Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/122

 no place is real superiority more readily appreciated than in the colonies, but nowhere is the counterfeit article more quickly detected and exposed. It was in Victoria that the biting phrase "the wealthy lower orders" was first uttered. Go where you will, politics is a rough-and-tumble, and there are many refined persons in England who would be quite out of place in the House of Commons. I guarantee that if Mr. Finch-Hatton, who has a politician's instincts and aspirations, were to make his home in Victoria, he would find his way very readily into the Legislative Assembly, and would soon regard the public movements of the colony in a very different light from that of the small and publicly impotent section of colonial society with which, like most aristocratic visitors, he appears, almost exclusively, to have come in contact, and from whom he has formed his ideas, if not of Queensland, at least of Victorian politics.

In a less recent diatribe against Victorian democracy, I find it stated that "one result of it is to exclude any man of inconveniently refined temperament, of a too fastidious intellect, and an oppressively severe independence of opinion, from any part in the representation of the colony." A very little