In this matter we Australians
live in glass houses and must not throw stones. Mr. Chesterton is
treading on our pet corns. For Australia and America are the two most
'monstrous mushrooms' on the face of the earth! Like the nations of
which the prophet wrote, they were 'born in a day.' Think of what
happened in America in the ten short years between 1830 and 1840! No
nation in the history of the world can produce so astounding a record!
In 1830 America had 23 miles of railway; in 1840 she had 800. In 1830
the country presented all the wilder characteristics of early colonial
settlement; in 1840 it was a great and populous nation. In 1830
Chicago was a frontier fort; in 1840 Chicago was a city. In 1830 the
population of Michigan was 32,000; in 1840 it was 212,000. It was
during this sensational decade, too, that the first steamships crossed
the Atlantic. And the spirit of the age reflected itself in the
literary wealth of which America became possessed at that extraordinary
time. Whittier and Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Emerson and Bancroft, Poe and Prescott, all arose during
that eventful period, and made for themselves names that have become
classical and immortal. Here is a monstrous mushroom for you! Or, to
pass from the things of yesterday to the things of to-day, see how,
under the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, Canadian cities are in our own
time shooting up with positively incredible swiftness. No, no; Mr.
Chesterton must not speak disparagingly of mushrooms!

And look at the rapidity at which these young nations beneath the
Southern Cross sprang into existence! I remember standing on the
sea-shore in New Zealand talking to a couple of old whalers, who told
me of the times they spent before the first emigrant ships arrived,
when they were the only white men for hundreds of miles around. And
now! Why, in their own lifetime these men had seen a great nation
spring into being! Here, I say again, are mushrooms for you!

But do mushrooms really spring up as suddenly as they appear to do?
Dan Crawford tells us that, in Central Africa, if a young missionary
attempts to prove the existence of God, the natives laugh, and,
pointing to the wonders of Nature around, exclaim, '_No rain, no
mushrooms!_' In effect they mean to say, without some adequate cause.
If there were no God, whence came the forest and the fauna? Now that
African proverb is very suggestive. 'No rain, no