The Chinaman is pushing himself to the fore wherever his presence is not prohibited. We find Chinese helmsmen and quartermasters in the service of the Messageries and Oriental companies receiving twice the wages paid to Indian Lascars. We hear of the importation of Chinese laborers into India for railway and for drainage works. The Chinaman has great vitality. Of the cheap races the Mongol seems the most pushing, the likeliest to conquer in the fight. It would almost seem as though we were wrong in our common scales of preference, far from right in our use of the terms “superior” and “inferior” races.
A well-taught white man can outreason or can overreach a well-taught Chinaman or negro. But under some climatic conditions, the negro can outwork the white man; under almost all conditions, the Chinaman can outwork him. Where this is the case, is it not the Chinaman or the negro that should be called the better man? Call him what we may, will he not prove his superiority by working the Englishman off the soil? In Florida and Mississippi the black is certainly the better man.
Many Victorians, even those who respect and admire the Chinese, are in favor of the imposition of a tax upon the yellow immigrants, in order to prevent the destruction of the rising Australian nationality. They fear that otherwise they will live to see the English element swamped in the Asiatic throughout Australia. It is not certain that we may not some day have to encounter a similar danger in Old England.
It will be seen from the account thus given of the state of the labor question in Australia, that the colonial handicraftsmen stand toward those of the world in much the same relative position as that held by the members of a trade union toward the other workmen of the same trade. The limitation of immigration there has much the same effects as the limitation of apprentices in a single trade in England. It is easy to say that the difference between fellow-countryman and foreigner is important; that while it is an unfairness to all English workmen that English hatters should limit apprentices, it is not unfair to English hatters that Australian hatters should limit their apprentices. For my own part, I am inclined to think that, fair or unfair – and we have no international moral rule generally acknowledged to decide the question – we might at least say to Australia that, while she throws upon us the chief expenses of her defense, she is hardly in a position to refuse to aid our emigrants.
Day by day the labor question in its older aspects becomes of less and less importance. The relationship of master and servant is rapidly dying the death; co-operative farming and industrial partnerships must supersede it everywhere at no distant date. In these systems we shall find the remedy against the decline of trade with which the English-speaking countries of the earth are threatened.
The existing system of labor is anti-democratic; it is at once productive of and founded on the existence of an aristocracy of capital and a servitude of workmen; and our English democracies cannot afford that half their citizens should be dependent laborers. If manufactures are to be consistent with democracy, they must be carried on in shops in which each man shall be at once capitalist and handicraftsman. Such institutions are already in existence in Massachusetts, in Illinois, in Pennsylvania, and in Sydney; while at Troy, in New York State, there is a great iron foundery, owned from roof to floor by the men who work in it. It is not enough that the workman should share in the profits. The change which, continuing through the middle ages into the present century, has at last everywhere converted the relation of lord and slave into that of master and hireling, is already giving place to the silent revolution which is steadily substituting for this relationship of capital and labor that of a perfect marriage, in which the laborer and the capitalist shall be one.
Under this system there can be no strikes, no petty trickery, no jealousy, no waste of time. Each man‘s individual interest is coincident with that of all. Where the labor is that of a brotherhood, the toil becomes ennobled. Were industrial partnerships a new device, their inventor would need no monument; his would be found in the future history of the race. As it is, this latest advance of Western civilization is but a return to the earliest and noblest form of labor; the Arabs, the Don Cossacks, the Maori tribes are all co-operative farmers; it is the mission of the English race to apply the ancient principle to manufactures.
CHAPTER VIII.
WOMAN
IN one respect, Victoria stands at once sadly behind and strangely in advance of other democratic countries. Women, or at least some women, vote at the Lower House elections; but, on the other hand, the legal position of the sex is almost as inferior to that of man as it is in England or the East.
