Page:Adams - Australian Essays.djvu/19

Rh strength. What is the state of the weaker nations that opposed us there? In America and Australia they are perishing off the face of the earth; even in New Zealand, where the aborigines are a really fine and noble race, we are, it seems, swiftly destroying them. In India, whose climate is too extreme for us ever to make it a colony in the sense that America and Australia are colonies; in India, since we could neither make the aborigines give way, nor make them adapt themselves to us, we have simply let them alone. They do not understand us, nor we them. Of late, it is true, an interest in them, in their religion and literature, has been springing up, but what a strange aspect do we, the lords of India for some hundred and thirty years, present I " In my own experience among Englishmen," says an Indian scholar writing to the Times in 1874, "I have found no general indifference to India, but I have found a Cimmerian darkness about the manners and habits of my countrymen, an almost poetical description of our customs, and a conception no less wild and startling than the vagaries of Mandeville and Marco Polo concerning our religion." Do we want any further testimony than this to the determined, the pitiless strength of "the Anglo-Saxon race . . . the Norman blood?"

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

Let us consider it for a moment. The Australians have no prejudice about an endowed Church, as we English have, and hence they have, what we have not, religious liberty. As far as I can make out, there is no reason why the wife of a clergyman of the Church of England should in this colony look