Greater Britain Part 26

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

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

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

As sweeping a.s.sertions are made by the townsfolk upon the other side.

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

The occupation of the whole of the crown lands by squatters has prevented the making of railways to be paid for in land on the American system; but the chief of all the evils connected with squatting is the tendency to the acc.u.mulation in a few hands of all the land and all the pastoral wealth of the country, an extreme danger in the face of democratic inst.i.tutions, such as those of Victoria and New South Wales.

Remembering that manufactures are few, the swelling of the cities shows how the people have been kept from the land; considerably more than half of the population of Victoria lives within the corporate towns.

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

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

Since the Radicals have been in power, both here and in New South Wales, they have carried act after act to encourage agricultural settlers on freehold tenure, at the expense of the pastoral squatters. The "free selection" plan, now in operation in New South Wales, allows the agricultural settler to buy, but at a fixed price, the freehold of a patch of land, provided it be over forty acres and less than 320, anywhere he pleases--even in the middle of a squatter's "run," if he enters at once, and commences to cultivate; and the Land Act of 1862 provides that the squatting license system shall entirely end with the year 1869. Forgetting that in every lease the government reserved the power of terminating the agreement for the purpose of the sale of land, the squatters complain that free selection is but confiscation, and that they are at the mercy of a pack of cattle-stealers and horse-thieves, who roam through the country haunting their "runs" like "ghosts," taking up the best land on their "runs," "picking the eyes out of the land,"

turning to graze anywhere, on the richest gra.s.s, the sheep and cattle they have stolen on their way. The best of them, they say, are but "c.o.c.katoo farmers," living from hand to mouth on what they manage to grub and grow. On the other hand, the "free selection" principle "up country" is tempered by the power of the wealthy squatter to impound the cattle of the poor little freeholder whenever he pleases to say that they stray on to his "run;" indeed, "Pound them off, or if you can't, buy them off," has become a much used phrase. The squatter, too, is protected in Victoria by such provisions as that "improvements" by him, if over 40 on forty acres, cover an acre of land for each 1. The squatters are themselves buying largely of land, and thus profiting by the free selection. To a stranger it seems as though the interests of the squatter have been at least sufficiently cared for, remembering the vital necessity for immediate action. In 1865, Victoria, small as she is, had not sold a tenth of her land.

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

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

CHAPTER V.

COLONIAL DEMOCRACY.

Payment of members by the State was the great question under debate in the Lower House during much of the time I spent in Melbourne, and, in spite of all the efforts of the Victorian democracy, the bill was lost.

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

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

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

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

The Victorian have a singular advantage over the American democrats as being unhampered by a const.i.tution of antiquity and renown.

Const.i.tution-tinkering is here continual; the new society is continually reshaping its political inst.i.tutions to keep pace with the latest developments of the national mind; in America, the party of liberty, at this moment engaged in remoulding the worn-out const.i.tution in favor of freedom, dares not even yet proclaim that the national good is its aim, but keeps to the old watchwords, and professes to be treading in the footsteps of George Washington.

The tone of Victorian democracy is not American. There is the defiant way of taking care of themselves and ignoring their neighbors, characteristic of the founders of English plantations in all parts of the world; the spirit which prompted the pa.s.sing, in 1852, of the act prohibiting the admission to the colony of convicts for three years after they had received their pardons; but the English race here is not Latinized as it is in America. If it were, Australian democracy would not be so "shocking" to the squatters. Democracy, like Mormonism, would be nothing if found among Frenchmen or people with black faces, but it is at first sight very terrible, when it smiles on you from between a pair of rosy Yorkshire cheeks.

The political are not greater than the social differences between Australia and America. Australian society resembles English middle-cla.s.s society; the people have, in matters of literature and religion, tastes and feelings similar to those which pervade such communities as those of Birmingham or Manchester. On the other hand, the vices of America are those of aristocracies; her virtues, those of a landed republic. Shop and factory are still in the second rank; wheat and corn still the prevailing powers. In all the Australian colonies land is coming to the front for the second time under a system of small holdings, except in Queensland, where it has never ceased to rule, and that under an oligarchic form of society and government; but it is doubtful whether, looking to the size of Melbourne, the landed democracy will ever outvote the townfolk in Victoria.

That men of ability and character are proscribed has been one of the charges brought against colonial democracy. For my part, I found gathered in Melbourne, at the University, at the Observatory, at the Botanical Garden, and at the government offices, men of the highest scientific attainments, drawn from all parts of the world, and tempted to Australia by large salaries voted by the democracy. The statesmen of all the colonies are well worthy of the posts they hold. Mr. Macalister, in Queensland, and Mr. Martin, at Sydney, are excellent debaters. Mr.

