I met Mr Gladstone afterwards at a big social function which was engineered by the late William Woodhall, some time member for Stoke and Master of the Ordnance. Finding him unoccupied and alone, I ventured to ask to be recalled to his remembrance. "No need for that, Mr Murray," he answered, "no need for that," and plunged back straightway into the talk at Hawarden as if it had taken place only yesterday. There were all manner of amusements provided for Mr Wood-hall's guests, and into one of them at least he plunged with the delighted enthusiasm of a boy.

Poor Charles Bertram, the conjurer, was there, and it was arranged that a hand of Napoleon should be played under his direction between the statesman and Sir Francis Burnand, then editor of Punch. "You, gentlemen, must decide between you," said the conjurer, "as to who is to win." It was agreed that Gladstone was to be the victor, and Bertram, who, of course, had not apparently seen the cards, instructed him as to what he was to lead and what to play in sequence, securing for him all five tricks out of an apparently impossible hand. He was immensely delighted and interested, and held a very animated conversation afterwards with Bertram on the art of conjuring.

A good many years later yet, when I brought over from Australia the nucleus of a comedy company to perform here in a piece of my own writing, I had amongst them a very remarkable child actor, whose name was Leo Byrne. He played the title role in my comedy of Neds Churn, and when the provincial run of the piece was over he was employed by Sir Henry Irving to play the child's part in Lord Tennyson's tragedy of Becket. Mr Gladstone was present at one performance, and not wishing for some reason of his own to be identified by the public, took his seat out of view of the audience on the prompt side of the stage. Whilst the curtain was down, Mr Gladstone took the fictitious son of the Fair Rosamund on his knee and began to question him. "You come from Australia, my little man?" he said. "Yes, sir," the boy answered. "And what do you think of England?" he was asked. "I think it is being ruined by the Liberal Party," Master Byrne responded. The great man laughed and suffered him to escape, which I am told he did very willingly. Mr Bram Stoker afterwards took the child apart and told him that one of these days he would be very proud of having been taken on that old gentleman's knee. "Oh! I know," the imp responded, "it's old Gladstone; I don't want to be bothered with him. I have promised another boy to go and spin tops with him behind the scenes."



CHAPTER XII

First Fiction—A Life's Atonement—The Casual Tramp—Poor Law Relief—Charles Reade—The Cloister and the Hearth— Wilkie Collins—The Figure in Mediaeval Costume—Joseph's Coat—At Rochefort—Rainbow Gold—The Anarchist—The Police—The Text of Scripture.

Whilst I was still engaged on the staff of the Birmingham Morning News, as I have mentioned previously, Mr Edmund Yates was running through its columns a novel which he entitled A Bad Lot. He was lecturing in America at the time, and must have been living a hand to mouth life with his story, for he brought it to an abrupt and rather disastrous conclusion. When the final instalment of copy was received there was a momentary consternation in the office. New arrangements were pending, but we had supposed ourselves to have at least two months in hand. In these circumstances my chief came to me and asked me if I thought that I could fill the gap. I was simply burning for a chance to try my hand at fiction, and I leapt eagerly at the opportunity. I began that very day and I wrote a chapter which I am quite sure must have led my readers to expect a tolerable weekly entertainment for some time, but I had no plot in mind and I had not the remotest notion as to whither I was going. I struggled on week by week and succeeded, as I now believe, in producing absolutely the most formless and incoherent work of fiction which was ever put in type. Scores of letters were sent week by week to the editor protesting against its continuance, and at last I had worked all my characters into such a tangle that, with the exception of the hero and heroine and a few subordinates, whose fate it was not necessary to particularise, I sent them all into a coal-mine, flooded the workings and drowned the lot of them.

A very able and kindly critic told me that this amorphous first attempt at fiction had flesh and blood but no bones, and I have learned since that in writing a work of imagination as in much more serious enterprises, the first essential is to be aware of your own purpose. For some years afterwards I tried my hand on the short story, but before I left England for the Russo-Turkish campaign, I had embarked upon a more ambitious work, which finally took shape in A Life's Atonement. In the hurry of departure I forgot my manuscript and left it at my lodgings. I had quite resigned myself to think it lost, but when I received my first commission for a three-volume story, it occurred to me that the manuscript was worth inquiring after, and it surprised me agreeably to find that it had been preserved. It was finished, sent in and accepted, and achieved more than a commonplace success. New commissions came in, and I found myself fairly launched as a novelist.

There is one queer thing about that first book which no critic ever noticed so far as I know; it was, from beginning to end, a wholly unconscious plagiarism of David Copperfield. Had there been no Peggotty, there would have been no Sally Troman; had there been no Steerforth, there would have been no Gascoigne. The greater part of the fable and nearly all the characters I owed to Dickens, and yet I can aver in perfect honesty that, at the time of writing and for years afterwards, I was entirely unconscious of the fact One thing in the book, in any case, was real. I sent my tragic hero wandering about the country, finding shelter in all manner of low lodging-houses, and living generally the life of a tramp. Before I put him to that experience I went through it religiously myself, and for a whole seven weeks in the summer, after my return from Turkey, I was "on the road" as a casual tramp. It was my purpose to prove in my own person what I knew very well already, namely, that it was, as most unhappily it still is, actually impossible for a poor man honestly in search of work, to make his way through England and to hold body and soul together without infringing the law in one way or another.

I found that it was not possible. Well, I had seven weeks of it. I went under the name of "David Vane, compositor," as of course, I knew something about the printing trade. My clothes were shabby at the outset, but were utterly in rags when I had done. "David Vane" had many strange adventures, but the funniest was reserved for the close. I may say that I took a ten-pound note with me, and through the Post Office sent portions of it on before me and walked towards it.

When I got to the "George" at Hereford I had L7, 13s. 6d. left out of the L10. I slept in workhouses or in the fields; the professional term for the former is the "spike," for the latter the "skipper." I went on "spike" and "skipper" both. I had sent a little portmanteau on before me to the "George" at Hereford, with the initials "D.C.M." at the side. In it I had a change of clothes and a shaving kit. When I got into Hereford I had had no shave for three or four weeks, my boots were absolutely worn out, my clothes were rags and tatters, and exposure to the sun had tanned my face. I drew my money at the Post Office at Hereford, and carrying it in my hand, for all my pockets were worn out, I reached the "George," a good old-fashioned county hotel.

A set of steps reached up to the main entrance, where stood a waiter with a professional napkin. He looked up the street, down the street, and across the street, smiling all the time—a proprietorial sort of smile. I talked to him from below—one always speaks from below with a sense of disadvantage—and said, "I want a room." He gave a wave of his napkin in answer, and said, "Go away, go away." But I did not go away. I went up the steps, showed him my money, and told him not to play the fool. I said, "I want a room." He looked at me stolidly, but suddenly I discovered my portmanteau in a corner. I claimed it at once and mounted the stairs, the waiter following with his curiously feline footsteps, and murmuring at intervals, "Well, I am———!" He said it with great conviction, but he took me to the bath room nevertheless. I got a shave, changed my suit, and, as I was something of a dandy at the time, I affected certain airs as to the arrangement of my watch-chain and the like. I came out cleanshaven and with an eye-glass, and generally looking as different from the man who went in as it was possible to imagine. On the stairs I found my waiter ready, and when he saw me he said most emphatically that he was ——. He took me to the coffee room, where I had a meal. He stood behind my chair, and by means of a mirror opposite I saw him keep saying to himself that he was ——. I stayed in Hereford for some time, both to rest and to write articles about my experiences, which appeared in Mayfair, a society paper, long since dead. I took a private room, and this particular waiter seemed to be told off to attend me in all my doings. Everything seemed to surprise him; he could not measure me up at all, and he was continually saying that he was ——, although I knew quite well that he wasn't. One day his worship the Mayor of Hereford called to see me. When I asked the waiter to show his worship up he said that he was ——. The mayor was a flamboyant sort of individual, and said, "Now, Mr Christie Murray, Lord Lyttelton is in Hereford, and is most par-tic-ular-ly interested in the subject of which you are treating in Mayfair. He will be delighted to meet you, and I have arranged with his lordship that you shall meet him at my house (the mayor's house) at 7.30 on Friday. You will not fail his lordship?" I said that I would not for the world, and I escorted his worship to his carriage. At the door he turned and said, "Half-past seven on Friday, Mr Christie Murray, at my house, to meet Lord Lyttelton. Profoundly disappointed if you don't turn out. His lordship will be grieved, Mr Murray." The mayor having gone I turned round—to encounter my waiter, and for the last time he said that he was ——. And although I had known that he was not, he said it with such sincerity that I more than half believed him.