At an election held some few years ago, female ratepayers voted everywhere throughout Victoria. Upon examination, it was found that a new registration act had directed the rate-books to be used as a basis for the preparation of the electoral lists, and that women householders had been legally put on the register, although the intention of the legislature was not expressed, and the question of female voting had not been raised during the debates. Another instance, this, of the singular way in which in truly British countries reforms are brought about by accident, and, when once become facts, are allowed to stand. There is no more sign of general adhesion in Australia than in England to the doctrine which asserts that women, as well as men, being interested in good government, should have a voice in the selection of that government to which they are forced to submit themselves.
As far as concerns their social position, women are as badly off in Australia as in England. Our theory of marriage – which has been tersely explained thus: “the husband and wife are one, and the husband is that one” – rules as absolutely at the antipodes as it does in Yorkshire. I was daily forced to remember the men of Kansas and Missouri, and the widely different view they take of these matters to that of the Australians. As they used to tell me, they are impatient of seeing their women ranked with “lunatics and idiots” in the catalogue of incapacities. They are incapable of seeing that women are much better represented by their male friends than were the Southern blacks by their owners or overseers. They believe that the process of election would not be more purified by female emancipation than would the character of the Parliaments elected.
The Kansas people often say that if you were told that there existed in some ideal country two great sections of a race, the members of the one often gross, often vicious, often given to loud talking, to swearing, to drinking, spitting, chewing, not infrequently corrupt; those of the other branch, mild, kind, quiet, pure, devout, with none of the habitual vices of the first-named sect, – if you were told that one of these branches was alone to elect rulers and to govern, you would at once say, “Tell us where this happy country is that basks in the rule of such a godlike people.” “Stop a minute,” says your informant, “it is the creatures I described first – the men– who rule; the others are only women, poor silly fools – imperfect men, I assure you; nothing more.”
It is somewhat the fashion to say that the so-called “extravagancies” of the Kansas folk and other American Western men arise from the extraordinary position given to their women by the disproportion of the sexes. Now in all the Australian colonies the men vastly outnumber the women, yet the disproportion has none of those results which have been attributed to it by some writers on America. In New South Wales, the sexes are as 250,000 to 200,000, in Victoria 370,000 to 280,000, in New Zealand 130,000 to 80,000, in Queensland 60,000 to 40,000, in Tasmania 50,000 to 40,000, in West Australia 14,000 to 8000, 90,000 to 80,000 in South Australia. In all our Southern colonies together, there are a million of men to only three-quarters of a million of women; yet with all this disproportion, which far exceeds that in Western America, not only have the women failed to acquire any great share of power, political or social, but they are content to occupy a position not relatively superior to that held by them at home.
The “Sewing Clubs” of the war-time are at the bottom of a good deal of the “woman movement” in America. At the time of greatest need, the ladies of the Northern States formed themselves into associations for the supply of lint, of linen, and of comforts to the army: the women of a district would meet together daily in some large room, and sew, and chat while they were sewing.
The British section of the Teutonic race seems naturally inclined, through the operation of its old interest-begotten prejudices, to rank women where Plato placed them in the “Timæus,” along with horses and draught cattle, or to think of them much as he did when he said that all the brutes derived their origin from man by a series of successive degradations, of which the first was from man to woman. There is, however, one strong reason why the English should, in America, have laid aside their prejudices upon this point, retaining them in Australia, where the conditions are not the same. Among farming peoples, whose women do not work regularly in the field, the woman to whom falls the household and superior work is better off than she is among town-dwelling peoples. The Americans are mainly a farming, the Australians and British mainly a town-dwelling, people. The absence in all sections of our race of regular woman labor in the field seems to be a remnant of the high estimation in which women were held by our former ancestry. In Britain we have, until the last few years, been steadily retrograding upon this point.
It is a serious question how far the natural prejudice of the English mind against the labor of what we call “inferior races” will be found to extend to half the superior race itself. How will English laborers receive the inevitable competition of women in many of their fields? Woman is at present starved, if she works at all, and does not rest content in dependence upon some man, by the terrible lowness of wages in every employment open to her, and this low rate of wages is itself the direct result of the fewness of the occupations which society allows her. Where a man can see a thousand crafts in which he may engage, a woman will perhaps be permitted to find ten. A hundred times as many women as there is room for invade each of this small number of employments. In the Australian labor-field the prospects of women are no better than they are in Europe, and during my residence in Melbourne the Council of the Associated Trades passed a resolution to the effect that nothing could justify the employment of women in any kind of productive labor.
