396 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tant in young countries where property is widely held — was persever- 

 ingly proposed, and at length carried, by the aristocratic leader of the 

 democratic party in New Zealand, whence it is spreading to the adjacent 

 colonies; it has been for some years adopted by the British Liberals as 

 an article in their programme, and it is also a plank in the European 

 socialist platform. The general adhesion to an eight hours' day in the 

 Australasian colonies is having an effect in England and is probably the 

 measure to which Mr. Morley refers as likely to be dangerous; his 

 opposition to it cost him his seat at Newcastle. The adoption of female 

 suffrage in two of these colonies and the certainty of its adoption in 

 others are habitually cited by the advocates of the cause in England 

 as an argument for its adoption in England. The nationalization of the 

 land has been a popular notion in these same colonies ever since Henry 

 George's famous book was published, and the large extent of private 

 lands bought back by the governments of New Zealand and Queensland 

 has strengthened the hands of the land-nationalizers in Europe. The 

 advanced government socialism of most of these colonies, made in- 

 evitable by the lack of private capital, and its apparent success, furnish 

 socialists of the German type with weapons and encourage them to 

 prophesy 'the dawn of a revolutionary epoch.' 



The spiritual reaction of the colonies on the mother-land is much 

 less considerable, yet is not nil. One or two instances stand out 

 prominently. Jonathan Edwards is one of the giants of British as well 

 as of American theology, and his treatise on the freedom of the will 

 has counted for as much as Butler's Analogy in the development of 

 English theological thought. Sam Slick has been the father or foster- 

 father of the portentous overgrowth of humor by which the United 

 States balances the devouring activity of its public and the overstrain of 

 its private life, but he has been practically inoperative on the very 

 different quality of English humor. From South Africa have come 

 influences of a sterner sort. "Who could have foreseen," asks Mr. 

 Stead, "that the new, and in many respects the most distinctive, note 

 of the literature of the last decade of the nineteenth century would be 

 sounded by a little chit of a girl reared in the solemn stillness of the 

 Karoo, in the solitude of the African bush? The Cape has indeed done 

 yeoman's service to the English-speaking world. To that pivot of the 

 empire we owe our most pronounced types of the imperial man and 

 the emancipated woman" — Cecil Rhodes and Olive Schreiner. 



