POLITICAL AND SOCIAL. ,421 



of the new population to these centres, with the result that Victoria advanced towards 

 prosperity by leaps and bounds, and the characteristics of the new element in the 

 Australian population began to make themselves more plainly visible in that colony 

 than in any other of the Australian Group. Tasmania and South Australia the stories 

 of which have been told in their proper places were not directly affected by the new 

 element, while Queensland, which became an independent colony only as late as 1859, 

 inherited its results in due course. 



The population then in Australia, as well as its leaders, failed to estimate at 

 anything like its real importance the effects of this sudden influx of new blood into the 

 country. The older colonists had grown up from year to year, and from father to son, 

 in the midst of their familiar surroundings, far removed from contact with the stream 

 of Old World life, and to all practical intents and purposes cut off from anything like 

 intimate communication with the rapidly-developing thought and opinion of the mother- 

 country. They belonged, as it were, to a past age, and it was only recently that, with 

 the establishment of a public Press and the spread of popular opinion, they began to 

 feel or to think for themselves. Their leaders had come to Australia at a time before 

 English liberalism as we now know it was invented before the first Reform Bill of 

 Lord John Russell, or any of that long succession of popular Acts and Measures of the 

 House of Commons that had put the rank and file of the more modern population of 

 England on a much more elevated plane than that occupied by their fathers of even a 

 generation before. The wealthier inhabitants of the colony, and those, consequently, who 

 should have been the natural leaders of the people, had been trained in a state of 

 things of which the spirit was that of the days of a by-gone generation, and long 

 before even the upper classes at Home had been educated by the march of events into 

 their later sympathy with the wants and wishes of the hitherto unrepresented portion of 

 the English people. It can be easily understood, then, that the sudden avalanche of 

 humanity that now descended on the Australian coast really revolutionized public opinion 

 and stimulated the public spirit of the country into more healthful activity. Most of 

 the new-comers were men in the vigour of youth, or in the prime of life, physically 

 able to make their influence and numbers felt in a new country where the stream of 

 life had been accustomed to run so slowly, and mentally active enough to assert that 

 influence as occasion required. Few countries in the world's history, with the single 

 notable exception, perhaps, of California, have passed through the same singular experience 

 as that which now fell to the lot of the Australian colonies. Every one of the immigrant 

 ships that crowded Hobson's Bay and Sydney Harbour in the early fifties brought with 

 it a cargo of muscle and manhood that was soon to be used in carving the destinies 

 of the new country, and nothing at the same time could have better served the interest 

 of Australia, or acted more usefully in the work of its development. It is true that the 

 bulk of the new-comers had but little conception of the nature of the political problem 

 they were to work out in their new home. Those taken from the operative and 

 agricultural classes of the United Kingdom had never in the home they had left polled a 

 vote. Little thought had they for sociological or economic theories, or political privileges, 

 or rights of responsible representation. But they had always the advantage over the 

 population whose character they came to change, that they had been in touch with the 



