Thirty Years in Australia Part 13

And there may be more.

But I believe there are already guide-books to the city of Melbourne, with all its British inst.i.tutions common to every British city of any consequence precisely catalogued. And I have lived too retired a life as a Melbourne citizen to be qualified to enter into compet.i.tion with them. I do not know the faces of the City fathers when I see them, and am unacquainted with much else that is common knowledge to any man in the street. On the other hand I have strayed into some of the by-ways, the underground tunnels, of our local civilisation, where the local historian would feel off his beat.

For some years, while in town on business or holiday from the country (and parish), I was much with a dear friend who, while living far above it in what we call the best society, shared my pa.s.sion for unconventional excursions into what answers here to Gissing's Nether-World. We did not go "slumming" or anything of that sort--we would have been the last to commit such impertinences--but we wanted to see deeper into the workings of the mysterious problems of social life which so much and equally concerned us. In memory of her and those days of lofty thought and helpful companionship I keep on a shelf apart the books she gave me--Mill, Morley, Th.o.r.eau, and the like--that we read together under the trees of her beautiful garden or by a secluded fireside, and which inspired us to the search for that ideal truth which we could not admit was inaccessible. Our husbands were both indulgent to our aberrations from the beaten path. In G.'s case, I must confess, I traded a little upon the fact that what the eye does not see the heart does not grieve for; I thought it just as well that a parson--and one so far away--should not know everything; I took the view that I was at large for the time being, and to that he never made objection. Of course, I respected the altered circ.u.mstances when we came to live in town together, and have known nothing of alien "persuasions" and their goings on of a Sunday since.

But it was just these irregular operations in the moral world that we desired to investigate, my friend and I: our outlook over it was not bounded by the walls of the Church of England or of our cla.s.s. Drawn as we felt ourselves to be towards our fellow-strugglers after light and knowledge, we wanted to know what they were doing in furtherance of the common aim. The phenomena of spiritual life, in whatever form, attracted us; the more curious and unconvincing to us personally, the more earnestly to be searched into and understood, if possible. The Salvation Army was a case in point. Why was it such a power in the land? Eclectic as we were, we could find but one theory to account for it--which I still think a good one, _i.e._, that men and women share equally and intimately in the whole work from top to bottom--but this did not cover all the ground. It did not adequately explain the number and fervour of its non-official adherents, and their long continuance in faith. According to appearances, it is all force and artificial emotionalism, the "unhealthy excitement" against which I have heard so many good clergymen earnestly warn their flocks; yet time falsifies the prediction I remember they made from the pulpit at least eighteen years ago, that it was a pa.s.sing craze, a grotesque epidemic, that would quickly die.

My friend and I--our minds burdened with, our thoughts and conversation full of, the (to us) injustices of human arrangements, and our responsibilities towards the (to us) enslaved and wronged--wondered how much real amelioration of the lot of the more miserable was wrought by this particular agency. We knew that, as we sat, like Buddha in his palace, within our social shelters, we could know little about it; we resolved to go outside and see. It was Sunday morning, and we said we would go to a Salvation Army meeting, at the Head-Quarter Barracks, that night. My friend's husband, who would have liked to keep her (she was so precious) in a gla.s.s case, yet could not bear to balk her wish if it was anywhere within the bounds of reason, asked leave to take us into the city and to the door of the tabernacle, and to wait for us until we came out; but we agreed that that would spoil it all. For what we wanted to feel was that we were one with our poorer fellow-wayfarers on this pilgrimage of life, afoot and equal, not carrying any of our unfair privileges into their rougher line of march. Her correct English maid, who must have had her thoughts, though she did not express them, produced a plain waterproof and a gossamer veil, in which my companion could hide her native elegance from a curiosity that we did not wish to court--I easily made myself inconspicuous--and we set forth, escorted only as far as the railway station of our exclusive suburb.

When we got into the Sunday-night city streets we were a happy pair.

