published, seems interesting enough to be related here. There are two volcanoes, a big one and a little one, standing near to each other. The big one is the husband, the little one the bride, and when the smoke blows from the gentle man's cone in the direction of the lady, he is supposed to be paying his addresses to her. In the old original times there was an interloper in the person of a third volcano, who, while the lady's proprietor was supposed to be asleep, ventured to project his smoke in her direction. But the bridegroom had only feigned to slumber, and had expected this attempted encroachment upon his privileges. He had gathered his forces already, and smote his rival from bencath with such a shock of earthquake that he lifted him from his rocky roots and hurled him to a lonely promontory thirty or forty miles away. He has never recovered sufficient spirit to go back again, and stands there still. Modern men name that ejected intruder Mount Egmont. Пе I am glad to have been led to the mention of these curious legends, because they bring me, in a perfectly natural and easy way, to the man to whom the world owes most of its knowledge concerning them. There is little enough talk of Sir George Grey on this side of the world, and little enough knowledge of his achievements. He is the Nestor of New Zealand. was the Governor of South Australia half a century ago, and he did as much for the development of the resources of British possessions at the Cape as any man alive. A statesman, a soldier, an orator, and a scholar, a man who has showered gifts of all sorts on the latest country in which he has served his people and his Queen, he lives still with a freshness of political ideal which is perhaps only rivalled by our own Gladstone. He is full of somewhat Irish suavities, and has those delightfully urbane manners which are associated, in the minds of reading people, with the gentlemen of eighty years ago. Mr. Froude is generally supposed to have been too much under Sir George Grey's dominion, and his book is condemned by the mass of New Zealanders partly on the ground that it represents too exclusively Sir George Grey's opinions. I can recall few pleasanter days than those I spent in the society of the ex-Governor of New Zealand. He is commonly credited with a desire to make all men proselytes to his own opinions, but we exchanged no word of politics together. He took me to one of the public institutions of the northern city, and showed me there a splendid array of MSS., and a most unique collection of Polynesian curios. I admired them to the full, but it was only from the curator that I learned that all these things were Sir George Grey's gifts to Auckland. I have long ago come to the conclusion that the game of politics is about as little worth playing as any in the world, and have grown to be absolutely indifferent to any body's political opinions. Sir George Grey is far more than a politician. He is a patriot, and a patriot of the best type, and there are few men to whom the British Colonies owe a larger debt of gratitude. He used to own a very beautiful house and estate at Kawa, and the people of Auckland were made abso lutely free of it. Hundreds and hundreds of steamboat excursionists thronged unpatrolled and unwatched through chambers crowded with beautiful and costly curiosities, but Sir George himself assured me that he had not only never missed the merest trifle from his collection, but had never had anything broken or misplaced. In his old age he has retired to quieter quarters, has made over all his rich collections to Auckland, and leads a life of great simplicity. He still holds his place in Parliament, and in spite of age still retains his fine oratorical power. He was received quite recently at Adelaide, where, half a century ago, he occupied the post of Governor, and there, for once, his oratory failed him. The Nestor of the great southern island was welcomed with an enthusiasm so disturbing that he could only speak a few broken words through tears. There are servants of the Empire by the score who do work in our far-off possessions which would make them iminortal if it were done at home, and whose names are barely known to the English public. Sir George Grey is one of these. The next great figure which presents itself to my memory is that of Sir Henry Parkes, who is still in the very thick of the fight. He was a Warwickshire peasant to begin with, learned a handicraft, migrated to Australia, started a newspaper there, threw himself into the vortex of politics, found a seat in the Legislative Assembly, came to be Minister, and finally was made Premier. This is a wonderful record, and it is one of the exceptional glories of the Colonies that they have made such a career possible. One would have to travel very far, indeed, to find a more strongly marked personality than that of Sir Henry Parkes. He may be called 66 strictly a self-educated man, and though his written and reported speech is pure, vigorous, and cultured, there linger yet in his manner, and will always linger, certain traces of the educational disabilities of his youth. He