CHAPTER IX.
VICTORIAN PORTS
ALL allowance being made for the great number of wide roads for trade, there is still a singular absence of traffic in the Melbourne streets. Trade may be said to be transacted only upon paper in the city, while the tallow, grain, and wool, which form the basis of Australian commerce, do not pass through Melbourne, but skirt it, and go by railway to Williamstown, Sandridge, and Geelong.
Geelong, once expected to rival Melbourne, and become the first port of all Australia, I found grass-grown and half deserted, with but one vessel lying at her wharf. At Williamstown a great fleet of first-class ships was moored alongside the pier. When the gold-find at Ballarat took place, Geelong rose fast as the digging port, but her citizens chose to complete the railway line to Melbourne instead of first opening that to Ballarat, and so lost all the up-country trade. Melbourne, having once obtained the lead, soon managed to control the legislature, and grants were made for the Echuca Railroad, which tapped the Murray, and brought the trade of Upper Queensland and New South Wales down to Melbourne, in the interest of the ports of Williamstown and Sandridge. Not content with ruining Geelong, the Melbourne men have set themselves to ridicule it. One of their stories goes that the Geelong streets bear such a fine crop of grass, that a free selector has applied to have them surveyed and sold to him, under the 42d clause of the New Land Act. Another story tells how a Geelongee lately died, and went to heaven. Peter, opening the door to his knock, asked, “Where from?” “Geelong.” “Where?” said Peter. “Geelong.” “There‘s no such place,” replied the Apostle. “In Victoria,” cried the colonist. “Fetch Ham‘s Australian Atlas,” called Peter; and when the map was brought and the spot shown to him, he replied, “Well, I beg your pardon, but I really never had any one here from that place before.”
If Geelong be standing still, which in a colony is the same as rapid decline would be with us, the famed wheat country around it seems as inexhaustible as it ever was. The whole of the Barrabool range, from Ceres to Mount Moriac, is one great golden waving sheet, save where it is broken by the stunted claret-vineyards. Here and there I came upon a group of the little daughters of the German vine-dressers, tending and trenching the plants, with the round eyes, rosy cheeks, and shiny pigtails of their native Rudesheim all flourishing beneath the Southern Cross.
The colonial vines are excellent; better, indeed, than the growths of California, which, however, they resemble in general character. The wines are naturally all Burgundies, and colonial imitations of claret, port, and sherry are detestable, and the hocks but little better. The Albury hermitage is a better wine than can be bought in Europe at its price, but in some places this wine is sold as Murray Burgundy, while the dealers foist horrible stuff upon you under the name of hermitage. Of the wines of New South Wales, White Dallwood is a fair Sauterne, and White Cawarra a good Chablis, while for sweet wines the Chasselas is singularly cheap; and the Tokay, the Shiraz, and the still Muscat are remarkable.
Northwest of Geelong, upon the summit of the foot-hills of the dividing range, lies Ballarat, the headquarters of deep quartz mining, and now no longer a diggers’ camp, but a graceful city, full of shady boulevards and noble buildings, and with a stationary population of thirty thousand. My first visit was made in the company of the prime ministers of all the colonies, who were at Melbourne nominally for a conference, but really to enjoy a holiday and the International Exhibition. With that extraordinary generosity in the spending of other people‘s money which distinguishes colonial cabinets, the Victorian government placed special trains, horses, carriages, and hotels at our disposal, the result of which was that, fêted everywhere, we saw nothing, and I had to return to Ballarat in order even to go through the mines.
In visiting Lake Learmouth and Clunes, and the mining district on each side of Ballarat, I found myself able to discover the date of settlement by the names of places, as one finds the age of a London suburb by the titles of its terraces. The dates run in a wave across the country. St. Arnaud is a town between Ballarat and Castlemaine, and Alma lies near to it, while Balaklava Hill is near Ballarat, where also are Raglan and Sebastopol. Inkerman lies close to Castlemaine, and Mount Cathcart bears the name of the general killed at the Two Gun battery, while the Malakhoff diggings, discovered doubtless toward the end of the war, lie to the northward, in the Wimmera.