Manners in Australia do not deteriorate as the social scale descends; we were jostled on the crowded pavements, but not rudely; in fact, the sensation was grateful to us. We were literally in touch with our kind, free of artificial restrictions, and "seeing life" as we had desired to see it. The crowds were later, however; going in we were before them, thinking it wise to be early since we had to find our way. The large building was filling fast when we arrived, but we secured what we thought safe seats--near the door, and with a pillar or something b.u.t.tressing our backs--and from this point studied the scene and the proceedings with rapt attention. I should think no Salvation Army meeting ever included two persons at once so devout and so hopelessly impervious. But, though impervious, we were deeply impressed. The only thing that offended us--unless I except a hectic and hysterical preaching girl, whose health we saw being destroyed before our eyes--was the conduct of a group of lads who had evidently come for the fun of the thing. They sat just within the door, and ought to have been put outside it; yet their ill manners were compensated for by the patient courtesy of the officer who from time to time came to expostulate with them. For myself, I could willingly have boxed their ears. I remembered this incident when afterwards I had a Salvation Army servant and it was reported to me that my own mischievous boys had gone to the little conventicle of her sect to hear her preach. She was a quiet-mannered, sedate sort of person, and never gave us Salvation Army in the house, except in the form of a modest brooch; but on Sat.u.r.day evenings--the Australian servants' free time--she stole off in her hallelujah bonnet, and, I was told, carried a torch or a banner in the procession that patrolled the town, and sang and prayed with the best of them. We never minded these little things, holding the view that a good servant was a good servant, and that her religion was her own business. One of the best we ever had was a Roman Catholic of the strictest type. I believe that girl never omitted an observance required of such an one; yet she never allowed us to be inconvenienced on that account. She would do her washing, or whatever it was, in the middle of the night to go to a morning service; on Sundays she would come out from her devotions at her church, which was not a stone's throw from ours, to put on the potatoes, and trot back again. Between our kitchen and that of the Presbytery the most neighbourly relations existed during her reign.

They borrowed of each other without any false pride, and many a time, at my secret instigation, B. went over to a.s.sist when the priest was having company, sometimes carrying extra silver and such like from my store. I was always desperately afraid of his hearing of these liberties that a black heretic was taking with him--and he a dean, if you please; mentally putting myself in his place, I knew how I should feel, and I was always exhorting B., who was garrulous, to guard against this risk.--One Christmas I heard that he was to have a party of priests to dinner, and that his cook was quite incapable of rising to such an occasion. "I'd like to send over one of our puddings," said I, "only that I'd be so afraid he might ask who made it"--for our puddings, I may modestly state, were good. B. jumped at the tentative offer, and the pudding, with a few etceteras from the same source, duly graced the dean's table. Our Christmas feast took place in the middle of the day, his in the evening, so she could attend to both.

When she returned at night from the second function she was radiant.

The table, she said, was something beautiful, and they ate up all the pudding, and praised it to the skies. "I do hope to goodness you never breathed a word," said I, "and that that cook will keep the secret."

Alas! it transpired that B. herself had been unable to keep it. "But,"

said she, "you needn't worry yourself at all, for he was quite pleased about it, and says he is coming himself to thank you for your kindness."

That was a good old man, and the most liberal-minded ecclesiastic of his faith that I ever came across. B. being so strict a daughter of her Church, and living in a place where its influence was strong--for the matter of that, it is strong everywhere in Australia--she used to have qualms of conscience now and again, after the nuns had been talking to her, as to the lawfulness of dwelling under a Protestant roof. She went to the dean for advice, and he gave it promptly. "Don't you be a little fool"--his very words, she told me. "You get more Catholic privileges where you are than you'd get in many a Catholic house. You stay where you are well off." Under these circ.u.mstances she was delighted to stay. But some time afterwards, when under more rigid discipline, she was inveigled from us--the only one of our good servants who went, even to that extent from choice, except to be married. But she still maintains intimate relations with the family, and brings each little Pat and Biddy to show us as soon as it is old enough to take the air.

But to return to the Salvation Army. Personally, as I have said, we were cold to its appeals, but seldom had our hearts been so warmed by the reflected feeling around us. It was perfectly apparent to us that we were in contact with things as sincere and real as they could be.

Even the hectic girl preacher, who almost frothed at the mouth, was in earnest, whatever the old hands amongst her colleagues, who sat about her and watched her, might have been. The music--their best--with its swing and precision, was splendid, incalculably effective as a stimulant; I could have thrilled to that if I had not heard so much of the excruciating performances of the humbler rank and file. But it was the congregation which so impressed us. Going to church all my life--much against the grain sometimes, I must confess--I had never seen anything like it; so many men in proportion to women, such intensity of religious feeling as distinct from superficial ardour and rant. The service was very long, and we grew anxious as the hours pa.s.sed, knowing how our husband and host would worry about us if we missed the train he had fixed on for our return, and we had carefully left our watches at home. So I leaned towards my next neighbour on the left, a respectable and very quiet and silent young working-man--just as I would have done in any other church--and whispered to him, "Would you kindly tell me the time?" As soon as the words were out of my mouth I was smitten with compunction, and felt more ashamed of myself than I had ever done in my life. Wild prayers were going on, and the young man was on his knees, and his uplifted face wore a stern solemnity that showed him miles and miles above all such considerations as the time of day. At first he took no notice, as if he had not heard me; then he slowly climbed down and down from his heights and looked at me with a blank, dazed stare; and his eyes were full of tears. I shall never forget him, and all that he taught me in that moment. We went home thoughtful, humbled in our intellectual conceit, deeply touched and moved; certainly all the better for our excursion into this by-path of national life, although we never felt drawn to go into it again.