Parkes, whose biography would be the typical history of a successful colonist, and who has fought his way up from the position of a Birmingham artisan free-emigrant to that of Colonial Secretary of New South Wales, is an extremely able writer and deep thinker. The business powers of the present Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales are remarkable; and Mr. Higinbotham, the Attorney-General of Victoria, possesses a fund of experience and a power of foresight which it would be hard to equal at home. Many of the ministers in all the colonies are men who have worked themselves up from the ranks, and it is amusing to notice the affected horror with which their antecedents have been recalled by those who have brought out a pedigree from the old country.

A government clerk in one of the colonies told me that the three last ministers at the head of his department had been "so low in the social scale, that my wife could not visit theirs."

Cla.s.s animosity and political feud runs much higher, and drives its roots far deeper into private life in Victoria than in any other English-speaking country I have seen. Political men of distinction are shunned by their opponents in the streets and clubs; and, instead of its being possible to differ on politics and yet continue friends, as in the old country, I have seen men in Victoria refuse to sit down to dinner with a statesman from whose views on land questions they happened to dissent. A man once warned me solemnly against dining with a quiet grave old gentleman, on the ground that he was "a most dangerous radical--a perfect firebrand."

Treated in this way, it is not strange that the democratic ministers and members stand much upon their dignity, and colonial Parliaments are in fact not only as haughty as the parent a.s.sembly at Westminster, but often a.s.sert their privileges by the most arbitrary of means. A few weeks before I arrived in Melbourne, a member of the staff of the _Argus_ newspaper was given up by the proprietors to soothe the infuriated a.s.sembly. Having got him, the great question of what to do with him arose, and he was placed in a vault with a grated window, originally built for prisoners of the House, but which had been temporarily made use of as a coal-hole. Such a disturbance was provoked by the alleged barbarity of this proceeding, that the prisoner was taken to a capital room up stairs, where he gave dinner-parties every day. His opponents said the great difficulty was to get rid of him, for he seemed to be permanently located in the Parliament-house, and that, when they ordered his liberation, his friends insisted that it should not take place until he had been carried down to the coal-hole cell which he had occupied the first day, and there photographed "through the dungeon bars" as the "martyr of the a.s.sembly."

Though both Victoria and New South Wales are democratic, there is a great difference between the two democracies. In New South Wales, I found not a democratic so much as a mixed country, containing a large and wealthy cla.s.s with aristocratic prejudices, but governed by an intensely democratic majority--a country not unlike the State of Maryland. On the other hand, the interest which attaches to the political condition of Victoria is extreme, since it probably presents an accurate view, "in little," of the state of society which will exist in England, after many steps toward social democracy have been taken, but before the nation as a whole has become completely democratic.

One of the best features of the colonial democracy is its earnestness in the cause of education. In England it is one of our worst national peculiarities that, whatever our station, we either are content with giving children an "education" which is absolutely wanting in any real training for the mind, or aid to the brain in its development, or else we give them a schooling which is a mere preparation for the Bar or Church, for it has always been considered with us that it is a far greater matter to be a solicitor or a curate than to be wise or happy.

This is, of course, a consequence partly of the energy of the race, and partly of our aristocratic form of society, which leads every member of a cla.s.s to be continually trying to get into the cla.s.s immediately above it in wealth or standing. In the colonies, as in the United States, the democratic form which society has taken has carried with it the continental habit of thought upon educational matters, so that it would seem as though the form of society influenced this question much more than the energy of the race, which is rather heightened than depressed in these new countries. The English Englishman says, "If I send d.i.c.k to a good school, and sc.r.a.pe up money enough to put him into a profession, even if he don't make much, at least he'll be a gentleman." The Australian or democratic Englishman says, "Tom must have good schooling, and must make the most of it; but I'll not have him knocking about in broadcloth, and earning nothing; so no profession for him; but let him make money like me, and mayhap get a few acres more land."

Making allowance for the thinness of population in the bush, education in Victoria is extremely general among the children, and is directed by local committees with success, although the members of the boards are often themselves dest.i.tute of all knowledge except that which tells them that education will do their children good. Mr. Geary, an inspector of schools, told the Commissioners that he had examined one school where not a single member of the local committee could write; but these immigrant fathers do their duty honestly toward the children for all their ignorance, and there is every chance that the schools will grow and grow until their influence on behalf of freedom becomes as marked in Victoria as ever it has been in Ma.s.sachusetts. Education has a great advantage in countries where political rights are widely extended: in the colonies, as in America, there is a spirit of political life astir throughout the country, and newspapers and public meetings continue an education throughout life which in England ceases at twelve, and gives place to driving sheep to paddocks, and shouting at rooks in a wheat-field.