Everywhere I found the interior far hotter than the coast, but free from the sudden changes of temperature that occur in Melbourne twice or thrice a week throughout the summer, and are dangerous to children and to persons of weak health. After two or three days of the hot wind, then comes a night, breathless, heavy, still. In the morning the sun rises, once more fierce and red. After such a night and dawn, I have seen the shade thermometer in the cool verandas of the Melbourne Club standing at 95° before ten o‘clock, when suddenly the sun and sky would change from red and brown to gold and blue, and a merry breeze, dancing up from the ice-packs of the South Pole and across the Antarctic seas, would lower the temperature in an hour to 60° or 65°. After a few days of cold and rain, a quiet English morning would be cut in half about eleven by a sudden slamming of doors and whirling of dust from the north across the town, while darkness came upon the streets. Then was heard the cry of “Shut the windows; here‘s a hot wind,” and down would go every window, barred and bolted, while the oldest colonists walked out to enjoy the dry air and healthy heat. The thick walls of the clubs and private houses will keep out the heat for about three days, but if, as sometimes happens, the hot wind lasts longer, then the walls are heated through, and the nights are hardly to be borne. Up country the settlers know nothing of these changes. The regular irregularity is peculiar to the Melbourne summer.
CHAPTER X.
TASMANIA
AFTER the parching heat of Australia, a visit to Tasmania was a grateful change. Steaming along Port Dalrymple and up the Tamar in the soft sunlight of an English afternoon, we were able to look upward, and enjoy the charming views of wood and river, instead of having to stand with downcast head, as in the blaze of the Victorian sun.
The beauty of the Tamar is of a quiet kind: its scenery like that of the non-Alpine districts of the west coast of New Zealand, but softer and more habitable than is that of even the least rude portions of these islands. To one fresh from the baked Australian plains, there is likeness between any green and humid land and the last unparched country that he may have seen. Still, New Zealand cannot show fresher cheeks nor homes more cosy than those of the Tamar valley. Somersetshire cannot surpass the orchards of Tasmania, nor Devon match its flowers.
The natural resemblance of Maria Van Dieman‘s Land (as Tasman called it after his betrothed) to England seems to have struck the early settlers. In sailing up the Tamar, we had on one bank the County of Dorset, with its villages touchingly named after those at home, according to their situations, from its Lulworth Cove, Corfe Castle, and St. Alban‘s Head, round to Abbotsbury, and, on our right hand, Devon, with its Sidmouth, Exeter, and Torquay.
Hurrying through Launceston – a pretty little town, of which the banks and post-office are models of simple architecture – I passed at once across the island southward to Hobarton, the capital. The scenery on the great convict road is not impressive. The Tasmanian Mountains – detached and rugged masses of basaltic rock, from four to five thousand feet in height – are wanting in grandeur when seen from a distance, with a foreground of flat corn-land. It is disheartening, too, in an English colony, to see half the houses shut up and deserted, and acre upon acre of old wheat-land abandoned to mimosa scrub. The people in these older portions of the island have worked their lands to death, and even guano seems but to galvanize them into a momentary life. Since leaving Virginia, I had seen no such melancholy sight.
Nature is bountiful enough: in the world there is not a fairer climate; the gum-trees grow to 350 feet, attesting the richness of the soil; and the giant tree-ferns are never injured by heat, as in Australia, nor by cold, as in New Zealand. All the fruits of Europe are in season at the same time, and the Christmas dessert at Hobarton often consists of five and twenty distinct fresh fruits. Even more than Britain, Tasmania may be said to present on a small area an epitome of the globe: mountain and plain, forest and rolling prairie land, rivers and grand capes, and the noblest harbor in the world, all are contained in a country the size of Ireland. It is unhappily not only in this sense that Tasmania is the Ireland of the South.
