Great Britain, and therefore lack the
stimulus of an active patriotism, so long will much of whatever is
individual in their social development and national aspirations be
without expression. In the case of the Australasian colonies it would
further mean (apart from any consideration of their future independence)
that a people far removed from other communities of the same race and
already giving promise of being the greatest power south of the equator,
must continue for an indefinite period to be wholly sustained and swayed
in matters of thought and art by a country over twelve thousand miles
distant that happens for the present to offer the most convenient
markets in which to buy and sell. The point need hardly be discussed,
but it suggests some facts in the intellectual life of Australia that it
will be of interest to name. These may not be found to explain why there
is yet no sign of the coming of an Antipodean Franklin or Irving, or
Hawthorne or Emerson; but they will help to show why the literature of
the country grows so unevenly, why it is chiefly of the objective order
and leaves large tracts of the life of the people untouched.

Perhaps the paradox that a people may read a great deal and yet not be
interested in literature could hardly be applied to the Australians,
but it is a fact that they make no special effort to encourage the
growth of a literature of their own. By no means unconscious of their
achievements in other directions--in political innovations, in sport and
athletics--they appear not to take any pride in or see the advantage of
promoting creative intellectual work. Will this be considered natural
and reasonable, as already they are supplied with books and plays and
pictures from England and Europe, or as a proof of thoughtlessness and
neglect? 'Why,' asked a critic in the _Edinburgh Review_ in 1819,
'should the Americans write books when a six weeks' passage brings them,
in their own tongue, our sense, science, and genius in bales and
hogsheads?' Are the Australians of these days asking themselves a
similar question? It would seem so. In 1894 they imported books,
magazines and newspapers from the United Kingdom to the value of
L363,741: this, too, at a time when most of the colonies were understood
to be rigidly economising in consequence of a financial crisis. A decade
before the amount was not far short of a hundred thousand pounds
higher.

Foremost in his list of the salient intellectual te