There is nothing in the state of the Victorian schools to show what will be the type of the next generation, but there are many reasons for believing that the present disorganization of colonial society will only cease with the attainment of complete democracy or absolute equality of conditions, which must be produced by the already completely democratic inst.i.tutions in little more than a generation. The squatter cla.s.s will disappear as agriculture drives sheep-farming from the field, and, on the other hand, the town democracy will adopt a tone of manly independence instead of one of brag and bl.u.s.ter, when education makes them that which at present they are not--the equals of the wealthy farmers.

It has been justly pointed out that one of the worst dangers of democracy is the crushing influence of public opinion upon individuality, and many who have written upon America have a.s.sumed that the tendency has already manifested itself there. I had during my stay in the United States arrived at the contrary opinion, and come to believe that in no country in the world is eccentricity, moral and religious, so ripe as in America, in no country individuality more strong; but, ascribing to intermixture of foreign blood this apparently abnormal departure from the a.s.sumed democratic shape of society, I looked forward to the prospect of seeing the overwhelming force of the opinion of the majority exhibited in all its hideousness in the democratic colonies. I was as far from discovering the monster as I had been in America, for I soon found that, although there may be little intellectual unrest in Australia, there is marvelous variety of manners.

There is in our colonies no trace of that multiplication of creeds which characterizes America, and which is said to be everywhere the result of the abolition of Establishments. In Victoria, eighty per cent. of the whites belong to either Episcopalians, Catholics, or Presbyterians, and almost all of the remainder to the well-known English Churches; nothing is heard of such sects as the hundreds that have sprung up in New England--Hopkinsians, Universalists, Osgoodites, Rogerenes, Come-Outers, Non-Resistants, and the like. The Australian democrat likes to pray as his father prayed before him, and is strongly conservative in his ecclesiastical affairs. It may be the absence in Australia of enthusiastic religion which accounts for the want among the country-folk of the peculiar gentleness of manner which distinguishes the farmer in America. Climate may have its effect upon the voice; the influence of the Puritan and Quaker in the early history of the thirteen States, when manners were moulded and the national life shaped for good or harm, may have permanently affected the descendants of the early settlers; but everywhere in America I noticed that the most perfect dignity and repose of manner was found in districts where the pa.s.sionate religious systems had their strongest hold.

There is no trace in the colonies at present of that love for general ideas which takes America away from England in philosophy, and sets her with the Latin and Celtic races on the side of France. The tendency is said to follow on democracy, but it would be better said that democracy is itself one of these general ideas. Democracy in the colonies is at present an accident, and nothing more; it rests upon no basis of reasoning, but upon a fact. The first settlers were active, bustling men of fairly even rank or wealth, none of whom could brook the leadership of any other. The only way out of the difficulty was the adoption of the rule "All of us to be equal, and the majority to govern;" but there is no conception of the nature of democracy, as the unfortunate Chinese have long since discovered. The colonial democrats understood "democracy" as little as the party which takes the name in the United States; but there is at present no such party in the colonies as the great Republican party of America.

Democracy cannot always remain an accident in Australia: where once planted, it never fails to fix its roots; but even in America its growth has been extremely slow. There is at present in Victoria and New South Wales a general admission among the men of the existence of equality of conditions, together with a perpetual rebellion on the part of their wives to defeat democracy, and to reintroduce the old "colonial court"

society, and resulting cla.s.s divisions. The consequence of this distinction is that the women are mostly engaged in elbowing their way; while among their husbands there is no such thing as the pretending to a style, a culture, or a wealth that the pretender does not possess, for the reason that no male colonist admits the possibility of the existence of a social superior. Like the American "democrat," the Australian will admit that there may be any number of grades below him, so long as you allow that he is at the top; but no republican can be stauncher in the matter of his own equality with the best.

There is no sign that in Australia any more than in America there will spring up a center of opposition to the dominant majority; but there is as little evidence that the majority will even unwittingly abuse its power. It is the fashion to say that for a State to be intellectually great and n.o.ble there must be within it a nucleus of opposition to the dominant principles of the time and place, and that the best and n.o.blest minds, the intellects the most seminal, have invariably belonged to men who formed part of such a group. It may be doubted whether this a.s.sumed necessity for opposition to the public will is not characteristic of a terribly imperfect state of society and government. It is chiefly because the world has never had experience of a national life at once throbbing with the pulse of the whole people, and completely tolerant not only in law but in opinion of sentiments the most divergent from the views of the majority--firm in the pursuit of truths already grasped, but ready to seize with avidity upon new; gifted with a love of order, yet ready to fit itself to shifting circ.u.mstances--that men continue to look with complacency upon the enormous waste of intellectual power that occurs when a germ of truth such as that contained in the doctrines of the Puritans finds development and acceptance only after centuries have pa.s.sed.

Australia will start unclogged by slavery to try this experiment for the world.

CHAPTER VI.

PROTECTION.

The greatest of all democratic stumbling-blocks is said to be Protection.

