No doubt it was due to the very wide difference between the two points of view from which I had seen Australia and the Australians, but I must confess that my first impressions were more pleasant than my second. Naturally the happy-go-lucky-sailor lad who thought that the earth was his and the fulness thereof as long as he had a shilling in his pocket and a square meal ahead of him, would not look upon things in general with the same eyes that I did after twenty years of changing fortunes and the gradual fading of the “golden dreams of trustful twenty,”—or eighteen, to be more exact. In those days I was, almost of necessity, a practical democrat living in a democracy which neither had the time nor the inclination to bother about politics; but now many experiences in many lands had taught me that democracy of[291] the political sort is more pleasant to read about than to rub shoulders with!
America has an aristocracy of blood, brains, and money which looks with open contempt upon politics, and has no more connection with politicians than is involved in the payment of bribes by its agents. Australia has no such aristocracy, and everybody apparently goes into politics. In America democracy is a political fiction, and the person whom political advocates and managers call the working man is kept in his place by methods more or less moral but still effective. The real rulers of the United States believe, with Bismarck, that popular government of a country resembles control of a household by the nursery.
In Australia the democracy really does rule. It is the worst-mannered country that I have ever travelled through, I mean, of course, as regards the people you are brought into contact with in the ordinary course of travel. Every man is as good as another unless he happens to be an official, and then he is a good deal better—in his own opinion, and much worse in that of the wanderer from other lands.
Of course one meets, as I did, just as charming[292] people in Australia as you do anywhere else, but these are the exceptions. The American, as I found him, no matter what his rank in life, was a born gentleman, kindly and courteous, yet prompt and practical, and just as nice a fellow whether he was inviting you to a banquet or giving you a shave.
Now, with all due deference to Miss Australia’s many physical and mental charms and her rapidly increasing stature, I venture to suggest that she would not be the worse for a few lessons in social deportment. At present she appears to be rather in danger of becoming the tomboy of the international nursery. The chief trouble with her seems to be that she is so desperately anxious not to appear servile that she forgets to be civil.
One cause of this singular lack of manners in the conduct of every-day affairs may be found in the fact that the vast majority of parents—and particularly those belonging to the so-called working-class—consider that the end and aim of their children’s education should be the obtaining of “a good government billet.” The natural result is the creation of a huge army of officials who have never had any training in the social ways[293] of the world, who know little or nothing of business in the wider sense of the term, and whose education compels them either to do everything according to official routine or to leave it undone.
The fact is that Australia is beginning to suffer from too much government. It is the most over-governed commonwealth in the world. As every old Colonial knows, it is the interest of a large majority of the voters to have a governmental machine with as many wheels in it as possible. There is a curious likeness here between the middle- and lower-class Australian, if I may be pardoned for using such a heretical word as class in such a connection, and the Frenchman of the same social grade. To both the highest ideal of personal ambition is well-paid employment under government with a pension to follow; whence it comes that both these utterly dissimilar nations are cursed with an ever-increasing generation of office-seekers whose only object in life is to live as well as possible out of the taxes.
The Australian Commonwealth is composed of young and lusty nations which have bred a magnificent race of men and women; but they have also developed a form of government which is[294] far too broadly based upon that specious absurdity, the equality of man. In fact, in Australia, they have gone farther, for another tenet of their political creed is the equality of women with each other and with men. One of the natural results of this is that, although the best sort of Australian wife is almost invariably the political ally of her husband, her housemaid and her cook and washer-woman, who of course greatly outnumber her and are much more receptive of the wild-cat theories of the demagogue, have votes also, and use them—frequently with weird effect. Education, experience, social standing, and personal character go for nothing. A vote is a vote, no matter who gives it. In fact this fundamentally hopeless system is worked out to such a deplorably logical extremity that those women who, through misfortune or intent, have crossed the borders of what we call here respectable society have the lodger-vote in Australia. This fact is, I believe, unique in the records of democracy from the days of Cleon until now.
It is, of course, only in the ordinary development of human affairs that such a system of election should not produce the best of all possible rulers.
Some time after my return to England I wanted[295] to write an article for an English daily newspaper on the subject of Australian Politics. The editor declined to have anything to do with it. He thought I was, as they say, talking through the back of my hat, until I asked him whether he thought the Australian politician was anything like the men whom he associated with Downing Street? He seemed to think that they were about on the same level, I then asked him whether he could conceive Lord Salisbury, Lord Rosebery, and Mr. Joseph Chamberlain playing poker with travellers and strangers in a London club, and then having to be telegraphed to by the said strangers for the money they had lost to them? He said he couldn’t. I said it was a fact, and so it is. That is the difference between Imperial and Colonial politics and politicians—from which it will be seen that there is no comparison to be drawn between the more or less efficient statesmen whom we manage somehow to get into power in this country, and the person whom the male and female votes of the Australian Commonwealth puts into office over there.
Some one once said that any government is good enough for the people who can stand it. That is[296] true of all countries, and it is so in a peculiar sense of the empire which all good Englishmen hope will some day develop out of the newly-made Australian Commonwealth. But before that happens Australia will have to evolve an aristocracy of some sort. The old territorial magnates of twenty-five and thirty years ago have been gradually squeezed out. Some of them, the fortunate ones who located themselves on well-watered territories, and others who found minerals under their sheep pastures are still the highest class of Australian society. The rest have seen their estates............