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Well, and how does all this concern Australia in general and Melbourne in particular? It concerns them in this way, that the civilization of Australia, of Melbourne, is an Anglo-Saxon civilization, a civilization of the Norman blood, and that, with all the good attendant on such a civilization, there is also all the evil. All? Well, I will not say all, for that would be to contradict one of the first and chief statements I made about her, namely that “as far as she can see Melbourne has no prejudices,” a statement which I could not make of England. “This our native or adopted land,” says an intelligent Australian critic, the late Mr. Marcus Clarke, “has no past, no story. No poet speaks to us.” “No,” we might add, “and (thus far happily for you) neither, as far as you can see, does any direct preacher of prejudice.” And here, as I take it, we have put our finger upon what is at once the strength and the weakness of this civilization.

Let us consider it for a moment. The Australians have no prejudice about an endowed Church, as we English have, and hence they have, what we have not, religious liberty. As far as I can make out, there is no reason why the wife of a clergyman of the Church of England should in this colony look down upon the wife of a dissenting minister as her social inferior, and this is, on the whole, I think, well, for it tends to break up the notion of caste that exists between the two sects; it tends, I mean, to their mutual benefit, to the interchange of the church’s sense of “the beauty of holiness” with the chapel’s sense of the passion of holiness. Here, then, you are better off than we. On the other hand, you have no prejudice, as we at last have, against Protection, and consequently you go on benefiting a class at the expense of the community in a manner that can only, I think, be defined as short-sighted and foolish. Here we are better off than you. Again, however, you have not the prejudice that we have against the intervention of the State. You have nationalized your railways, and are attempting, as much as possible, to nationalize your land.[1] You are beginning to see that a land tax, at any given rate of annual value, would be (as Mr. Fawcett puts it) “a valuable national resource, which might be utilized in rendering unnecessary the imposition of many taxes which will otherwise have to be imposed.” Here you are better off than we, better off both in fortune and general speculation. Again, you have not yet arrived at Federalism, and what a waste of time and all time’s products is implied in the want of central unity! Now the first and third of these instances show the strength that is in this civilization, and the second shows a portion of the weakness, at present only a small portion, but, unless vigorous measures are resorted to and soon, this Protection will become the great evil that it is in America. There is just the same cry there as here: “Protect the native industries until they are strong enough to stand alone”—as if an industry that has once been protected will ever care to stand alone again until it is compelled to! as if a class benefited at the expense of the community will ever give up its benefit until the community takes it away again!