Beautiful as is the view of Hobarton from Mount Wellington, – the spurs in the foreground clothed with a crimson carpet by a heathlike plant; the city nestled under the basaltic columns of the crags, – even here it is difficult to avoid a certain gloom when the eye, sweeping over the vast expanse of Storm Bay and D‘Entrecasteaux Sound, discovers only three great ships in a harbor fitted to contain the navies of the world.
The scene first of the horrible deeds of early convict days at Macquarie Harbor and Port Arthur, and later of the still more frightful massacres of the aboriginal inhabitants of the isle, Van Dieman‘s Land has never been a name of happy omen, and now the island, in changing its title, seems not to have escaped from the former blight. The poetry of the English village names met with throughout Tasmania vanishes before the recollection of the circumstances under which the harsher native terms came to be supplanted. Fifty years ago, our colonists found in Tasmania a powerful and numerous though degraded native race. At this moment, three old women and a lad who dwell on Gun-carriage Rock, in Bass‘s Straits, are all who remain of the aboriginal population of the island.
We live in an age of mild humanity, we are often told, but, whatever the polish of manner and of minds in the old country, in outlying portions of the empire there is no lack of the old savagery of our race. Battues of the natives were conducted by the military in Tasmania not more than twenty years ago, and are not unknown even now among the Queensland settlers. Let it not be thought that Englishmen go out to murder natives unprovoked; they have that provocation for which even the Spaniards in Mexico used to wait, which the Brazilians wait for now – the provocation of robberies committed in the neighborhood by natives unknown. It is not that there is no offense to punish, it is that the punishment is indiscriminate, that even when it falls upon the guilty it visits men who know no better. Where one wretched untaught native pilfers from a sheep-station, on the Queensland Downs, a dozen will be shot by the settlers, “as an example,” and the remainder of the tribe brought back to the district to be fed and kept, until whisky, rum, and other devils’ missionaries have done their work.
Nothing will persuade the rougher class of Queensland settlers that the “black-fellow” and his “jin” are human. They tell you freely that they look upon the native Australian as an ingenious kind of monkey, and that it is not for us to talk too much of the treatment of the “jins,” or native women, while the “wrens” of the Curragh exist among ourselves. No great distance appears to separate us from the days when the Spaniards in the West Indies used to brand on the face and arms all the natives they could catch, and gamble them away for wine.
Though not more than three or four million acres out of seventeen million acres of land in Tasmania have as yet been alienated by the crown, the population has increased only by 15,000 in the last ten years. Such is the indolence of the settlers, that vast tracts of land in the central plain, once fertile under irrigation, have been allowed to fall back into a desert state from sheer neglect of the dams and conduits. Though iron and coal are abundant, they are seldom if ever worked, and one house in every thirty-two in the whole island is licensed for the sale of spirits, of which the annual consumption exceeds five gallons a head for every man, woman, and child in the population. Tasmania reached her maximum of revenue in 1858, and her maximum of trade in 1853.
The curse of the country is the indolence of its lotus-eating population, who, like all dwellers in climates cool but winterless, are content to dream away their lives in drowsiness to which the habits of a hotter but less equable clime – Queensland, for example – are energy itself. In addition, however, to this natural cause of decline, Van Dieman‘s Land is not yet free from all traces of the convict blood, nor from the evil effects of reliance on forced labor. It is, indeed, but a few years since the island was one great jail, and in 1853 there were still 20,000 actual convicts in the island. The old free settlers will tell you that the deadly shade of slave labor has not blighted Jamaica more thoroughly than that of convict labor has Van Dieman‘s Land.
