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manded that I should come over and lecture in that ideal

village.

But in the course of time what will these names signify to the people of that region? Even while those men lived there were comparatively few to comprehend their precise addition to knowledge, and it was impossible that they themselves 'could perceive the logical results of their own generalizations. Every individual light must shine at last (if at all) in the sum of the average mind; the thinker's undergraduate or casual or superannuated words are confused with his real contribution to science; the emancipator of thought in his own time is liable to become its oppressor in the farther time. I had pleasure in telling Dr. Tyndall and Huxley that they had named streets in New Zealand. I remember that Carlyle, though he declined a title offered by Queen Victoria, was gratified when a pretty place at Chelsea was named “Carlyle Square."

The company on our ship consisted mainly of well-todo and fairly educated people, most of them rather young. They showed enthusiasm for natural scenery, and those who resided in Australia supplied me with advice where to go in that country. "Such a view! Such superb precipices! "Are there any aborigines?" "Oh no, they have long disappeared." But they have left behind them curious folk-lore, proverbs, legends about all those hills and precipices, and my fellow travellers also are seeing their admirable scenes, not as they really are, but as transfigured or decorated by their faith or by their favourite poets.

On my way to Sydney I fell in with Mr. Young, a nephew of James Bryce, M. P., engaged in the pearl business; and his charming tales about the divers and the pearl oysters so illuminated the ocean's depths that there

A FLOATING UTOPIA

67

appeared a new mythology even down there. The Persian Isle of Aval linked itself with our English Avalon, the Arthurian paradise. Two months before a poor fisherman had found a pearl which brought him four thousand pounds: long ago Browning's Paracelsus had seen and named the two points in the adventure of that diver:

One, when a beggar, he prepares to plunge;

One, when a prince, he rises with his pearl.

And who of us trained in the Solomonic similitude of wisdom, in the parable of the lost pearl, in visions of the Celestial City whose every gate is one pearl, could ever see a pearl as a mere bit of encisted dust diseasing an oyster?

Flash! a great light blazes over our ship; it is not St. Elmo's fire, but the wondrous searchlight at Sydney sweeping our sea at midnight like an all-seeing eye. It was the last evening of our voyage together, which for a full lunar month we had managed to make merry and even ideal. Much is said about civilization, but really there is no such thing except in small oases here and there in the great swarming nations. But I feel bold enough to say that the Australia on that occasion was a little floating example of civilization; and it'was made so chiefly by the sovereignty of the ladies. Nearly all of these were young married ladies with their husbands along, some on their honeymoon voyage; but there being on board more gentlemen than ladies by a third, these ladies showed themselves gracious and agreeable to the companionless with that charming freedom of which only innocence and refinement are capable. A shade of sadness therefore comes over some of us, even as we gaze on the sublimities of Sydney Harbour at dawn: a beautiful and

unique thing had budded off the Golden Gate and flowered through its month; its petals were now to be scattered through the prosaic streets of cities, never again to be united. Everything passes.

That poor Australian who under pressure of poverty sold his little field for a pittance and became insane on learning that the sterile field was a gold mine, can be sympathized with by the pilgrim who discovers too late that he has passed some rich treasure and seen only the earthen vessel containing it. Could I only have known even a little of the wonderful story of New Zealand told by Dr. Richard Garnett (1898) I should not have returned to England without really seeing more of that colony. I had long known Dr. Garnett, as far as it was permissible to encroach on that scholar who long sat in the British Museum as preeminently the interpreter for literary inquirers, always the most modest of the chieftains of culture, and the most gracious. But as much as I appreciated his varied knowledge, it was with surprise that I read his contribution to Fisher Unwin's series of the Builders of Greater Britain, "Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the Colonization of South Australia and New Zealand." I do not believe that there is any other volume of four hundred pages which contains so much well-digested knowledge of the motives and forces that go to the founding of an English colony, and such clear and comprehensive insight into the conditions - physical, political, and religious, which modify and complicate such ideals and aims as those of Wakefield. Nor does any romance of our time surpass in interest the story told without embellishment, of the admirable man Wakefield, who alone of the many English idealists gave his entire life to the practical realization on earth of the Utopia he had written on paper.

"MOTHERLESS" MAORIS

69

In 1882 a company of Maoris came to London for the purpose of seeing Queen Victoria and laying before her sympathetic heart their grievances. My wife and I met these still nominal chieftains in London at the house of Mr. and Mrs. (Ottilia Blind) Hancock, always anxious to comfort the distressed. And these Maoris were in deep distress, not so much because of the troubles that had brought them all the way from New Zealand, but because they were not permitted to meet or see their Queen. One of them who spoke English, speaking for the rest, moved the large company of ladies and gentlemen almost to tears as he told of the grief with which they had journeyed so far only to find themselves motherless. They did not, so far as I can remember, tell us what their grievances were at home, but in reply to our questions spoke of the cherished dream of all their race that they had in England a supreme and benevolent Mother who could and would end all the troubles of her remotest children if she knew of them. Since reading the work of my old friend Dr. Garnett, I have written to ask him about this New Zealand deputation, and he says in a private note: "They had several interviews with the colonial secretary, Lord Kimberley, but he prevented their seeing the Queen, who would, I think, have insisted upon their being admitted to her presence if she had known the circumstances."

CHAPTER IV

The Melbourne Cup-Joss House-Sects in Victoria-Governor of Victoria - Bishop of Melbourne - Rev. Charles Strong-Australian insanity - Ballarat gold mines — Hon. Peter Lalor - Hon. A. Inglis Clark-Hobart - Campbellites - Nature's oddities-Relics of transportation times-Extinction of Tasmanians - My ordeal in SydneyImpaled with Bishop Moorhouse and Rev. Charles Strong - Fusion of Freethought and Spiritualism - The Botany Bay myth - Justice Windeyer.

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T is odd that Melbourne, rigidly Presbyterian, should have for its Pan-Australian synod a horse-race. Melbourne has, however, made its racing week a social congress of the colonies. The betting is universal. Sweepstakes were arranged in the schools (by the teachers), and Cup Day is a holiday. It was stated that after the Cup race a carriage horse was observed to throw down a mouthful of hay given him, which his mate pounced on.

Early in the morning I walked over the course, so to say. Byron Moore, secretary of the Racing Club, guided me, and I saw the artistic arrangements for this great event. The apartments for the governor and his company, the committee rooms, the medical rooms, the ladies' rooms, all were elaborately elegant. There was fine floral decoration everywhere; cosmetics in the ladies' room, and needles threaded with every colour, ready for use.

In the element of grotesquerie the English Derby has large advantages over the Cup, where respectability was carried to an extreme; there was hardly a side-show, nothing characteristic of the country, no aborigines, no boomerangs. It all impressed me as too much a Presbyte

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