On the other hand, these people will be merciless to the humbug, to anyone who is mean or idle. They know their own value; “Business is business,” as they say. They will give freely enough, but they will not submit to be haggled with or underpaid; and why should they? I have worked shoulder to shoulder with them for eight years, and I never wish to work with better people. Their absolute indifference, except where they really like or respect a person, their crudity, their common sense, their shrewdness, is like a tonic. And thus, in spite of Mr. Foster Fraser’s assertion that the Australians can only exist by the constant effusion of fresh and virile blood from the Old Country, I must still believe that, for any elaborate ideals and ethics of over-civilization which we take with us to this new country, we receive in return very much more, certainly individually, than we have ever given; while in respect to the question of virility, Mr. Fraser must, I feel, have very largely judged Australians from the towns, and the undergrown shop-boys and factory-girls that he has seen there. After all, if we stay a little to ponder over what he regards as the degeneracy of these people—and it can only be the town people of whom he speaks—I think we shall realize that it is all only part of the natural order of things; that the more completely a plant belongs to the outdoor world, to the wilds and open places, the more it will suffer by transplantation to the vitiated air, the smoke and dust, of the city. Some day Australia may produce two types, as England does—the city type, with, in spite of its anæmic appearance, a quite immense vitality, and the country type, heavier, slower, and more robust. In the meantime, all these narrow-chested boys and precocious, over-developed girls who at night line the pavement of Swanston Street are really the inevitable result of a period of transition. Most likely when their parents were born there were no streets at all, as we now see them; while their fathers and mothers were such people as Walt Whitman must have had in mind when he wrote, saying: “I see the makings of the best persons. It is to grow in the open air, and to eat and sleep with the earth.”