Either the man must beg, which in itself is, of course, a misdemeanour, or he must starve. To sleep out of doors is a crime, and for a man to appeal for shelter at the workhouse means that he will be detained until every chance of obtaining employment is lost. I remember an unfortunate fellow, whom I overtook near Tewkesbury, a man of about sixty as I should judge, who was sitting by the roadside cooling his blistered heels in a little runnel of clear water, and crying quietly to himself as he tried to rid his fingers of the tar which stuck to them after his workhouse morning's experience of oakum picking. I sat down beside him and offered him a fill of tobacco, and by and by got into talk with him. He was a man of some intelligence and education, and had begun life as a journeyman watchmaker. He had risen to be an employer, and had kept a small workshop in Coventry, but misfortune had overtaken him and he had failed in business. The immediate cause of his distress was that he had received notification that employment at his trade of watchmaker was open to him at Evesham. The poor fellow was quite penniless and had been compelled to walk; his strength had failed him by the way, and he had had to take refuge in the workhouse. In payment for his lodging, his two chunks of dry bread and his pint of skilly, he had been compelled to pick his quantum of oakum. The man's fingers were, of course, as delicate as a lady's, and in the course of our talk he held them out to me, showing the tips all raw and bleeding and thick with tar. He sobbed bitterly as he told me that he would be unable to do a hand-stroke at his trade for at least a fortnight. He carried with him letters of recommendation which ought to have guaranteed him from any such usage as that to which he had been condemned. He had tried to show them to the labour master, but he had been waved contemptuously aside, and had been forced by threats of being imprisoned as a refractory pauper to betake himself to the task imposed upon him.

It need hardly be said that all the men one encountered were not of this type. I met one engaging ruffian who unbosomed himself to me with the utmost frankness. "Oi meets genelmen on the road," he said, "as arsks me why Oi don't gaow to wurk; a great big upstandin' chap loike you, they sez, loafin' abaht and doin' nothin'—why it's disgraiceful! Well, I sez, guv'nor, I sez, 'ow can Oi go to wurk? Oi'm a skilled wurkman, I sez, in me own trade, but Oi'm froze aht by modern machinery. Oi'm a 'and comb-maker, I sez, and the trade's bin killed this dozen years. Oi'm too hold a dawg to learn new tricks, I sez, Oi'm a middle-aged man and what ham Oi to do to yearn my means of loiveli'ood." He added with a wink that there was only one hand comb-maker in business in that wide district of England and Wales over which he wandered. "And," said he, "you can bet your sweet loife Oi don't go nigh 'im." This cadging rascal would very rarely have occasion to present himself as a casual pauper at the Union workhouse, but had he done so, he and the unfortunate watchmaker would have been treated on perfectly equal terms.

The whole system of casual poor law relief is about as rotten and as stupid as it can be, and its administration is in itself a scandal. There is no general rule throughout the country as to dietary or as to the nature of the labour executed, or as to the hours over which that labour shall be extended. The habitual loafer knows perfectly well the places where life is made easy to him, and as a matter of course avoids those in which the fare is poorest and the work most arduous. The honest seeker after work knows nothing of these things and the whole iniquitous and idiotic system is at once a direct bribe to the inveterate work-shirker and a scourge to the honest and industrious poor. I published the result of my own researches into it in the columns of Mayfair now nearly thirty years ago, and suggested a very simple and easy remedy for its defects. I had some hope that I might be attended to. The late Lord Lyttelton, Mr Gladstone's friend, was at one time disposed to take the matter up, but his melancholy death put an end to that, and recent inquiries assure me that the old intolerable methods of casual relief are still unreformed.

Looking back now, I can see how very large a part that seven weeks' experience played in my life as a novelist. For years afterwards it cropped up as inevitably in my work as King Charles's head in Mr Dick's Memorial, but at least it has enabled me to feel that few writers of fiction in my time have gone nearer to reality in their studies than myself. I certainly worked the little mine that I had opened for all that it was worth, and readers of mine who give themselves the trouble to remember will recall the wanderings of the hero of Skeleton Keys, of Frank Fairholt, of Hiram Search and of young George Bushell. Speaking of Hiram Search naturally reminds me of Charles Reade. I dedicated the book in which Hiram appears to that great writer and sent a copy of it to him with what I daresay was a somewhat boyish letter. I have the terms of my dedication in mind still, and I remember that I wrote of a great genius which has always been put to lofty uses. Reade's letter in response has always held a place amongst my treasures. "It is no discredit," he wrote, "for a young man to appreciate his seniors beyond their merits." I have always thought that very noble and modest and well-said. Reade is the only one of the writers who in my own boyhood were already reckoned great with whom it was my happiness to come into personal contact.

I have met with but four men in my experience who have been distinguished by that splendid urbanity of manner which was once thought to express the acme of high breeding. Charles Reade was one of them. I never knew him intimately enough to get beyond it, but that he himself could break through it upon occasion was known to everybody. A beautiful, stately cordiality commonly marked his social manner, but he could be moved to a towering rage by an act of meanness, treachery or oppression; and in his public correspondence he was sometimes downright vitriolic. Hardly anything could have excused the retort he flung at some unhappy disputant who had called one of his facts in question. "You have dared," he wrote, "to contradict me on a subject in which I am profoundly learned, while you are ignorant as dirt." It was true enough, but perhaps it was hardly worth while to say it in that fashion. Nearly all his life he was embroiled in controversy of one sort or another. He spent himself in the exposure of abuses and the people whom he exposed assailed him rashly. He took prodigious pains to be accurate, and before he assaulted the prison system in It's Never Too Late to Mend, or the conduct of private lunatic asylums in Hard Cash, he had gathered and indexed huge volumes of information culled from every available source. These memoranda he called nigri loci. His system of indexing was so precise that he could lay an instant finger on any fact of which he was in search, and nobody who ventured to impugn his facts escaped from him unmutilated. In one instance, a barrister was so misguided as to tell him publicly that a legal incident in one of the two books I have mentioned was obviously impossible and absurd.

Reade was down upon him like a hammer: "The impossibility in question disguised itself as fact and went through the hollow form of taking place" on such and such a date, in such and such a court, and the proceedings were recorded in volume so and so, on certain pages of the official Law Reports for a given year. His adversary was left with no better resource than to charge him with hurling undigested lumps of official documents at the head of the public; and this left his equanimity undisturbed.

But it was when they charged him with plagiarism that his critics hit him on the raw. About the time when I first knew him somebody started a controversy with respect to his story of The Wandering Heir, and the accusation was made that he had lifted a page or two out of Swift's Polite Conversations. "Of course I did," said Reade to me, "but the essence of a plagiarism is that it shall have some chance of going undetected; it is the appropriation to one's self of the property of another with the intent to display it as one's own, and to me it was impossible to suppose that a writer like Dean Swift was so obscure that I could play a trick like that with him with impunity. A recognisable quotation is not a plagiarism. They brought the same charge against me because I translated the etchings of Corot into accurate English. The sources I tapped for The Cloister and the Hearth are open to anybody, and any man who chooses may study them and make a romance out of them if he can. It is perfectly true that I milked three hundred cows into that bucket, but the butter I churned was my own." It seems scarcely fair to have brought such an accusation against a writer who not only made no disguise of his literary methods, but who so openly proclaimed and defended them.

In the last page of The Cloister and the Hearth he acknowledges his debt to the great Erasmus, for example, in these very noble and eloquent phrases:—"Some of the best scenes in this new book are from his mediaeval pen and illumine the pages where they come; for the words of a genius so high as his are not born to die: their immediate work upon mankind fulfilled, they may seem to lie torpid; but at each fresh shower of intelligence Time pours upon her students, they prove their immortal race; they revive, they spring from the dust of great libraries; they bud, they flower, they fruit, they seed from generation to generation, and from age to age." The professional critics have never been just to Reade, but it is a fact that I have never encountered a workman in the craft of fiction who did not reckon him a master among the masters. It has long seemed to me that The Cloister and the Hearth is, in fiction, the only real revival of a dead age in the whole range of imaginative literature. When Mr Conan Doyle, as he then was, was lecturing in the United States, we met one evening at the Parker House in Boston, and he said one thing about that immortal book which I have ever since thought memorable. "To read The Cloister and the Hearth" he declared, "is like going through the Dark Ages with a dark lantern." And indeed the criticism is true. You travel from old Sevenbergen to mediaeval Rome and every man and woman you encounter on the way is indisputably alive, though there is no he or she amongst them all who has a touch of modernity. They are of their epoch, from Denys of Burgundy to the Princess Claelia, from the mijauree of the Tete D'Or to the tired and polished old gentleman who for the time being presides over the destinies of the Church of Rome. Here, for once, a prodigious faculty for taking pains is used with genius, and the chances are that the author of this monumental work, despised as he too often was as a mere sensationalist in his own day, will survive a score of his contemporaries who are even at this hour, by common critical consent, placed over him.