is the bête noire of that Australian Thersites, the Sydney Bulletin, which slangs him weekly with a surprising constancy and vivacity. One might have thought that in the course of a year or two a weekly repetition of such fun as is to be got out of a misplaced "h" would have palled alike upon the satirist and upon the public, but with unfailing regularity fifty-two times in every year the local humorist tips his quill dagger with the venom of the superfluous aspirate and stabs the Premier with it. There are few men in the world who have been so royally abused as Sir Henry Parkes, and few men who have come through abuse with less damage to nerve tissue, fighting force, or good temper. Until now he has been, in one respect at least, an unmitigated blessing to New South Wales. He has saved her from the commercial canker of Protection, and although it seems more than likely that the present colony will follow the mistaken example of Victoria, the most distinguished champion of Free Trade in Australia has the satisfaction of seeing his own colony still in the way of righteousness. The student of the various problems the colony has so far solved, and of the problems she still has to face, might fairly point to the veteran Premier of New South Wales as the most striking example of the advantages the Colonies afford to intellectual powers which, in older countries, would not only go without help, but might be finaliy, and even fatally obstructed. It is quite easy to see now, and cheap to proclaim the fact, that he is a born leader and ruler of men. Even in his native Warwickshire he could not have failed to be remarkable, but it is, of course, impossible to say in what direction the obstructive forces would have turned his powers. I saw enough of him to learn that the rugged, forceful, yet kindly and genial outside of the man is in complete accord with his inward gifts and nature. His opponents proclaim him a trickster, by which they really mean no more than that he has generally outwitted their own attempts at political jugglery. The Liberals of England denounced Disraeli in the same terms, and the Tories of to-day employ them in regard to Gladstone. The game of politics, the whole world over, is so rootedly and unconsciously dishonorable that the dispraises of an enemy are but the reverse of the praises of a friend. The Warwickshire peasant, before he became Premier, and since that date, might have found life a bitter business if it had not been leavened through for him by a virile and enduring sense of humor. Like Abraham Lincoln, he loves, and can tell a good story, and his sense of fun relieves for him a good deal of the tedium of official business. I was with him one day when, in an up-country town, he was boarded by a friendly deputation at the exit from the railway depôt. Some local functionary read an address of portentous length, and the Premier, who was already fatigued by a dreary railway journey, and had yet heavy work that day before him, listened for awhile with a somewhat forlorn expression of statesmanlike interest. The remorseless periods droned on, and it was evident that the reader had no intention of allowing his hearers to escape a solitary paragraph of the lengthy MS. he carried. A little Chinese boy, some six or seven years of age, had somehow found his way through the crowd, and stood bareheaded between the recipient of the address and its presenter. His almondshaped eyes were fixed on the grizzled features of the Premier, and he stared with all his soul. Parkes stood with his silk hat in his hand, wearily nodding to the droning periods, when his eye fell upon the small celestial, and stooping with a solemn twinkle, he blotted the infant out of sight with his hat. He kept the hat on the child's head until the address was exhausted, and from the moment when the jest occurred to him until the tiresome function was over, he sparkled with a dry complacency. It was my good fortune to be present at that now famous meeting at Tenterfield at which Sir Henry chose to make his pronunciamento with regard to Australian federation, and I shall not readily forget the enthusiasm his speech evoked. His utterance was plain, straightforward, and convincing, and the speaker's sterling belief in the greatness of his theme and the propitious character of the hour was strikingly evident. The excellent choice of words, the masterly elaboration of phrases which were obviously moulded while he stood there upon his feet, were in some contrast to the manner of his utterance. The voice was a little veiled by fatigue and age. The massive shoulders were a little bowed, but the huge head, with its streaming wave of silver hair and beard, was held as erect as ever. The rough, homely features were as eloquent as the words he spoke, and the instinct of the natural fighting-man lit up the ancient warrior's eye. The mere aspect and manner would have been remarkable to a stranger anywhere, but there, where for the first time the voice of an authoritative statesman gave soul and utterance to the aspiration of a people, it was truly memorable, and not without a touch of