Page:The Coming Colony Mennell 1892.djvu/124

 It is easy for the globe-trotter to amuse himself with the harmless vanities of colonial existence, which are at the worst but a watery reflection of the intricate snobberies which exuberate at home. He has the conceit taken out of him, however, when those whom he thinks it his right to criticise from an English standpoint take up the parable in their turn and give him the outside view o:f things as they are in the old country. I was never more impressed with this than when the witty Nestor of Western Australia, Mr. George Leake, formerly Acting Chief Justice, expatiated to me on the awful situation of the "submerged tenth" at the East End of London. He seemed to think that our statesmen were sitting on a suppressed but not long suppressible volcano whilst such an "open sore" was per­mitted to fester unhealed. Smug critics at home, ignoring the multitudinous good things which the colonies have achieved and the many evil emanations of the Old World which they have ameliorated or checked, expatiate on shortcomings trivial in comparison with the foul excrescences on the:face of older civilisations. What, after all, are the temporary miseries of an ill-considered strike, a possibly too lavish policy of borrowing (never, be it remembered, in excess of assets), and the occa­sional waste of a million or two on unremunerative public works or railways in these democratic communities, in com­parison with the record o:f crime and suffering which cries to Heaven as the outcome of centuries of class waste, domination, and selfishness in the Old World?

Before I finally left Perth on my way south to Albany to catch the P. and O. steamer Shannon, which was to take me back to the eastern colonies, I had a peep at Rottnest, an island seven and a half miles long by two and a half broad, lying out to sea about eleven miles from Fremantle. It boasts "its palace and its prison on each hand," being the site both of the summer resort of the Governors of Western Australia and of the prison for native offenders, who, whatever the dark rumours of their past ill-treatment at the hands of white gaolers, are now benevolently cared for under the paternal régime of Colonel Angelo, an old Imperial officer, who, after holding high military position in India, became commandant of the Tasmanian local