"Encourage native industry!" the colonial shopkeepers write up; "Show your patriotism, and buy colonial goods!" is painted in huge letters on a shopfront at Castlemaine. In England, some unscrupulous traders, we are told, write "From Paris" over their English goods, but such dishonesty in Victoria takes another shape; there we have "Warranted colonial made" placed over imported wares, for many will pay a higher price for a colonial product confessedly not more than equal to the foreign, such is the rage for Native Industry, and the hatred of the "Antipodean doctrine of Free Trade."

Many former colonists who live at home persuade themselves, and unfortunately persuade also the public in England, that the Protectionists are weak in the colonies. So far is this from being the case in either Victoria or New South Wales, that in the former colony I found that in the Lower House the Free Traders formed but three-elevenths of the a.s.sembly, and in New South Wales the pastoral tenants of the crown may be said to stand alone in their support of Free Trade. Some of the squatters go so far as to declare that none of the public men of the colonies really believe in the advantages of Protection, but that they dishonestly accept the principle, and undertake to act upon it when in office, in order to secure the votes of an ignorant majority of laborers, who are themselves convinced that Protection means high wages.

It would seem as though we Free Traders had become nearly as bigoted in favor of Free Trade as our former opponents were in favor of Protection.

Just as they used to say "We are right; why argue the question?" so now, in face of the support of Protection by all the greatest minds in America, all the first statesmen of the Australias, we tell the New England and the Australian politicians that we will not discuss Protection with them, because there can be no two minds about it among men of intelligence and education. We will hear no defense of "national lunacy," we say.

If, putting aside our prejudices, we consent to argue with an Australian or American Protectionist, we find ourselves in difficulties. All the ordinary arguments against the compelling people by act of Parliament to consume a dearer or inferior article are admitted as soon as they are urged. If you attempt to prove that Protection is bolstered up by those whose private interests it subserves, you are shown the shrewd Australian diggers and the calculating Western farmers in America--men whose pocket interest is wholly opposed to Protection, and who yet, almost to a man, support it. A digger at Ballarat defended Protection to me in this way: he said he knew that under a protective tariff he had to pay dearer than would otherwise be the case for his jacket and his moleskin trowsers, but that he preferred to do this, as by so doing he aided in building up in the colony such trades as the making up of clothes, in which his brother and other men physically too weak to be diggers could gain an honest living. In short, the self-denying Protection of the Australian diggers is of the character of that which would be accorded to the glaziers of a town by the citizens, if they broke their windows to find their fellow-townsmen work: "We know we lose, but men must live," they say. At the same time they deny that the loss will be enduring. The digger tells you that he should not mind a continuing pocket loss, but that, as a matter of fact, this, which in an old country would be pocket loss, in a new country such as his only comes to this--that it forms a check on immigration. Wages being 5_s._ a day in Victoria and 3_s._ a day in England, workmen would naturally flock into Victoria from England until wages in Melbourne fell to 3_s._ 6_d._ or 4_s._. Here comes in prohibition, and by increasing the cost of living in Victoria, and cutting into the Australian handicraftsman's margin of luxuries, and reducing his wages to 4_s._, diminishes the temptation to immigration, and consequently the influx itself.

The Western farmers in America, I have heard, defend Protection upon far wider grounds: they admit that Free Trade would conduce to the most rapid possible peopling of their country with foreign immigrants; but this, they say, is an eminently undesirable conclusion. They prefer to pay a heavy tax in the increased price of everything they consume, and in the greater cost of labor, rather than see their country denationalized by a rush of Irish or Germans, or their political inst.i.tutions endangered by a still further increase in the size and power of New York. One old fellow said to me: "I don't want the Americans in 1900 to be 200 millions, but I want them to be happy."

The American Protectionists point to the danger that their countrymen would run unless town kept pace with country population. Settlers would pour off to the West, and drain the juices of the fertile land by cropping it year after year without fallow, without manure, and then, as the land became in a few years exhausted, would have nowhere whither to turn to find the fertilizers which the soil would need. Were they to depend upon agriculture alone, they would sweep in a wave across the land, leaving behind them a worn-out, depopulated, jungle-covered soil, open to future settlement, when its lands should have recovered their fertility, by some other and more provident race. The coastlands of most ancient countries are exhausted, densely bushed, and uninhabited. In this fact lies the power of our sailor race: crossing the seas, we occupy the coasts, and step by step work our way into the upper country, where we should not have attempted to show ourselves had the ancient population resisted us upon the sh.o.r.es. In India, in Ceylon, we met the hardy race of the highlands and interior only after we had already fixed ourselves upon the coast, with a safe basis for our supply. The fate that these countries have met is that which colonists expect to be their own, unless the protective system be carried out in its entirety. In like manner the Americans point to the ruin of Virginia, and if you urge "slavery," answer, "slavery is but agriculture."