left to neglect and death, and the national glory was sullied.'
They volunteered to come over and help us fight our battles. The
Colonial Office, then under Lord Derby, was for a few days disposed to
turn the cold shoulder to these efforts of assistance. But the feeling,
which had been aroused in the country by the first announcements in the
newspapers, was too deep to be mistaken. It broke through the ice in
which the Colonial Office is usually imbedded, and compelled Lord Derby
to make a warm and grateful response to the Colonies. In reality, the
people there are, as many travellers besides Mr. Froude have remarked,
more English than the English themselves in their sensitiveness as
regards the national honour. We talk very coolly here of 'standing
aside,' of 'having seen our best days,' and of giving up one part of our
inheritance after another; but the Englishmen abroad are animated by
very different sentiments. The love of the 'old home' is strong in them,
even though they may have been born in the Colonies. It shows itself in
a thousand different ways. At Ballarat, Mr. Froude seems to have been
struck with a garden which might have been attached to an old cottage in
Surrey or Devonshire. There were cabbage-roses, pinks, columbines,
sweet-williams, laburnums, and honey-suckle--all prized because they
were the flowers of Old England. The people everywhere speak the
language with remarkable purity. The aspirate is rarely misplaced,
unless by a recent immigrant. The misuse of the aspirate is, indeed, a
peculiar part of the birthright of an Englishman. No one ever yet heard
it from the poorest or most illiterate class in the United States. In
Australia, says Mr. Froude, 'no provincialism has yet developed itself.
The tone is soft, the language good.' The young people looked fresh and
healthy, 'not lean and sun-dried, but fair, fleshy, lymphatic.' Mr.
Froude could not see any difference between his countrymen at home and
those who had settled down in this new and wider field of industry. 'The
leaves that grow on one branch of an oak are not more like the leaves
that grow upon another, than the Australian swarm is like the hive it
sprung from.' Mr. Service, the Prime Minister of Victoria, fully shares
the English predilections of his fellow colonists, but he appears to
feel some irritation at the tone so frequently adopted by the Liberal
press and party in this country, and emphatically urged in their day by
Mr. Cobden and