On another Sunday evening we attended some sort of Free Thought service in one of the theatres. Here the "minister," if not a charlatan, was something of a fraud--to us, at anyrate, who had made a deeper study of the questions dealt with than he had. But in this case again the congregation, which filled the building, was the instructive and surprising feature. Not only perfectly respectable and orderly, but grave and attentive, and the majority well-dressed middle-cla.s.s people, husbands and wives together, dropping into their seats with the air of habitual attendants. The proverbial pin might have been heard while the pseudo-teacher poured forth words and phrases that had no intelligible meaning in them; every eye was fixed on him, every ear listening. We were much exercised in mind over the results of this experiment. The size, seriousness, and social quality of the congregation were our chief concern. Evidently seekers after light and knowledge, like the rest of us--no mere heathen idlers wilfully or carelessly breaking the Sabbath day. "And," sighed we, "getting only this rubbish for their pains!"

Then there was a place called, I think, the Progressive Lyceum--a small body this, but, once in it, you found it a little world to itself. I went there one Sunday, and again felt how little the cla.s.sified majority of us knew what the mixed minority was about. I was with two other inquiring friends this time, and we were invited to stay to a sort of little conference that was to conclude the morning exercises. Well, before we knew it, we were joining in the discussion--carried on without a trace of theological rancour--with half-a-dozen or so of the leading members sitting in a group in a corner of the otherwise emptied room, all as friendly as could be.

Other little worlds within worlds, colonies within the colony, I have wandered into from time to time, never without gaining fresh conviction of the interestingness of my fellow-creatures and of their inherent goodness--more trust in and respect for that poor human nature which, fumbling along its confused and crooked paths, yet ever seems to be aiming at the true goal. More than that--as one can see by taking the general bearings at intervals--it is getting there by degrees.

CHAPTER XX

CONCLUSION

The thirty years covered by this chronicle came to an end with the nineteenth century and the history of these colonies as such.

On the last day of 1900 I sat at my writing window to watch the drop of the time-ball that regulates all the Government clocks--the clocks which the morning papers had warned us to set our time-pieces by at 1 P.M., so as not to be a second out, if we could help it, when the midnight hour should strike. I cannot describe the state of tension we were in, the sense of fateful happenings that possessed us that day.

The New Year and the New Century were coming to all peoples, but we could not think of them save as satellites of our New Commonwealth, arranged for the purpose of fitly inaugurating the New Nation.

Australia believed herself on the threshold of the Golden Age. I myself openly boasted of my happiness--reviewing my peaceful family life, my little home circle, unbroken since 1876--when we began wishing happy new years to one another.

The same scene lies before me now. Hobson's Bay in the foreground--never professing to be picturesque, but to me as full of variety and charm as a good, homely human face--and the long line of city dividing it from the sky. In the sunset of a fine day--sunset taking place behind me--that thread of crowded life is glowing beautifully, isolated buildings, as they catch the direct gleam, standing out as distinctly as if they were not leagues away. And after dark it will shine a thick-set band of lights many miles in length.

And then, later, a clear moon will flood the whole. All as it was twenty months and more ago, when our hearts were so confident and our hopes so high.

But Fate has dealt with our hearts and hopes in the usual way. The closing of this book synchronises with the ending of one of those lives integrally a part of mine--that of my eldest son, in the prime of his fine young manhood--which for me has altered the whole face of the world and of the future, but yesterday so smiling for us both. I took no account of the Ambushed Enemy when I said on that New Year's night that I was happy.

And as for the country that went mad with joy on the same occasion, how does it feel now? Where is the enthusiasm for Federation which then turned every head?

Federation, so far as we can see, has put back the Golden Age. The triumphant shout, "Advance, Australia!" has become a mockery in our ears. "Australia for the Australians!"--that ign.o.ble aspiration, which even then meant "Australia for the Australians now in it"--less than two to the square mile--now means that Australia is not even for them.

No, for the census returns of this state for 1891 gave us 446,195 young persons of what census people call the marrying age (15 to 35), of whom the excess of young men over young women was 17,047; and the census for 1901 shows 419,910, and the excess on the other side--16,742 more young women than young men. Where are those lost young men? And why have they gone from one of the gardens of the world, as Victoria should be, with its temperate climate and its consequent potential fertility?

