before and they must still remain unequal to the task before
them for many centuries. The cry raised is that of "Australia for the
Australians." Well, who are the Australians? Are they the men of the old
British stock who made the country what it is, or the men who had the
luck to be born to the inheritance of a splendid position, for which
they have not toiled? It is the honest simple truth, and no man ought to
be angry at the statement of it--though many will be--that Australia
was built up by British enterprise and British money. It is a British
possession still, and without British protection, British gold, and the
trade which exists between it and Britain, would be in a bad way. Looked
at dispassionately, the cry of "Australia for the Australians" seems
hardly reasonable. The mother country has a right to something of a
share in the bargain.

The argument would be infinitely less strong if the Australians were
using Australia. But they are not. The vast Melbourne, of which Victoria
is so proud, holds half the population of the colony, and produces
little or nothing. Melbourne is the city of brass plates. There are more
brass-plates to the acre in the thoroughfares which diverge from
Collins Street than could be found in any other city of the world.
The brass-plate, as all the world knows, is the badge of the
non-producer--the parasite, the middleman, agent, call him what you
will--the man who wears a tall hat and black coat, and who lives in
a villa, and lives on and by the products of the labour of others. As
society is constituted he is an essential when he exists in reasonable
numbers. In Melbourne his numbers are out of reason. For almost every
producer in Victoria there is a non-producer in the capital. In the
early days men went into the country and set themselves to clear and
till the soil. That impulse of energy has died out and a new one has
succeeded it which is infinitely less profitable and wholesome. The
tendency is now towards the city. The one source of permanent wealth
is neglected, and commerce and speculation occupy the minds of men who
fifty years ago would have raised mutton and wool, corn and wine. With
every increase of growth in the great city there is a cry for rural
labour to preserve the necessary balance of things. The call is not
listened to or answered, and Melbourne is a hundred times more abnormal
than London. London deals with the trade of the world, and a good half
of its populatio