He was always fighting against some legal oppression. In the latest case in which I knew him to be engaged, an attempt had been made by a wealthy ground landlord to squeeze an unprotected widow lady out of her rights and to compel her to surrender the house and grounds which had belonged to her deceased husband. With the impetuosity which distinguished him in such matters, Reade flung himself into the conflict. It was enough for him to know that an injustice was being done or attempted to fire him at the centre. He caused to be inscribed on the outer wall of the garden of the mansion in dispute the words, "Naboth's Vineyard," and he used to relate with great glee how a Jew old clothesman one day translated this into "Naboth's Vinegar," and after a wondering reading of it, said: "Good Lord! I should have taken it for a gentlemanth houth." "From which," said Reade, quaintly, "you may conclude that Houndsditch thumbs not the annals of Samaria!"

That shapeless production Grace Forbeach had one idea in it which I was able to use later on to some advantage. In those days a writer of fiction expended much more care upon the actual mechanism of his plot than seems to be thought necessary nowadays. Even a man of the genius of Charles Dickens did not feel himself at liberty to work untrammelled by the exigencies of some intricate and harassing framework of invention on which he made it his business to hang all his splendours of description and his observation of human character. The power of the plot in English fiction found its culmination in the work of Wilkie Collins, whose Moonstone is probably the finest piece of mere literary cabinet-making in the world. All the younger writers of his time were strongly under his domination and it was quite a necessity for us to have some merely mechanical central idea round which we could evolve a story which, in its serial form, should keep the reader perpetually upon the tenterhooks of expectation. Such an idea I had stumbled on in Grace Forbeach where one of the characters was made feloniously to possess himself of his own property and thereby rendered himself liable to penal servitude. I elaborated this notion in Joseph's Coat and made the development of the whole fable dependent on it.

Leaving forgotten Grace Forbeach out of the reckoning, Joseph's Coat was my third novel in the order of writing and the second in order of publication. The second half of A Life's Atonement was written under difficulties which would have been absolutely insurmountable if it had not been for that spirit of camaraderie which distinguished the jolly little Bohemian set amongst whom I had fallen. One chum who lived over an undertaker's shop in Great Russell Street found me house-room, and I had a resource from which, for the space of some ten weeks, I was entitled to draw one pound a week, which came to me in rather an odd fashion. Every morning a half-crown was slipped under the doormat, except on Saturdays, when three were left there, one for the needs of the day and a double allowance for the Sunday. A loaf and a tin of Chicago beef stocked the larder, and that being once attended to, the remnant of my income served for such necessaries of life as beer and tobacco, and pen and ink and paper. The bargain I had made with Messrs Chambers was that I should receive one-half payment for the book—one hundred and twenty-five pounds—on delivery and acceptance, and the other half on the conclusion of the serial publication of the story in their journal. This left an interval of twelve months between the two payments, and the first was all but exhausted when my second commission from the firm reached me. It was then drawing towards the close of the year, and Mr Robert Chambers wrote me to say that the writer with whom he had bargained to follow A Life's Atonement had broken down in health, and asking if I were in a position to supply her place. I went off post-haste to Edinburgh and saw him there, and it was arranged between us that I should deliver to him six chapters of an original novel per week, that I should remain in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh in order to give him opportunity for consultation from time to time, and that whilst the book was being written I should receive a living wage. He recommended me to locate myself in Portobello, and there in the dead season I had no difficulty in finding lodgings.

I had scarcely deposited my portmanteau when I set to work. I began to write without the faintest idea of a plan, and for the first day or two I swam boldly enough along the stream of chance. The first chapters pleased Robert Chambers greatly and he was wise and generous enough to say so. For six tremendous weeks I wrote, beginning punctually every morning at eight o'clock and pretty generally bringing the day's work to a finish in the neighbourhood of midnight. I gave myself two half-hours for exercise and rambled in all sorts of weather about the sands and the deserted promenade. I was approaching the end of the work when a very curious experience befell me. I was sitting towards the end of the day's labour at my table when I felt suddenly that somebody was standing just behind me. The impression was so strong that I turned round hastily and made a survey of the little room. There was nobody there and I went back to work again. The feeling returned so often that I repeatedly found myself turning round in the middle of a sentence, but in an hour at most I was able to dismiss the fancy for the time. I got to bed too excited and too tired to sleep, and whilst I was lying there in the dark, the idea of that fancied presence came back again. It was standing at my bed-head in the darkness, and though I knew that to be a physical impossibility because the bed and the wall were close together, I found myself no longer able to dismiss the image. I went to sleep in spite of it at last, but at the instant at which I sat down at my table to take up the thread of last night's work, it was there again. Little by little it assumed shape and colour in my imagination, until at last it was as clearly present to me as if I had seen it with my bodily eyes. I have it before me at this instant; it was the figure of a man in mediaeval costume, in trunk and hose and doublet, and his clothing was red on one side and yellow on the other. The face, so far as it could be seen, was cadaverous and cruel, but half of it was concealed by a black vizor of velvet, through which lamped a pair of dark, unwinking eyes. The figure was there all day and every minute of the day, but I pegged stolidly on and gave as little heed as I could to it. But that night when I had got to bed, a development occurred. The figure took up that impossible position at my head, and I became aware that it had, balanced over its shoulder, an axe with a broad back and an edge like a razor, with which it stood in act to strike.

I got out of bed and re-lit the lamp, refilled my pipe and sat down to think things over. Wherever I went, the figure was behind me and always in the same threatening attitude. I began to talk to it at last in set phrases: "I know perfectly well what you are," I said; "you are an inhabitant of the land of Mental Overwork. I'm going to hold you at arm's length, because if I allowed you to take liberties, you might grow dangerous. We will travel together if you will insist upon it until this book is finished and then I will take you into some quiet, rural, restful place and lose you." I did not lose him when the work was over; he went about with me for a week or two. He travelled with me from Edinburgh to London, then from London by the long sea-route to Antwerp; from Antwerp to tranquil little Roche-fort in the Belgian Ardennes; and it was not until I found myself one day with my easel and my paintbox sketching some quaint bulbous old trees in the Avenue des Tilleuls, that I woke up to the fact that I had lost him. He came back to me once more and once only. I think it was owing to the fact that a fire had occurred at the printing premises of Messrs Grant & Co. in Turnmill Street, in which the manuscript of a work of fiction had been destroyed, that I was asked by my old friend Gowing to put extra pressure upon myself for the completion of a story on which I was engaged for him. It was a question of days and almost of hours, and I remember that at the last, from Friday morning until late on Sunday night, I wrote almost incessantly, snatching an hour or two's sleep in an armchair, only when Nature imperatively demanded it. I delivered the manuscript in person on Monday morning and as I was walking home along Holborn, I suddenly became aware of the presence of my old unpleasant comrade. I gibed at him with a feeling of perfect security, but I was brought to a halt by a sudden horrible discovery—the paving-stone in front of me was not a real paving-stone at all but a mere paper imitation, with an actually measureless gulf below it. The delusion was so real and convincing that I was able to pursue my way only by the most desperate resolution, and all the way to Fitzroy Square, where I was living at the time, the fear clung to me. I took a liberal dose of whisky, went to bed and slept the clock round, and woke to find the whole thing vanished.

I spent five happy years at Rochefort, and although when I first went there I had no idea of staying for more than three or four weeks' rest and quiet, it was actually eighteen months before I left the place at all.

In dealing with my experiences in the Press gallery of the House of Commons, I had occasion to speak of the curious premonition which assailed me at the instant at which the unfortunate Dr Kenealy made use of the rhetorical symbol of the dewdrops and the lion's mane. I do not know that I have any right to claim the possession of any psychic faculty which goes beyond the ordinary, but I do know that that sort of premonition of a coming circumstance has not been at all rare in my experience. Something very like it befell me whilst I was living at Rochefort, and in that instance it proved of signal service to me, I wrote the final scene of Joseph's Coat on a certain wintry day and was within a page or two of the conclusion of the story when I was called to luncheon. In the ardour of work I had allowed the fire to die out in my bedroom stove, and encountering on the stairs a certain lout, whose name was Victor, who did duty about the stables of the hotel, I gave him instructions to see to it. Ten minutes later a dreadful inspiration occurred to me, and I dashed upstairs. The man was kneeling before the stove and was in the very act of striking a lucifer match when I arrived. A glance at my writing-table showed me that the impulse on which I had acted was only too well-founded. The man had taken a dozen pages of my manuscript, and an instant later he would have set them blazing. In those days I wrote on an unruled large quarto, and since it was my habit to crowd sixteen hundred words into a page, the loss of time and labour would have been, at least, considerable. I recovered my MS. all crumpled and dirty, and I applied to that ostler pretty nearly all the opprobrious names in his language with which I was acquainted. "Mais, monsieur," the criminal responded, "le papier etait deja gate; vous avez ecrit la-dessus." If this had been intended as a literary criticism, it might possibly have been justified, but seeing that it was offered by a man who could not read, there was something in the frank imbecility of it which disarmed me, and I daresay that the shout of laughter with which I received it was just as incomprehensible to the man as the rage with which I had fallen upon him only a moment earlier.