Most of them have gone since the new century came in, and the other states have to mourn similar losses within the same short s.p.a.ce of time. There have been no gains. Immigration, even of the most desirable "White Australia" brand, is discouraged in all possible ways, in the supposed interests of the beneficiaries in possession--reapers of the sowings of far different men--with their "work" and "wages" which no longer correspond to the old meanings of those words. While as for our coloured brothers--including Britain's ally, j.a.pan--they are not recognised as men at all. They are vermin, to be stamped out like rabbits.

One third of Australia lies within the tropic belt, where manual labour is incompatible with the white man's physique, and where no industry could afford him, at the price he puts upon himself. What matter? Let the Queensland sugar fields, and the seven millions sunk in them, revert to the desert waste they were before. Let the pearling industry go to foreigners, as it must go. Let the Northern Territory, an area equal to that of France, Germany, and Austria combined, with all its known potential wealth, lie waste and empty, while millions upon millions of our co-inheritors of the earth swarm upon little bits of land that do not give them room to turn round. What does it care, this dog in the manger? It will starve itself--it is starving itself--to keep the world out, to shut off compet.i.tion with existing interests, to nip back growth at every point. Oh, that we had a Washington to lead our young nation in more righteous paths, to n.o.bler ends! Had "Australia for the World" been the watchword of the Commonwealth, we might now be making a second great United States such as only the glorious First could rival. Instead of that a stationary population of less than four millions, from which the best elements are being rapidly drained away.

For these four millions we have fourteen Houses of Parliament, with over fifty ministers and little under a thousand members. They are housed magnificently--in this State, at anyrate--regardless of expense; they have billiard-rooms, and bowling and tennis grounds, and every club luxury, the "keep" of the Victorian establishment alone (the parliamentary bill for the year) running to 141,549. Each pair of State Houses can pledge the credit of its section of the country as it likes (what our public debt amounts to everybody knows); the Federal Houses can pledge the credit of the whole. And what is there to control them? "The State servants," says the _Argus_, "already const.i.tute almost a clear majority of the names on the electors'

rolls." Government "promises soon to become the sole employer of labour in the community." The octopus of political rule holds the private citizen--"pursued with regulations and prohibitions in his uprising and his down-sitting," so that "there will soon be absolutely no room left" for him--helpless in its grasp.

And who are they that work this Juggernaut of an engine, that run this overgrown business of state? To quote again the authority above-mentioned, not seldom "men who, in private life, would hardly be trusted to run an apple stall."

There was a _Times_ correspondent with the royal party that recently visited us, and he published his impression that "political corruption" was amongst our little failings that he had noticed. That was an observant man, worthy of his post. Here n.o.body had an idea of such a thing, and the outcry that ensued upon the cabled report of his report, the indignant protest of injured innocence, was almost unanimous throughout the land. Every newspaper repudiated the foul aspersion, and in good faith--because, as a fact, the parliamentary candidate does not bribe and corrupt within the meaning of the act as traditionally understood; he does not buy the individual's vote with coin from his pocket or a pot of beer. But what he does--which probably never strikes him as political corruption, although recognised as that by the _Times_ correspondent--is to buy _en bloc_ the party which gives him his comfortable place and perquisites--his trade and living, in fact; and that party will be paid in full or know the reason why. They support each other--both at the expense of the general community. There is a printed rule of a Political Labour League which says that "before any person can be accepted as a candidate for the Federal or State Parliament" he shall "place in the hands of the executive of the league an agreement that in the event of his acting contrary to the policy of the combined Labour Organisation," and of their consequently "pa.s.sing a vote of no-confidence in him, he will resign his seat." Furthermore, he is to "place his resignation (undated) in the hands of the executive, together with a doc.u.ment authorising the executive to fill in the date subsequent to the day on which the vote is taken." Parliament would not be what it is if there were not plenty of men willing to subscribe to such contracts as these--to sell their votes in the House beforehand, in order to get there. We all know that they do so sell them. We see the price paid when such legislation as the Minimum Wage Act is concocted, that pitiable outrage upon the natural, the moral, and the economic law which is visibly recoiling upon the heads of those it was framed to benefit, killing their goose of the golden eggs as well as ours.

It was to the Commonwealth Government that we looked for relief and redress--that was the meaning of our wild jubilation when the union of the states was consummated. Alas! Could we have foreknown the history of its first couple of years, there would have been no federation in our time. Could we be unfederated to-morrow, the _status quo ante_ would be restored the day after, beyond the shadow of a doubt. For the Federal politician is but the State politician writ large. His wider sphere of action means but greater opportunities for the exercise of those political vices which are so ingrained in him as to have become his second nature. The first act of the Federal Ministry was one of sordid personal greed; every following act seems to have been worse.

