WHEN I was a girl I remember many times hearing my father say that he would rather mount a lady on a young, well-broken horse than on an old hunter; that they knew too much, that they had mastered the art of falling soft, and preferred their own way to that of their rider. As a housekeeper, I know I would rather have an absolutely untaught young girl as a domestic than one who held her own views as to how everything was to be done; equally fearing and disliking any new innovation which might possibly mean extra work. For the same reason, if I was a politician, I would rather have my lines cast in a new country, not yet pot-bound by traditions. England seems at times to hover, literally paralyzed, between the devil of:—“They say” and the deep sea of:—“Has been.” I recollect that in the old days at home a ploughman was ordered to run his furrow along a special field from east to west. I can see now the odd, clouded look of bewilderment which came into his face as the order was given to him; then the drawing down of the long upper lip, the set of the obstinate chin, when his protestation that it “wur allus ploughed t’other way” were received merely by a smiling repetition of the command. Finally, his utter bewilderment when the—to his mind—unanswerable argument that it had “allus been ploughed that way, when ferther wur a lad, an’ gran’ferther wur a lad, an’ the owd meyster wur alive,” was met in the same manner. The merest yokel in Australia could see no reason at all in an argument such as this. Here the people revel in change. They are ready to try anything, and, if one plan fails, another is at once experimented with. Sometimes it may be rather like the progress of a bull in a china-shop, but still it is progress, and the people here find it very difficult to realize the mind of a country which takes up the attitude of a man refusing to change his shirt for fear that he should suffer some chill or discomfort in the process. In the article on the Sydney Congress in the _Times_ of May 24, 1910, the difference between the two countries in many political matters is very plainly stated:—“There is nothing more extraordinary in Free Trade propaganda than the lame contention that we must continue upon a ruinous course because a new policy will involve initial difficulties. That argument is laughed to scorn in Australia. The Australian fears no difficulties. The spirit which leads men to face and overcome obstacles is in his blood. His history and condition are one long record of triumphing over difficulties, and he cannot understand why the complexity of framing a tariff should be urged for a moment in England. He thinks, like many Englishmen, that the historian of the future will contemplate with amazement the spectacle of the Dominions seeking closer unity, while the Mother Country remains coldly repelling their advances.”