Seventy miles northwest of Hobarton is a sheet of water called Macquarie Harbor, the deeds wrought upon the shores of which are not to be forgotten in a decade. In 1823, there were 228 prisoners at Macquarie Harbor, to whom, in the year, 229 floggings and 9925 lashes were ordered, 9100 lashes being actually inflicted. The cat was, by order of the authorities, soaked in salt water and dried in the sun before being used. There was at Macquarie Harbor one convict overseer who took a delight in seeing his companions punished. A day seldom passed without five or six being flogged on his reports. The convicts were at his mercy. In a space of five years, during which the prisoners at Macquarie Harbor averaged 250 in number, there were 835 floggings and 32,723 lashes administered. In the same five years, 112 convicts absconded from this settlement, of whom 10 were killed and eaten by their companions, 75 perished in the bush with or without cannibalism, two were captured with portions of human flesh in their possession, and died in hospital, two were shot, 16 were hanged for murder and cannibalism, and seven are reported to have made good their escape, though this is by no means certain.
It has been stated by a Catholic missionary bishop in his evidence before a Royal Commission, that when, after a meeting at one of the stations, he read out to his men the names of thirty-one condemned to death, they with one accord fell upon their knees, and solemnly thanked God that they were to be delivered from that horrible place. Men were known to commit murder that they might be sent away for trial, preferring death to Macquarie Harbor.
The escapes were often made with the deliberate expectation of death, the men perfectly knowing that they would have to draw lots for which should be killed and eaten. Nothing has ever been sworn to in the history of the world which, for revolting atrocity, can compare with the conduct of the Pierce-Greenhill party during their attempted escape. The testimony of Pierce is a revelation of the depths of degradation to which man can descend. The most fearful thought, when we hear of these Tasmanian horrors, is that probably many of those subjected to them were originally guiltless. If only one in a thousand was an innocent man, four human beings were consigned each year to hell on earth. We think, too, that the age of transportation for mere political offenses has long gone by, yet it is but eleven or twelve years since Mr. Frost received his pardon, after serving for sixteen years amid the horrors of Port Arthur.
Tasmania has never been able to rid herself of the convict population in any great degree, for the free colonies have always kept a jealous watch upon her emigrants. Even at the time of the great gold-rush to Victoria, almost every “Tasmanian bolter” and many a suspected but innocent man was seized upon his landing, and thrown into Pentridge Jail, to toil within its twenty-foot walls till death should come to his relief. Even now, men of wealth and station in Victoria are sometimes discovered to have been “bolters” in the digging times, and are at the mercy of their neighbors and the police, unless the governor can be wheedled into granting pardons for their former deeds. A wealthy Victorian was arrested as a “Tasmanian bolter” while I was in the colony.
The passport system is still in force in the free colonies with regard to passengers arriving from penal settlements, and there is a penalty of £100 inflicted upon captains of ships bringing convicts into Melbourne. The conditional pardons granted to prisoners in West Australia and in Tasmania generally contain words permitting the convict to visit any portion of the world except the British Isles, but the clause is a mere dead letter, for none of our free colonies will receive even our pardoned convicts.
It is hard to quarrel with the course the colonies have taken in this matter, for to them the transportation system appears in the light of moral vitriol-throwing; still, there is a wide distinction to be drawn between the action of the New South Welsh and that of the New Yorkers, when they declared to a British government of the last century, that nothing should induce them to accept the labor of “white English slaves:” the Sydney people have enjoyed the advantages of the system they now blame. Even the Victorians and South Australians, who have never had convicts in their land, can be met by argument. The Australian colonies, it might be urged, were planted for the sole purpose of affording a suitable soil for the reception of British criminals: in face of this fact, the remonstrances of the free colonists read somewhat oddly, for it would seem as though men who quitted, with open eyes, Great Britain to make their home in the spots which their government had chosen as its giant prisons have little right to pretend to rouse themselves on a sudden, and cry out that England is pouring the scum of her soil on to a free land, and that they must rise and defend themselves against the grievous wrong. Weighing, however, calmly the good and evil, we cannot avoid the conclusion that the Victorians have much reason to object to a system which sends to another country a man who is too bad for his own, just as Jersey rogues are transported to Southampton. The Victorian proposition of selecting the most ruffianly of the colonial expirees, and shipping them to England in exchange for the convicts that we might send to Australia, was but a plagiarism on the conduct of the Virginians in a similar case, who quietly began to freight a ship with snakes.