Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/369

 ceaseless compulsory labour, and more capable of the rational enjoyment of life.

With regard to mental characteristics. It has been the fashion to assert that a certain want of thoroughness is observable in the native Australian youths. 'They will not fag at their books to the same extent as a Britisher. They are superficial, light-minded, unstable, what not.'

I well believe this to be an unfounded charge. When will people cease to talk of 'Australians' doing this and that, or permit colonists to differ among themselves from birth, as elsewhere? Here, under the Southern Cross as under Ursa Major, are born the imaginative and the practical, the energetic, the dreamy, the slow and the brilliant, the cautious and the rash, the persevering and the fickle. As the inscrutable human unit enters the world, so must he or she remain, I hold, but partially modified by human agency, until the day of death. Change of abode or circumstance will not perceptibly alter the mysteriously-persistent entity. The eager British or other critic sums up the inhabitants living in five hundred different ways as typical colonists. 'The Australian' (saith he) 'does this, or looks like that, dislikes formality, or abhors uniformity. He is quick, but not persevering; he is not so profound, so long enduring, so "thorough" as the Englishman.' Such reasoners surely assume that all Australians 'to the manner born' were hewn out of one primeval eucalyptus log, instead of, as I had the honour to remark before, possessing in full abundance the endless differentiations and divergences from the parent type, and from each other, so noticeable in Great Britain.

Know, O friendly generaliser, that there be tall Australians and short Australians, lean Australians, and those to whom the increase of adipose tissue is a sore trial. There be fair-haired and dark-haired, brown- and auburn-haired youths and maidens, and ever, as the outward man or woman ripens diverse under the same sun, do the invisible forces of the mind wax faint or fierce, feeble-clinging or deathless-strong. There are speculative, rash Australians; also cautious, very wary Australians. Some to whom gold is but dross, peculiarly difficult to 'pocket' in life's billiard-table, and woefully given to the losing hazard; others to whom pence and half-pence are dear as the rarest coins of the collector, prone to fight for