ople of
the country, pawns his belongings bit by bit, loafs in search of the
eleemosynary half-crown or sixpence, and finally goes up country to be
loathed and despised as a tenderfoot, and to swell the statistics of
insanity and disease. The most loyal and friendly of Australians resent
this importation. The uninstructed and untravelled native accepts him as
a pattern Englishman, and the satirical prints help out that conclusion
in his mind. There is no signboard on the Australian continent that
rubbish of this sort may be shot there, and the English tendency to
throw its waste in that direction has never been regarded in a friendly
spirit. We gave them our convicts for a start and now we give them our
most dangerous incapables. They do not like this and will never be got
to like it. At the Bluff in New Zealand people show the stranger the
southernmost gas-lamp in the world. It is the correct thing for the
stranger to touch this in order that he may tell of the fact thereafter.
The traveller may take the spirit of Sheridan's excellent advice to his
son, and _say_ he has touched it, but as a rule he takes the trouble
to go down and do it. I was escorted for this festal ceremony by a
resident, and leaning against that southernmost lamp-post was a Scot
in an abject state of drunkeness, and as Stevenson says of a similar
personage, "radiating dirt and humbug." Nigh at hand was another
drunkard, sitting pipe in mouth on an upturned petroleum-tin, and the
two were conversing. "Et's a nice letde coal'ny," said the man against
the lamp-post, "a very nice lettle coal'ny, but it wants inergy, and it
wants interprise, and it wants (hie) sobriety." He spoke with a face
of immeasurable gravity, and I laughed so that I forgot to touch the
lamp-post.

There are countless little matters which help the growing distaste for
English people in the Australian mind. Our London journals for the most
part leave us in profound ignorance of the colonies. We see now and
again a telegram which is Greek to most of us, but we get no consecutive
information about our kindred over seas.

The colonists are perhaps curiously tender to the feeling of the mother
country and they resent this indifference. It is difficult to express
the varying sentiments of a community, but in many respects the
Australia of to-day resembles the America which Charles Dickens saw on
his first visit. There is an eager desire to ascertain the opinion of
the passing English