res the Russian Government with the English, and compares it
favourably. It loses no opportunity of degrading all things English as
English. England and the Englishman are as red rags to its bull-headed
rage. Of course, its readers are not all sincere, though doubtless some
of them are. Vast numbers of people who do not agree with it read it
for its stage and social gossip; but there is a class of working-men
who take its absurdities for gospel, and it is one of the factors in
the growing contempt for the mother country which is noticeable amongst
uninstructed Australians.

Another and more potent factor is supplied by Englishmen themselves. I
have never in my life known anything more offensively insolent than the
patronising tolerance which I have seen the travelling Cockney extend
to men of the colonies, who were worth a thousand of him. I have seen
an Englishman unintentionally insult a host at his own table, and set
everybody on tenterhooks by his blundering assumption that the colonists
are necessarily inferior to home-bred people. Nobody likes this sort of
thing. Nobody finds himself feeling more kindly to the race which sends
out that intolerable kind of man.

"Met a girl the other day," says the eye-glassed idiot, beaming
fatuously round the table, "little colonial girl, don't you know. She'd
read George Eliot. Never was more surprised in my life." And this to a
company of Australian ladies and gentlemen bred and born.

This kind of person has his influence, and on that ground he is to be
regretted. The students of men and manners find him as good as meat and
drink; but we cannot all be Touchstones, and perhaps, on the whole, it
would be well if he were buried.

Yet another and a still more potent factor is found in the habit which
prevails amongst English fathers and guardians of sending out their
incurable failures to the Colonies. "You shall have one more chance,
sir, and it shall be the last. You shall have L100 and your passage out
to Australia. This is the last I shall do for you. Now go and never
let me see your face again." So the whisky-bitten _vaurien_ goes out
to Melbourne, has an attack of delirium tremens aboard ship, finds
his alcoholic allowance thenceforward stopped by the doctor's orders,
swaggers his brief on the block in Collins Street, hangs about the bars,
cursing the colonies and all men and all things colonial in a loud and
masterful voice, to the great and natural contentment of the pe