Federation, so far, has but riveted our chains at home and darkened our character abroad--and I do not know which we feel most keenly, the latter, I think. For when six voices spoke for us there was a chance that some of them would do us justice; when the one voice that speaks for all betrays and disgraces us, we have to take the loss and odium silently and seem to acquiesce.

However, the country itself is still, potentially, as fine a country as the world contains--a huge manger, with provision for the sustenance of myriads of happy homes--and it cannot always remain the personal possession of a ring of unpatriotic self-seekers which may more appropriately be likened to a vampire than to a dog. It was meant to be a great country, and some day the hands that know how to make it so will get hold of it, perhaps sooner than we think--possibly before these pages see the light. I close my chronicle on the 18th of September, 1902, at a moment when the political sky in this State is brightened by a ray of hope such as it has not known for many a day, and which may signify the approach of a new era, not for us only but for the Commonwealth at large.

Some months ago a movement of revolt against the state of things was started by a few farmers, humble representatives of the uncorrupted manhood of the community; they met in their little country town and formed themselves into a league, which in a few months had branches in all the rural districts. The moral force generated was enough to put in a Government pledged (although no one believed its word) to the league's programme of Economy and Reform. Only the typical, the professional, politician jibed and jeered at the country b.u.mpkins who thought to touch his long-established power and his State-filled pocket. "Is not this mine a.s.s?" said he in effect, and, as soon as the Reform Government submitted its Reform proposals, voted against them with a light and fearless heart. But then an unexpected thing happened. That Government chanced to be in earnest. On that vote it not only resigned, but applied to the Governor for a dissolution--and got it. "People's Turn Now" says (in big capitals) a city daily, repeating the phrase with the same emphasis in every issue; and the fact does seem to have come home to them at last. On the first of October we shall see what we shall see. The Labour Party and the Civil Service are combining in defence of the old _regime_, and their numbers may be overwhelming; on the other side are the patriots, one and all, and at their backs the Press, never before united at such a time.

I ought to have mentioned sooner--what everyone who knows this country knows--how high and dignified is the moral and intellectual as well as (comparatively speaking) the literary standard of our representative journalism. It is beyond a doubt, and was never more so than at this moment, that the Press of Australia has a consistent respect for itself that is not found in some far greater nations. If there is a "gutter" belonging to it, it is so small and inoffensive that no whiff has reached my nose. With few exceptions (for which more or less can be said on the score of other good qualities), there is nothing in general circulation that is not almost austerely respectable. I have been told of an editor of high position who, if "darling" appears in a contributor's MS., crosses it out as an improper word, unfit for the family circle. We are so respectable as that. The _Society Journal_, vulgar spy and tale-bearer, cannot make a living here. In all the papers, more or less, "social columns" are available for those who wish to make public display of their frocks and entertainments, but the old-fashioned lover of domestic privacy may count on being left alone. As with some other of our national inst.i.tutions, the founders of our Press system were gentlemen. A standard of good taste and high-mindedness was set in the beginning, and the tradition of it remains a living force. When Edward Wilson of the _Argus_ bequeathed the charge of his interests in that paper to the friend who for thirty years conserved them so well--who for two-thirds of that time, until his death, was my friend also and told me the story--the last instructions of the dying man were: "Keep it gentlemanly, and never let them be mean." The rival "great daily," the _Age_, is a power in the State such as, I should think, no individual newspaper ever was in any land, and the literary beauty and philosophical significance of some of its Sat.u.r.day leaders have reached a level that would have made them notable amongst men of letters anywhere. And his daily newspaper is as necessary as his meals to the average citizen, while the weekly that belongs to it, a wonderful compendium of miscellaneous matter, is drained to its last drop by the Sunday-resting Paterfamilias of the rural districts, whose only book it is, and whom I have seen poring over it luxuriously the live-long day.

The Press of a country leads it, but it follows also, if only for the reason that it has its living to earn. And our newspapers being what they are--capable of the almost incredible n.o.bleness of sinking their life-long quarrels and party policies to stand shoulder to shoulder when the true welfare of their State demands it--is the best proof of its inherent soundness that any country could show. For the example of Victoria will be an inspiration to her sister colonies, which are all one people with her, and all in like case.

It is indeed a good country, even as it stands. I can say with truth and grat.i.tude, homesickness notwithstanding, that nowhere could I have been better off. And I am as sure as I am of anything that sooner or later--this year or next year, or after my time--the day of emanc.i.p.ation and enlightenment will come, to inevitably make it as great as it is good.

THE END