When I first took up my residence in that little Belgian village, I mistook it for an Arcadia, but a more intimate knowledge of it and the acquaintanceship I formed with the village doctor and the doyen of the little local cathedral served to undeceive me. It was full of poverty and of all the more sordid forms of vice which everywhere seem inseparable from physical distress and overcrowding. I taught both the medico and the cleric to appreciate the flavour of Scotch whisky, and on many a score of winter nights I used to sit and listen to them whilst they engaged in long discussions on the Christian faith. The venerable doyen laboured hard to convince the doctor, who was an Agnostic of the aggressive type. "La religion," said the latter, on one occasion, "est une bonne et belle chose pour les femmes, les enfants et les imbeciles," but in spite of their antagonism in this respect, they worked together with a devotion which was beyond praise amongst their poor. The priest used to tell the doctor that he would have been the best of Christians if he had only known it, and the doctor used to assure him in return that he would have been the best of men if only his mind had never been distorted by the fables of the Church. They met on the common ground of benevolence and scholarship and I think they were a pair of the most lovable old fossils I have ever known. The doctor was a man of prodigious attainment and I often used to wonder what had induced such a man to bury himself in such a place, until I learned that the genial old bachelor bookworm had known a day of romance long before, and that the lady of his choice had, on the very eve of marriage, resigned herself, like Carlyle's Blumine, to wed someone richer. The romance spoiled his career, but it was a godsend for his native village, where he laboured till the day of his death, expending the whole of his professional income in works of charity. He has no place in this simple record apart from my affectionate remembrance of him and these remembrances may be taken simply as a flower laid in passing on the burial mound of an old friend.

The hunting lodge of Leopold, King of the Belgians—the Chateau des Ardennes, as it is called—is situate some half a dozen miles from Rochefort, on the road to Dinan on the Meuse. It was a favourite relaxation of mine when I found myself in want of exercise and a holiday, to mount a knapsack and to stroll to Dinan, which is only a score of English miles away. On one of these jaunts I had my only interview with a reigning monarch. I was sauntering homeward in the dusk of a summer's evening when I saw at the gate of the chateau, a tall, gaunt figure with a long, peaked beard, a pheasant's feather stuck in the ribbon of a bowler hat, and trousers very disreputably trodden into rags behind. As I passed him he raised his hat and gave me a courteous "Bon soir, monsieur." I returned his salute and answered "Bon soir, sire." "Ah, ha!" said His Majesty, like a pleased child, "vous me connaissez alors?" I responded that everybody knew the King of the Belgians and I added that I had never ventured to enter His Majesty's dominions without carrying his portrait with me. "Comment donc!" said His Majesty, and when I produced a brand new five-franc piece, the jest enjoyed a greater prosperity than it deserved. We got into conversation on the strength of it and he stood for perhaps five minutes chatting not unintelligently about English books and authors.

The years I spent in Rochefort were, I think, the happiest and most fruitful of my life, but the last piece of work I did there came very near to landing me in a contretemps which might, for a time at least, have had an uncomfortable result. At that time Mr James Payn had just taken over the editorship of the Cornhill magazine, the price of which he had reduced to 6d. My story—By the Gate of the Sea—had been the last to appear in the original series founded by Thackeray, and I was invited by Mr Payn to inaugurate the new and cheaper issue. With this purpose I wrote Rainbow Gold, and since it was Mr Payn's unbreakable editorial rule not to take any work into consideration until its last line was in his hands, and he at this time was in a mighty hurry about his literary supplies, I had to undertake again pretty much such a spell of work as I had undertaken with Val Strange, and with an almost equally unfortunate result. My methods of work have often brought me near a nervous breakdown, and by the time at which Rainbow Gold was finished, I was all but a wreck. It had been arranged between the editor of the Cornhill and myself that the completed copy of my book should be in his hands on a given date, and for some reason I was afraid to trust it to the post, and determined to carry it to London and deliver it with my own hands. For this purpose it was necessary that I should catch the Malle Des Indes early on the Sunday morning at Jemelle two miles away. I had a little leather case constructed, in which to carry my manuscript, and this I had seen more than half completed on the Thursday afternoon. I strolled into the shop of the village cordonnier on Saturday morning to ask why it had not been delivered, and I found the man busy on a duplicate of it which he promised to deliver before the evening. It came out on inquiry that he had sold the case I had ordered to a person who described himself as a commercial traveller, and who was staying at the Chevaux Blancs, a little hotel in the village which was frequented by people of his class. I satisfied myself that the work would be done in time, and when it was delivered in the course of the evening, I naturally supposed that there was an end of the matter. I met the purchaser of my box on the platform at Jemelle, and we travelled by the same train as far as Lille. There I got another momentary glimpse of him and thenceforth saw him no more.

I travelled on to Dover without adventure, but there, as I was quitting the boat, I was encountered by a man who, although he was in plain clothes, was immediately recognisable as a member of the police force. He laid his hand upon my shoulder and said: "I beg your pardon, but I must ask you to accompany me to the Captain's cabin." I not unnaturally asked him why. He pointed to the box I held and asked if that were my property. I answered of course in the affirmative and he said in quite the official manner that he must trouble me to go with him, and made a motion to relieve me of my burden. I handed the box to him and he conducted me, still with a hand upon my shoulder, to the companion-way. In the captain's cabin I found two or three men who were all very grave, and all very suave and polite. One of them asked me my name, and another whether I had not left the village of Rochefort by such and such a train in the morning. I answered both questions without hesitation, and I noticed that my interlocutor looked a little puzzled. I was asked next what I was carrying in that leathern case, and, by way of answer, I unlocked the box and produced my manuscript. There was a curious restraint visible in the manner of my examiners when I performed this simple action, and I could not in the least understand it at the time, although its reason became clear enough a minute later. "I beg your pardon, Mr Murray," said the man who had first laid a detaining hand upon me, "there has been a mistake, but we were compelled to do our duty." He intimated that I was at liberty to go, which in some heat I declined to do, until I had received some explanation of this arrest of a private citizen bound on legitimate affairs. I had missed the tidal train, and I represented that this had caused me some inconvenience.

Then the truth came out The hotel des Chevaux Blancs, in innocent seeming little Roche-fort, had been for some months past a hot-bed of European anarchy. The people who went and came there were surrounded by spies, and the police of Dover had been advised by telegraph, of the departure of a noted anarchist, who was carrying precisely such a box as that in which I had bestowed my manuscript. Before I left Dover, it transpired that a man had been arrested in Folkestone who was carrying with him enough of Atlas dynamite to have wrecked a whole square. The movements of each of us had been watched by the continental police, and had been wired to England. There had been a moment at which the two boxes had been laid on the same bench on the platform at Jemelle, and I have often since pictured to myself the imbroglio which might have ensued if they had been accidentally exchanged. It could not have lasted long in the nature of things, but it would certainly have afforded me a new experience.

I have had a good deal to do with the police in my time, as most working journalists have, and this reminds me of one or two adventures which, if I had preserved a chronological order in my narrative, should have been told earlier. Before I left Birmingham I became acquainted with an officer who afterwards became eminent in the service of Scotland Yard. The fashion in which we were introduced to each other was sufficiently dramatic. It was an hour after midnight in a heavy rain and the place was Pinfold Street, at the back of the premises of the Birmingham Morning News. A bedraggled woman ran shrieking uphill with cries of "help" and "murder," and behind her staggered a drunken ruffian brandishing a club which, when we came to examine it later, proved to have been sawn from the top of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead. It was simply rounded at one end and square and heavy at the other, and it would infallibly have done the business of any person with whose head it had come in contact. I was encumbered with a heavy ulster which was buttoned down almost to my feet and I should certainly have been too late to prevent mischief, but just as the pursuer came within striking distance an agile figure darted round the corner and the murderous-minded drunkard dropped like an ox in the shambles at a single blow. The newcomer was a plain-clothes policeman and he had used a pair of handcuffs as a knuckle-duster and had taken the ruffian clean on the point of the chin. I accompanied him and his captor to the Moor Street police station and got a paragraph out of the incident before the paper went to bed.

