and of degrading fickleness of opinion in the people themselves in this apparent mistrust and neglect of their old friends." He tries to console himself with the somewhat bitter reflection that "it is not conservative reaction in the old party sense of the term, but the action of a shopocratic conservatism of modern growth, combined with a sprinkling of flunkeyism and a larger leaven of political infidelity." The writer explains that by this last phrase he means that the intelligent English artisans had come to see that "political agitation very inadequately supplies the daily wants of a family, and ministers but little to the enjoyment of life."
But over and above all these reasons for this strange condition of English public opinion, the Australian shrewdly detected the rooted dislike of Republican America, heightened into hysteria by the spectacle of the terrible internecine conflict. It is certainly a singular illustration of the law of reflex action that, owing to the American Civil War, the two Australian Emigration Commissioners should have been so completely baffled in England. The most influential English journals pointed to the struggle across the Atlantic as the inevitable outcome of a state of things where one man was, at
