Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/288

230 was mere County Council business, and it was almost impossible to believe that those men engaged in this miserable spectacle were the “great statesmen” of the British Empire! Indeed, we have come to a pretty pass when the high places of the Homeland are filled by mounte-banks, clamouring and behaving like village pot-house politicians, The world looks on with contempt. Are these responsible thinking beings, these unseeing, spluttering, carpet-bag nonentities? Let them go to Holland, which, as the geography book wickedly says, is “a low-lying country full of dams.” Not one sees the writing on the wall. Please God they may yet all be swept away, and in their stead rise the vigorous youth of the Empire, coming from north and south, from east and west, to save this tottering heritage of ours from final disruption, They must come from somewhere—they are not in the Homeland. And the silly, cowardly cry of, “Oh, the foreigner is coming to take us!” Our ancestors would have laughed with glee, risen as one man, and let the foreigner learn what British strength means. They would have welcomed the chance of putting the enemy in his proper place; they never would have sat down and cried, and moaned, and howled with fear, whilst the amazed world looked on and laughed them to derision. What a spectacle we present! Men bending from platforms, upon which stand Cabinet Ministers, to strike women who differ from them in ideas; men who have a vote and are too lazy and indifferent ever to have used it, booing and hissing and fighting with women who struggle for what they deem their rights; girl-scouts; handsome young women in uniform prancing about on horseback — what they mean, or of what use they are to any one, no one can tell; people of birth and