sublimity. The petty jealousies of rival states will yet fade away, the infinitesimal bickerings about imported lemons and exported onions, which now help to embitter a strife that is altogether puerile in itself, will come to an end. And here was the beginning of that better state of things which every lover of the British race at the Antipodes must hope for and believe in. I had returned to Australia when the Federa! Convention met at Sydney as an outcome of the speech of which I have just written, and of the memorandum to his fellow Premiers with which Sir Henry Parkes followed it. The Sydney Convention did not do everything the most sanguine of the Federationists desired, but it far surpassed the expectations of the moderate. It may be that in the pages of future historians the tale of that convention's doings will read as the first page of annals more glorious than any the Old World has to show. For there, for the first time in the story of the world, an attempt was made to found an empire without the preliminary of bloodshed. In that foolish and wicked isolation from her children in which the Mother Country chooses to live, England learned little, and perhaps cared as little, about the convention, and near at hand it took for some minds that air of unimportance which is the mischief that lies in neighborhood for common-place people. I expressed at the time, as well as I could, the thoughts with which it inspired me. Because they live among us, and we know The unheroic detail of their days, Since they and we move in familiar ways, We scant the greatness of the deed they do. Men say that if, within a reasonable time, these aspirations should be realized, Lord Carrington, the late Governor of New South Wales, would probably be the man selected as the first Viceregal ruler of the consolidated Colonies. The new fashion of sending out men of title as the representatives of the Crown, and of making the Viceregal Court a reflex of what the English Court used to be, is a source of delight to scores and a prompting to dissatisfaction among thousands. But Lord Carrington was unusually fortunate in his administration, and is undoubtedly one of the most popular of modern Governors. Whether he has the greater diplomatic faculties, he has so far had no opportunity of showing; but he possesses the lesser in perfection, and he owes the widespread esteem and affection he secured as much to the tact of the diplomat as to his inborn good-nature. If deinocratic Australia is to have a titled English representative at the head of its affairs at all, it will have a man for whom it can entertain a personal affection. The at tempt to conciliate the democracy by an occasional sprinkling of inferior titles upon distinguished citizens is met with outspoken derision. As I have said already, Lord Carrington lived in a Court, and courtiers say smooth things. Shrewd as he is, and well as he knows the people among whom he lived for five years, he could hardly have offered a poorer panacea than he proposed in a speech in London shortly after his return. Outside the Court fringe, the Australians not only do not refrain from asking for titles, but have a cordial and, from their own standpoint, a logical dislike of them. For good or for ill, the country has made up its mind. The democratic sentiment of Australia is profound and immovable. It is hard for a man of plain common sense to keep his temper in view of the ineptitude with which the Colonial Office in London has dealt with the magnificent interests confided to its care. It is not a question of what the Colonies are to us at this hour, or ever have been, until now. It is a question of what they should be and might be in the future, if their destinies were rightly ruled. One of our statesmen said, probably as a mere rhetorical flourish, that if England lost Australia and New Zealand she would sink to the position of a third-rate power. This is obvious nonsense. It will be many years before they can be much more than a source of affectionate anxiety to us, but the possibilities of the future were incalculable. Those possibilities have been muddled away with a recklessness, ignorance, and folly which are barely conceivable. For once in the history of the world it was possible that a great race might grow up free of those social hatreds which have disturbed every section of the old world since a time when history had not begun to be written. British people were first in possession of the whole band of Antipodean and Pacific islands. Not a single European power would have raised a hand in menace or a voice in protest had the British flag been planted on every one of them. Australian statesmen have always seen what was coming, have always struggled against it; but the Colonial Office has been invincibly ignorant. France, in making New Caledonia the receptacle of its human offscourings, has only followed the example England set her. But nothing in the world would have been easier than to forestall her action. New Caledonia is now a perpetual thorn in the side of Australia, and it might be a casus belli any day. It is all very well to hope that