I saw no more of my plain-clothes man for a month or two and then an odd circumstance threw us together again. My father, who was still carrying on business in West Bromwich, was a letterpress printer only, but he received an occasional order for copperplate and lithographic work which he handed over either to a Mr Storey in Livery Street, or to the firm of W. & B. Hunt in New Street. I had been over to call on him one evening and he had asked me to attend to some slight commission with either of these firms. I called first on the Livery Street man, whose establishment was just outside Snow Hill station, and found him looking at a queer copperplate impression which lay on the counter before him.

"There's something uncommonly queer about this," he said, "and I don't know that I ought to go on with it; it strikes me very forcibly that an attempt is being made to forge a Russian note and that this is a part of the process." The lines on the paper made a sort of hieroglyphic puzzle which it was quite impossible to decipher. I asked him what he intended to do with it and he answered that he would fulfil his order and set the police upon the track of the people who had given it. I went on to Messrs Hunt's printing works in New Street and there I found one of the partners poring over what at first sight looked like a replica of the impression I had just seen. I said nothing about the matter and nothing was said to me, but when I had transacted my business and had got out into the street again the first man I encountered was my plain-clothes policeman. I told him that I thought I was on the track of a little bit of business in his line and I took him back into the office of the copperplate printer and introduced him. It had just occurred to me that if the two plates I had seen were accurately registered they might fit into each other and make out a consecutive document, and so in the sequel it proved to be. A gang of Polish forgers had conceived the idea that in a foreign country it would be possible to get two separate engravers to imitate each a portion of a fifty-rouble note and they had made arrangements to do their own printing when they had secured the plates. I made arrangements with my detective that he should bring me first hand and exclusive information with respect to the development of the case and within eight and forty hours he had effected his arrest and I was the only journalist in the town who was allowed to know anything about it. Had I stayed on in Birmingham I might have developed a sort of specialism in this direction, but circumstances drifted me away and it was not until some years later that I met my friend again and found him to be occupying a position on the detective staff at Scotland Yard. He told me how he came there and, in its way, it is one of the most remarkable little stories I remember to have heard.

There was a manufacturing jeweller in Camberwell whose name was Whitehead, who had a showroom somewhere in the neighbourhood of St. Paul's Cathedral. Seventeen years there had been in his employ a commercial traveller in whom he reposed the completest confidence. This traveller had a very pretty turn for the invention of ornamental designs in fgold and precious stones and he was an accomplished draughtsman. In his journeys about the country he carried with him a tray of pinchbeck and of coloured glass, which represented in duplicate a tray of real jewellery and precious stones which was kept under lock and key at the showroom. It happened, whether by accident or design, that the one tray was substituted for the other, the pinchbeck imitations being left in the jeweller's safe and the real thing carried away by the commercial traveller. The fact of the substitution was not discovered for some days and by that time the traveller, following his ordinary route, should have been in Manchester or Liverpool. He was wired to at both places but no reply was received from him. Not a doubt of the man's probity entered into his employer's mind, but when all efforts to trace him had failed the jeweller became alarmed for the safety of his employe and communicated with the police.

Now, as fortune would have it, the young Birmingham detective had been sent up to London at this time and, calling at Scotland Yard, he had put into his hands some copies of the document by which the police were circulating the news of the traveller's disappearance, together with a woodcut reproducing a photograph which had been taken some years before and had willingly been surrendered to Mr. Whitehead by the traveller's wife, who was naturally in great distress concerning him. It was the general impression at the time that he had been decoyed away and murdered for the sake of the valuable property he carried, which was of such a nature that it might easily have been disposed of by the criminal—the gold being melted down and the precious stones being disposed of in the ordinary way of business. At Euston Station that afternoon, on his way back to Birmingham, the provincial detective had one fellow-traveller to whom, but for one singular little circumstance, he would probably have paid no heed whatever. The fellow-traveller had one article of luggage only, but he seemed to be unusually anxious about it. It was a hat-box and when he had placed it on the rack overhead he appeared to be unwilling to leave it out of sight for more than an instant at a time. He arose a score of times to readjust it and when he was not occupied in that way he kept a constant eye upon it. "I'm no great Scripture reader," said the detective to me, in telling me the story, "but when I was a kid my mother used to read the Bible to me every day and one text came into my mind when I saw that cove so anxious about his hat-box: 'Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also.' It kept coming back into my mind and somehow I got to thinking that if it had not been for certain things about him the man in the carriage would have been very like the man whose portrait and description I had just been looking at. The man described had features of a marked Jewish cast and so had the man in the carriage, but the man described had red hair, thick red eyebrows and a beard and moustache of the same colour. The man in the carriage was clean shaved and his hair and eyebrows were as black as a crow's back, but I had got the idea in my mind and I couldn't get it out again, and when he turned his face sideways to look out of the window the light fell on his cheek and, though the whisker had only just begun to sprout after his last shave, I could see that by nature he was as rusty as a jot. I felt downright certain of him from that very minute. He got out at Rugby, taking his hat-box with him, and as I had no funds with me I was afraid I was going to lose him, but he only went into the refreshment room for a glass of beer and a sandwich and came back with me and travelled comfortably on to Birmingham. There he engaged a room at the Queen's Hotel for the night, and having locked up his hat-box in it he went away to order a supply of clothes and linen, as I found out afterwards. I nipped down to Moor Street and told them what I had to say. I got my authority to act, and when my gentleman got back again, I was there all ready for him with a fellow-officer and we nabbed him at his bedroom door. He nipped out a revolver and tried to shoot himself, but we were too quick for him. We made him give up the key of the hat-box and there, sure enough, was every one of the missing jewels. He had torn the velvet lining out of the case and had thrown everything into it pell-mell and wrapped it up in two or three towels so, I suppose, that the contents of the hat-box couldn't jingle. My getting him was just an accident from start to finish, and if it had not been for that text of Scripture I should never have given the man a second thought, but it was reckoned a smartish capture and it ended in my promotion and my coming here."



CHAPTER XIII *

Eight Hours Day in Melbourne—The Australian Born— Australians and the Mother Country—The Governor—The Sydney Bulletin—The Englishman in Australia—Australian Journalism—The Theatres—The Creed of Athleticism—The Future.

It is many years since I saw a sight which so pricked and stirred my blood as the final episode of the procession of Eight Hours Day in Melbourne. The day was wintry and dismal. Early rains had threatened the dispersal of the patient crowds which lined the roads; the pavements were muddy and the sky was lowering. The march of the trades bodies did little to dispel the gloom of the day for the one onlooker concerning whose sentiments I am authorised to speak. The vast crowd gave each trade a reception as it passed, and sometimes the marchers passed below the Treasury windows and cheered the governor. There was plenty of noise and enthusiasm, but I was unawakened until the tail-end of the procession came. Two brakes drew up below the governor's standing-place, and some score of grey-bearded men rose up in these vehicles and waved their hats with vigour, whilst the whole orderly mob roared applause at them and Lord Hopetoun himself clapped his hands like a pleased boy at the theatre. All the men in the two brakes were elderly and grey-headed, but as far as I could see, they were all stalwart and able-bodied, and the faces of a good many were bronzed with years of sun and wind. Over the leading vehicle was suspended a strip of white cloth, and on this was painted the words, "The Pioneers." These men were the makers of Victoria, the fathers of the proud and populous city which lay widespread about us. There is no need to be eloquent about Melbourne. Too many people have sung its praises already. But it is one of the cities of the world; it has a population of over half a million; it has its churches, its chapels, its synagogues, its theatres, its hotels; it is as well furnished in most respects as any other city of its size; and these grey men yet staunch in body, bronzed and bright-eyed, were among the beginners of it. When I first visited Melbourne I was introduced to a man who, between the present site of the Roman Catholic Cathedral and the present site of the Town Hall, had been "bushed" for a whole day and lost in the virgin forest. I knew already how young the city was, how strangely rapid its growth had been; but I did not realise what I knew, and these elderly strangers' bodily presence made my thought concrete. That beautifully appropriate and dramatic finish struck the same chord of wonder, but with a fuller sound.

* These Antipodean notes, dealing with the conditions of some twenty years ago, have lost nothing of their vivid interest by the lapse of time, and illustrate in a remarkable manner the process of history being made for the world, while it hardly has time to wait.

