It seems as if I was “barracking” for Australia as against England, but very far from that. Though I have lived in Australia for years, and though it has helped me to a wider, fuller life than I ever knew before, England is my own country, and still holds my heart. And yet, when one hears, as one so often does, sweeping and wholesale condemnations and criticism—or, perhaps worse, faint praise—given without any realization of what a country really is, and how it has reached the position it now holds, it seems only honest that those who have gained their living through that country, to whom it has afforded friendship, shelter, and consideration, should speak of it as they have found it. A sort of friction seems inevitable between parents and their grown-up children, but the fault is not always and altogether on the children’s side—and, in any case, the friction is only intensified either by interference or well-meant attempts at rearrangement. Australians hate alike interference and pity. If you sympathize with a man or woman out here, it is ten to one that they will inform you that they can do their “own lying awake at night.” Once when a miner died up West his mates put up above his grave these words as a text—and, in truth, there are many worse:—“He did his damndest; angels could do no more.” But, then, the world in general is much like the ultra-tidy housewife of whom Oliver Wendell Holmes writes “that if the Angel Gabriel did come down from heaven, she would be complaining of him, that he dropped his feathers about the house.” Australia is so much overgoverned that it is really a wonder the broth is not spoilt between the multitude of cooks. It seemed bad enough before Federation, but it was nothing to what it is now, and one wonders that there is anyone left to govern. How long the state of affairs will go on which permits the expense of two Government Houses, and a superfluity of officials, I do not know. It seems, indeed, as if everybody must have been too busy to bother about it, and that the State Governorship remains, like many another archaic institution, simply because so many more intricate complications engage the attention of the people. Luckily for Australia, the separate functions of her two Houses of Parliament—the Legislative Assembly, or Lower House, and the Legislative Council, or Upper House—are more definitely defined than those of the House of Commons and the House of Lords are at home—or have been till just lately. Still, Australian politics represent a tangled web to the new chum, and one which I have had very little time or opportunity of studying. I scarcely know, indeed, how I ever got started on the subject of Preference, but as the chapter somehow began itself in that way, and as this book is most likely to be read by people at home, who, by some chance, may happily know even less about the matter than I do, a few of the leading points of the game may not come amiss.