it may never prove so, but the possibility is there, and the bare chance should never have been risked. We have let in Germany on the north, and have made possible another complication there. The plague of the thing is that the responsible people have never, from the first, been allowed to go without warning. Sir Henry Parkes has some fine and spiritcd lines which must have found an echo in the hearts of many Australians: "In other lands the patriot borsts His standard borne through slaughter's flood, Which, waving o'er infuriate hosts, Was consecrate in fire and blood. "A truer charm our flag endears, Where'er it waves on land or sea; "God girdled our majestic isle With seas far reaching east and west, That man might live beneath his smile In peace and freedom ever blessed." That patriotie and beautiful hope might have stood a chance of being fulfilled practically and to the letter, had all chances of the growing power of Australia being embroiled with the empires of old Europe been wisely held aloof. As matters stand, the materials for conflagration have been even painstakingly brought together, and if the fire never breaks out it will be more through luck than judgment. Another matter, on which opinion will be more divided, is the question of practically unlimited rights of self-government to the Colonies. It is too late to discuss that question since the final surrender of a few months back, but it may at least be doubted whether it would not have been wiser to have retained some powers of colonization. This has grown to be a ticklish subject, and it is of course quite hopeless to expect that Australia will surrender the powers conferred upon her. Her cry is, quite naturally, for greater corporate freedom, and any attempt at restriction would be angrily resented. But a wise and politic reservation was practicable not so many years ago, and had it been put into force, it would have been good both for the Colonies and for England. It is almost incredible that any overcrowded country should lave had possession of millions of miles of virgin land, and should deliberately and with open eyes have surrendered the right of state-aided emigration from her own shores to those vast possessions. Australia could refuse, and would refuse to accept any large number of emigrants from the old country, though plans might easily be constructed, by means of which the transfer of population could be made without the slightest danger of overflooding her labor market, and with no prospect but one of benefit to both the giver and the receiver. I have insisted so strongly on the indifference of the young Australian to England that I feel bound to offer an illustra tion of the very different way of thinking which distinguishes the original settler. The story may serve to lighten a page which runs some danger of growing too monotonously serious. When I started on my two years of travel to the Australias I left England by way of Plymouth Sound. When the anchor was weighed it brought with it a quantity of Devon mud and ooze, which, in the course of a day or two, under a suinmer sun, baked into stiffish earth. Half by way of a sentimental joke, and half seriously, I took a cubic inch or thereabouts of this English soil, placed it in an cnvelope, and determined to carry that morsel of Old England with me on my travels. Many months after I was the guest of a pastoralist away up country. I told him jestingly that I had brought a bit of England with me and he begged excitedly to see it. I took it from my portmanteau, opened the envelope, and displayed the relic. He begged it from me so movingly that, had I attached much more value to it than I did, I could have found no other way than to surrender it. "You'll be going back there," he said, " and I never shall. I've been away from home for sixteen years, and I'd value that bit of Old England more than the Kohinoor." When next I passed his way I found that he had ridden sixty miles (out and home again) to buy a little plush stand and a glass shade for the precious trifle. A fact in the history of another old settler breathes the same sentiment this little story illustrates. At his commission a ship came out from England in ballast. It carried English earth, and on that he built his house and planted his garden. One would naturally be disposed to think that the sons of men like these would grow to feel the distant homeland dearer for its distance. It seems rather pitiful that inertness on the one side and a sentiment purely mistaken on the other should rob Great Britain of the opportunity of grappling at once with one of her most serious and difficult problems. I am no statesman, and I can see difficulties in the way of the scheme I desire to propose, though I can find none that are really insuperable in the nature of things. I offer the scheme tentatively and with humility. Even if it should prove to be worthless, I shall have done a citizen's duty in offering it for public consideration. The dread of emigration in the colonial mind is excited only by the thought of a sudden influx, and by the fear that England should attempt to dump |