The city is commonplace enough in itself, but the Victorian, quite justifiably, refuses to think so. Men come back from London, and Paris, and Vienna, and New York, and think Melbourne the finer for the contrast. In reality, it is very very far from being so; but it is useless to reason with patriotism and its convictions. The men of Victoria run devotion to their soil to an extreme. I was told an exquisite story, for the truth of which I had a solemn voucher, though it carries its evidences of veracity and needs no bolstering from without. An Australian-born—he came of course from that Gascony of the Antipodes which has Melbourne for its capital—visited the home country. An old friend of his father was his cicerone in London and took him, amongst other places, to Westminster Abbey, and "There, my young friend," said the Englishman, when they had explored the noble old building, "you have nothing like that in Australia." "My word," said the colonial export, "no fear! You should just see the Scotch church at Ballarat!"

The tale is typical. I would tell it, in the hope that he would find it an open-sesame to many things, to any fair-minded and observant man who was going out to Victoria. It is a little outrageous to the stranger, but in it the general public sentiment is drawn in grand oudines, magnified many times, but not in the least caricatured. The patriotic prejudice goes everywhere. It lives at the very roots of life. Truthful men will tell you that London is vilely supplied with cabs in comparison with Melbourne. They believe it. They will tell you that the flavours of English meats, game, fruits and vegetables are vastly inferior to those they know at home. And they believe it. To the unprejudiced observer Melbourne is the worst cabbed city in the world, or amongst the worst. A gourmet would find a residence in Australia a purgatory. For my own part, I have learned in a variety of rough schools at whatsoever meat I sit therewith to be content. In matters of gourmandise I am content wi' little and cantie wi' mair.

But, Shade of Savarin! How I relish my morning sole, after two years banishment from that delicious creature! How I savour my saddle of mutton! What a delightful thing I now know my English strawberry to be! But to the New South Welshman my doctrine is a stumbling-block and to the Victorian it is foolishness. Mr Sala preached it years ago and the connoisseurs of the Greater Britain of the south have never forgiven him.

Another patriotic delusion is the glorious climate. The plain fact is that there is no such thing as a climate. They take their weather in laminae, set on end. You walk from the tropics to the pole in five minutes. A meteorological astonishment lies in wait at every corner of the street. It blows hot, it blows cold, it scorches, it freezes, it rains, it shines, and all within the compass of an hour. Yet these wonderful Australians love their weather. Other people would endure it. They brag about it. I think they must be the happiest people in the world.

By the way, I must qualify, before I forget to do so, the judgment expressed above with respect to the Australian table. I tasted in Adelaide a favourable specimen of the wild turkey, and I believe it to be the noblest of game birds. Its flavour is exquisite and you may carve at its bounteous breast for quite a little army of diners. And the remembrance of one friendly feast puts me in mind of many. Is there anywhere else on the surface of our planet a hospitality so generous, so free and boundless, as that extended to the stranger in Australia? If there be I have not known it. They meet you with so complete a welcome. They envelop you with kindness. There is no arriere pensee in their cordiality, no touch lacking in sincerity. This is a characteristic of the country. The native born Australian differs in many respects from the original stock, but in this particular he remains unchanged. You present a letter of introduction and this makes you the immediate friend of its recipient. He spares no pains to learn what you desire and then his whole aim and business in life for the moment is to fulfil your wishes. Your host will probably be less polished than an Englishman living in a like house and boasting an equal income, but his bonhomie is unsurpassed. I used to think there was nothing like an English welcome. Australia has killed that bit of English prejudice.

This very openness of welcome, the sincerity of heart in which your host stands before you, is the means whereby the traveller first learns to be dissatisfied. He has come out with his own judgment of things raying from him in all directions—a very porcupine of pre-conception. He is not merely persuaded that the colonies are loyal but he is certain they are loyal after his own conceptions of loyalty.

So long as he encounters only the old folks he will find his pre-conceptions flattered, but he will not go long before he meets a member of the A.N.A. (which letters being interpreted signify the Australian Natives Association), and then he must be prepared to be astonished beyond measure. In a while, if he be a man of sense, he will begin to see how natural the position of the Australian native is, and then he will cease to be astonished, though he may still be grieved. The society is large and powerful. It includes within its ranks a great number of the most capable of the rising men and the younger of those already risen. Speaking broadly, its aspiration is for a separate national life. It will "cut the painter"—that is the phrase—which ties it to the old ship of state. In its ranks are many who love the old country and reverence its history and traditions, and these an Englishman only remarks with a readier excuse for what he must esteem an error. But there are others, and the melancholy fact, too long concealed or slighted, is that they are many and growing in numbers, who hate England and all things English. There are many, not stigmatised as dullards or as fools, who publicly oppose the teaching of English history in the State schools. The feeling against England is not a fantastical crank, it is a movement growing yearly in strength. I have seen men keeping their seats in serious protesting silence when the health of the Queen has been drunk at public banquets, and have found in private converse that hundreds approve their action but do not follow it because they dislike to be thought singular. The out-and-out journalistic supporters of the country vilify the mother country as a whole. They belittle its history and besmirch its rulers. Loyal Australians pooh-pooh these prints and entreat the stranger within their gates to believe that they are despised and without influence. The stranger has only to travel to learn better than this. The strongest current of Australian feeling is setting with the tide of growing power against the mother country.

That this statement will excite anger and derision in the minds of many Australians is certain. They live entrenched in the flutters of their own opinion, and are blind to the fact of the power which is mustering against them. They are as little instructed as to what is going on around them as we are at home, and our ignorance of our great dependencies is shameful and criminal. Our colonial governors, from some of whom we are supposed ourselves to learn something, and many of whom have been men of especial capacity, do not come in contact with the crowd. Lord Carrington saw more of the people amongst whom he lived than any governor before him, and I had from him a single story of a man of the country who expressed in drunken Saxon his opinion of existing forms of government; but the tale was jocularly told and was not supposed to have any importance. It could have had no importance to one who found it a single instance, as a governor would be likely to do. A governor sees smooth things. All sorts of people (except the working sort) frequent his receptions—the fashionable classes, who are far more loyal to England for the most part than the English themselves, their fringe, and then the wealthier of the tradespeople. It is proven every day that a democracy is the happiest hunting ground for a man with a title. The very rarity of the distinction makes it more precious to those who value it, and the titled governors of one of our great colonies occupies a position which is vastly higher in public esteem than that of his fellow-noblemen at home. He is the local fount of honour. To sit at his table, and to be on terms of friendship with him is to gratify the highest social ambition. He is the direct representative of the Crown, and the people who desire to associate with him must not have views which are inimical to existing forms of government, or, if they hold them, they must keep them carefully concealed. The governor responds to the toast of his own health and talks of those ties which bind and must bind the mother country to her children. His hearers are at one with him, and cheer him with hearty vigour. Absence from the dear old land has made their hearts grow fonder. Their loyalty is perfervid. Everybody goes home in a sentimental glow and the native born working-man reads his Sydney Bulletin over a long-sleever and execrates the name of the country which bore his father and mother.

The journal just named is very capably written and edited. The brightest Australian verse and the best Australian stories find their way into its columns. Its illustrations are sometimes brilliant, though the high standard is not always maintained. And having thus spoken an honest mind in its favour I leave myself at liberty to say that it is probably the wrongest-headed and most mischievous journal in the world. People try to treat it as a negligible quantity when they disagree with it. But I have seen as much of the surface of the country and as much of its people as most men, and I have found the pestilent print everywhere, and everywhere have found it influential. For some time past it has been telling blood-curdling stories of the iniquities of prison rule in Tasmania, with the tacit conclusion that nothing but the power of the working classes makes a repetition of these atrocities impossible. It compares the Russian Government with the English, and compares it favourably. It loses no opportunity of degrading all things English as English. England and the Englishman are as red rags to its bull-headed rage. Of course, its readers are not all sincere, though doubtless some of them are. Vast numbers of people who do not agree with it read it for its stage and social gossip; but there is a class of working-men who take its absurdities for gospel, and it is one of the factors in the growing contempt for the mother country which is noticeable amongst uninstructed Australians.

Another and more potent factor is supplied by Englishmen themselves. I have never in my life known anything more offensively insolent than the patronising tolerance which I have seen the travelling Cockney extend to men of the colonies, who were worth a thousand of him. I have seen an Englishman unintentionally insult a host at his own table, and set everybody on tenterhooks by his blundering assumption that the colonists are necessarily inferior to home-bred people. Nobody likes this sort of thing. Nobody finds himself feeling more kindly to the race which sends out that intolerable kind of man.

"Met a girl the other day," says the eye-glassed idiot, beaming fatuously round the table, "little colonial girl, don't you know. She'd read George Eliot. Never was more surprised in my life." And this to a company of Australian ladies and gentlemen bred and born.

This kind of person has his influence, and on that ground he is to be regretted. The students of men and manners find him as good as meat and drink; but we cannot all be Touchstones, and perhaps, on the whole, it would be well if he were buried.

