he had named any one of the contemporary worthies of Great Britain. This state of feeling I hold to be an outcome, in great measure, of Australian democracy. I remember an American saying, with much truth, that to judge from the English papers there were only two people on the great American continent worth writing about, O'Donovan Rossa and Mrs. Langtry—"the one," he said, "a beautiful, and the other a very ugly, fleeting bubble on the great sea of American public life; and neither of them Americans." I have elsewhere, however, said enough on this point, as affecting the colonies.
In conclusion, I only ask the English reader to accept the situation as he finds it, and make the best of it. The democracies of Australia are far from perfect, but they cannot be sneered out of existence; and if we believe in the inherent vigour, veracity, and manliness of our race, they may yet be made important factors in our Empire, and sources of strength rather than of weakness to the mother-land. That they contain many disturbing elements, and that they may on occasion exhibit a low standard of national life mainly by reason of those elements, it will be the purpose of the two succeeding chapters in some measure to illustrate.