Yet another and a still more potent factor is found in the habit which prevails amongst English fathers and guardians of sending out their incurable failures to the Colonies. "You shall have one more chance, sir, and it shall be the last. You shall have L100 and your passage out to Australia. This is the last I shall do for you. Now go and never let me see your face again." So the whisky-bitten vaurien goes out to Melbourne, has an attack of delirium tremens aboard ship, finds his alcoholic allowance thenceforward stopped by the doctor's orders, swaggers his brief on the block in Collins Street, hangs about the bars, cursing the colonies and all men and all things colonial in a loud and masterful voice, to the great and natural contentment of the people 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 visitor, and this exists inexplicably enough even amongst the people who despise the visitor, and the land from which he comes. They ask for candour, but they are angry if you do not praise. A good many of them, whilst just as eager for judgment as the rest, resent praise as patronage. It is certain that, in a very little while, this raw sensitiveness will die away, and leave a feeling of national security, which will not need to be shored up by every wanderer's opinion. At present the curiosity for the traveller's opinion is a litde embarrassing, and more than once I was reminded of a drawing of Du Maurier's in Punch where a big man standing over a little one declares: "If any man told me that was not a Titian I would knock him down, and I want your candid opinion."

There is a stage of national hobbledehoyhood and Australia has not yet grown out of it. Vanity, shyness, an intermingling of tenderness and contempt for outside opinion, a determination to exact consideration before yielding it—all these are characteristics. The working man is surly to the man who is better dressed than himself, not because he is naturally a surly fellow, but because he has not yet found a less repellent fashion of asserting independence. I shall come to the consideration of the great colonial labour question by-and-by, but the attitude of the working man is curiously consonant with the monetary characteristics of the land he lives in. Labour is growing towards such a manhood of freedom as has never been achieved elsewhere. It, too, has reached the hobbledehoy height and has all the signs which mark that elevation, the brief aspirations, the splendid unformed hopes, and the touchy irascibility.

I have said what I can to justify the dislike of England, but have by no means exhausted the explanations of the fact There are explanations which do not justify and the most important of all seems to me to come under that head. The greatest danger to the contented union of the Empire is the protecting of a selfishness so abnormal as to excite anger and impatience. But since anger and impatience are the worst weapons with which it is possible to fight, it will be wise to lay them by, and to discuss the question unemotionally. Australia is governed by the working man. The working man has got hold of a good thing in Australia, and he has resolved to keep it and, if he can, to make it better. He has got it into his head that the one thing to be afraid of is the influx of population. He takes no count of the fact that all the wisest men of the country admit the crying need of people—that labour everywhere is needed for the development of giant resources. His loaf is his, and he is quite righteously determined that no man shall take it from him. He is not in the least degree determined that he shall not take away another man's loaf; but that is a different question. England is the one country in the world which can, under existing circumstances, or under circumstances easily conceivable, seek to send any appreciable number of new people into the colony. Therefore England is to be feared and hated, and any scheme which may be promulgated in favour of further emigration is to be resisted to the uttermost. Men talk of war as the answer to an attempt to deplete by emigration the overcrowded labour markets of the home country. No public man who sets the least value upon his position dares discuss this question. The feeling is too deep-rooted and its manifestations are too passionate. The scheme propounded by General Booth afforded an opportunity for a striking manifestation of this fact. Long before the nature of the scheme was known or guessed at, before any of the safeguards surrounding it were hinted, it was denounced from one end of the country to the other. It is not my present business to express any opinion as to the feasibility of the plan. The point is that the mere mention of it was enough to excite an intense and spontaneous opposition. Australia will never, except under compulsion, allow any large body of Englishmen to enter into possession of any portion of her territories. The ports for emigration on a large scale are finally and definitely closed.

The population of Australia is 3,326,000. These people have an area of 3,050,000 square miles from which to draw the necessaries and luxuries of life. Suppose it be allowed that one half the entire country is not and will not be habitable by man. Australians themselves would resent this estimate as being shamelessly exaggerated, but the supposition is, so far as the argument goes, in their favour. Take away that imagined useless half and every man, woman and child in the community would still have very nearly half a square mile of land if the country were equally divided. It is evident that the populace is unequal to the proper exploitation of the continent Let them multiply as the human race never multiplied before and they must still remain unequal to the task before them for many centuries. The cry raised is that of "Australia for the Australians." Well, who are the Australians? Are they the men of the old British stock who made the country what it is, or the men who had the luck to be born to the inheritance of a splendid position, for which they have not toiled? It is the honest simple truth, and no man ought to be angry at the statement of it—though many will be—that Australia was built up by British enterprise and British money. It is a British possession still, and without British protection, British gold, and the trade which exists between it and Britain, would be in a bad way. Looked at dispassionately, the cry of "Australia for the Australians" seems hardly reasonable. The mother country has a right to something of a share in the bargain.

The argument would be infinitely less strong if the Australians were using Australia. But they are not. The vast Melbourne, of which Victoria is so proud, holds half the population of the colony, and produces little or nothing. Melbourne is the city of brass plates. There are more brass-plates to the acre in the thoroughfares which diverge from Collins Street than could be found in any other city of the world. The brass-plate, as all the world knows, is the badge of the non-producer—the parasite, the middleman, agent, call him what you will—the man who wears a tall hat and black coat, and who lives in a villa, and lives on and by the products of the labour of others. As society is constituted he is an essential when he exists in reasonable numbers. In Melbourne his numbers are out of reason. For almost every producer in Victoria there is a non-producer in the capital. In the early days men went into the country and set themselves to clear and till the soil. That impulse of energy has died out and a new one has succeeded it which is infinitely less profitable and wholesome. The tendency is now towards the city. The one source of permanent wealth is neglected, and commerce and speculation occupy the minds of men who fifty years ago would have raised mutton and wool, corn and wine. With every increase of growth in the great city there is a cry for rural labour to preserve the necessary balance of things. The call is not listened to or answered, and Melbourne is a hundred times more abnormal than London. London deals with the trade of the world, and a good half of its population could not be dispensed with. Within its limits five and a half millions do the business of a hundred millions. In Melbourne half a million do the business of another half a million, and the country necessarily suffers. No student of social economy can deny the position, but the working man will have it otherwise. He is the ruler of Australia and the destinies of a people, pointed out by nature for greatness, are stationary in his hands. He is worth studying, however, and to convince him may mean the salvation of a continent. There, as here, the working man is the victim of a prodigious blunder—a mistake so obvious that the on-looker wonders at his blindness. A month or two ago he was in the thick of a struggle which was everywhere called a fight with capital. The real battle, however, was never with capital for a moment. The one engagement—and it ranged all along the line for months—was between organised and unorganised labour, between the unionists and non-unionists. Wherever a working man of the union declared against the conditions imposed by the employer, a working man outside the union accepted those conditions. The capitalist changed his staff—that was all. The unionists were thrown permanently out of employment in large numbers, and when at last the strike fizzled out, their leaders made a melancholy proclamation of victory, which deceived nobody, not even themselves. The unionist clock in Australia has been put back a year or two. It is probable that the men will know with whom they have to fight before they are again lured into conflict. It is an old adage that much will have more. The Australian working man is the best fed, the best paid, the best housed, and the least worked of all the workers of the world. In the great towns house rent is dear, much dearer than it has a right to be in so new and so wide a country. This is the consequence of the rush for secularisation and the ensuing neglect of the resources of the land. Clothing is dear as the consequence of protective imposts. The Australian working man is a staunch protectionist, being somehow persuaded that it is essential to his interests that he should suffer for the benefit of his only enemy, the middleman. There are hundreds of restaurants in the second-rate streets of colonial towns where you may see painted up a legend, "All Meals—6d." For that small sum a man may have a sufficiency of hot or cold beef or mutton, bread, tea and a choice of vegetables. I can testify from personal knowledge that the meals are well cooked, well served and plentiful. I have eaten a worse luncheon in a London club or restaurant than I found at one of these eating-houses in Sydney and have paid five times the price, although it has to be confessed that for five times the price one can get a finer meal. More wholesome or more plentiful fare no man need ask for.

Well, as I have said, much will have more. The working man has got his whole programme filled up. There is one vote for one man, and about that fact almost the whole land is jubilant—though the practical good of it may as yet be a problem. The aspiration expressed in the old quatrain is fulfilled.

"Eight hours work, Eight hours play, Eight hours sleep, And eight 'bob' a day."

The Eight Hours movement has been crowned with success, and there is a magnificent annual procession to commemorate it. It is announced that a movement is to be set on foot for the further reduction of the hours of labour. Six hours a day has to be the limit of the future. The comic journals, or to speak by the card, the journals which study to be comic, prophesy four hours, two hours, and then no hours at all; but these celestial visions are out of the working man's eyeshot.

Here and there an individual may be found who, being entrusted with an irresponsible power, would not desire to use it tyrannically. But since corporations are never so moral, so high-thinking so forbearing as individuals, corporate bodies tend always and everywhere to the misuse of their powers, and demand constantly to be held in check by some influence outside their own. The working man of the Antipodes is told so often that all the power (as well as all the freedom and the honour) lies in his hands, that he is disposed to do strange things.

But a mere glance at the history of two phases of the great strikes which have lately shaken Australian society may be of service.

In New Zealand, where, under conditions similar to those of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, the labourer has grown to think himself more worthy of his hire than anybody else could possibly be, the fight between unionists and non-unionists, with capital as an interested spectator, began on a curiously trivial question. A firm of printers and stationers in Christchurch were ordered to reinstate or discharge an employee. The firm declined to obey the mandate of the union, and an order went forth from the representatives of the latter body to the effect that no one belonging to any of its branches should handle the goods of the obdurate company. This was all very well in its way, until the order touched the railway hands, who are in the employ of the government. The union appealed to the railway commissioners to remain "neutral" and not to carry the goods of the offending firm. The commissioners responded that they were the servants of the public; that it was not part of their business to recognise the quarrel, but that it was their business to carry for any and every citizen who did not infringe their rules. The representatives of the union renewed their appeal for "neutrality." Why should these domineering commissioners take the side of capital and fight in its interests? The commissioners again wrote that they were the public carriers, that they had no right to refuse to work for any law-abiding citizen, that they had no place or part in the quarrel, and intended simply and merely to do the duty for which they were appointed. The din which arose on this final declaration was at once melancholy and comic.

Here was the government lending all its power to crush the working man. Here was the old class tyranny which had created class hatreds in the old country! This was what we were coming to after having emancipated ourselves from the trammels of a dead or effete superstition! Here was a government so crassly wicked and purposely blind as to profess neutrality and yet refuse to fight our battles! What had we—the working men of New Zealand—asked for? We asked that the government should hold our enemy while we punched him; and while they traitorously proclaimed their neutrality, they refused this simple request for fair play. Therefore are we, the working men of New Zealand, naturally incensed, and at the next election we will shake these worthless people out of office, and we will elect men like Fish, who know what neutrality really means!

The Hon. Mr Fish was one of the labourers' faithful. The palpable interference of the Commissioners wounded him profoundly.

The more recent strike of the Queensland shearers has afforded opportunity for a display of an equal faculty of logic and reasonableness. The shearers, at loggerheads with the squatters, proposed to arrange their differences by arson. They threatened openly to fire the grass upon those vast northern plains where fire is the thing most to be dreaded amongst many and terrible enemies. They not only threatened but they carried their threats into effect in many places; and but for the exceptional rains, which mercifully interfered between them and their purpose, they would have created scenes of boundless desolation. Here again a government has no sense of fair-play. Troops were sent to watch the shearers' camps and to prevent active hostilities. A natural thrill of horror ran through the country at this autocratic and unwarrantable act. Here at the Antipodes we have founded a democracy, and in a democracy the government motto should be nonintervention. The unionist workmen roared with indignation at countless meetings. Why were not the shearers allowed to settle the dispute their own way? Why were the poor men to be threatened, intimidated, bullied by armed force? A continent cried shame. When, in that eight hours' procession to which I have already twice referred the shearers' deputation rode by, they were received with rolling applause all along the line, and a free people cheered the victims of oppression.

In the middle of all this madness it was good to see that the greatest of the democratic journals had the courage of honesty and spoke its mind plainly. The Melbourne Age is a very wealthy and powerful journal, but it risked much, for the moment at least, in opposing the mingled voices of the populace. Excited leaders of the people denounced it in unmeasured epithets, and the crowd boo-hooed outside its offices in Collins Street, but the writers of the journal went their way unmoved, as British journalists have a knack of doing.

I find here an opportunity of saying the most favourable word I can anywhere speak for the Australian Colonies. The Press is amongst the best and most notable in the world. The great journals of Melbourne and Sydney are models of newspaper conduct, and are nowhere to be surpassed for extent and variety of information, for enterprise, liberality, and sound adhesion to principle, or for excellence of sub-editorial arrangement, or for force, justice, and exactness in expression. It is not only in the greater centres that the Press owns and displays these admirable characteristics. Adelaide, Brisbane, Dunedin, Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington have each journals of which no city in the world need be ashamed; and when the limitations which surround them are taken into consideration their excellence appears all the more remarkable and praiseworthy.

It is not unnatural perhaps that a man trained in English journalism and having worked in every grade of it should esteem it highly. But allowing all I can for personal prejudice and striving to look impartially upon it and its rivals, I am compelled to think it far and away the best in the world. In Australia the high traditions of the parent Press are preserved, and among many strange and novel and perplexing signs one can but gratefully and hopefully recognise the splendid enterprise and the lofty sense of public obligation which guide the youngest school of journalism in the world.

In one respect Australian journalism surpasses English. We have nothing to show which will at all compare with the Australasian or the Leader; but it is easy to see that they and similar journals of other cities (which are all worthy of the same high praise) are established excellences to local conditions. These great weekly issues give all the week's news and all the striking articles which have appeared in the daily journals of which they are at once the growth and compendium. They do much more than this, for they include whatever the gardener, the agriculturist, the housewife, the lady of fashion, the searcher of general literature, the chess-player, the squatter can most desire to know. They provide for 'all sorts of tastes and needs, and between their first sheet and their last, they render to their readers what we in England buy half a score of special journals to secure. The reason for their existence is simple. There is not population enough to support the specialist as we know him at home, and an eager and enquiring people will be served.

The first unescapable belief of the English traveller is that the Australian is a transplanted Englishman pure and simple. A residence of only a few months kills that notion outright. Many new characteristics present themselves. To arrest one of the most noticeable—there is perhaps no such pleasure-loving and pleasure-seeking people in the world. I wish now I had thought of securing trustworthy statistics with respect to the number of people who present themselves on the colonial racecourses within the limit of a year. It would be interesting to know what proportion of the population is given over to the breeding and training of horseflesh and the riding of races. The Melbourne people exult—and not unjustifiably—in the Melbourne Cup and on the spectacle presented at its running. That spectacle is quite unique as far as I know. Neither the Derby nor the Grand Prix can rival it for its view of packed humanity, and neither can approach it for the decorous order of the crowd. Is it Jane Taylor who tells the story of an English village? I am not quite sure, but I remember the genesis. You must have a church to begin with. For a church you want a parson and a parson must have a clerk. From this established nucleus grows everything. In Australia they begin with the race-course. This statement is not to be accepted as a satiric fable, but as a literal fact. Nearly two years ago, travelling in the Blue Mountains—miles upon miles away from everywhere—I came upon a huge board erected in the bush. The board bore this inscription, "Projected road to site of intended race-course." There was not a house visible, or the sign of the beginning of a house, but half-an-hour later, in apparent virgin forest, I found another board nailed to a big eucalypt. It had a painted legend on it, setting forth that these eligible building sites were to be let or sold. The solemn forest stood everywhere, and the advertisement of the eligible building sites was the only evidence of man's presence. It was for the benefit of future dwellers here that the road to the site of the "intended race-course" had been "projected."

Again there are more theatres and more theatregoers to the population than can probably be found elsewhere. The houses and the performances are alike admirable. Like the Americans, the Australians endure many performances which would not be thought tolerable in England, but they mount their productions with great pomp and luxury. Whatever is best in England finds an early rendering in the great cities, and for serious work the general standard is as high as in Paris or in London. The Princess Theatre in Melbourne has given renditions of comic opera which are not unfairly to be compared, for dressing, mise-en-scene and artistic finish to those of the Savoy. The general taste is for jollity, bright colour, cheerful music. Comedy runs broader than it does at home and some of the most excellent artists have learned a touch of buffoonery. The public taste condones it, may even be said to relish it to finesse. The critics of the Press are, in the main, too favourable, but that is a stricture which applies to modern criticism in general. There is a desire to say smooth words everywhere and to keep things pleasant.

Outside the southernmost parts of Victoria Australia has a climate, and the people can rejoice in midnight picnics. In the glorious southern moonlight one can read the small print of a newspaper. The air is cool after the overwhelming furnace of the day. The moonlight jaunts and junketings are characteristic and pleasant, and they offer an opportunity for the British matron who flourishes there as here—heaven bless her—to air her sense of morals in letters to the newspapers.