that “precious only child in the world” idea by which it seems each year to grow more completely engrossed—I mean the “Australia for the Australians” ideal. CHAPTER VII ALIEN LIFE MELBOURNE is not a cosmopolitan city. It neither lies in the direct route of globe-trotters, who will, indeed, often miss the whole of Australia and pass on to New Zealand or the Pacific Isles, nor does it possess many natural interests or curiosities. It is a level-headed place, too, and, though it amuses itself well enough, it does not cater for that class of people who will search the world over for a new sensation or exotic pleasure. If strangers come to Melbourne it is for the most part either to find work and carve out a new future for themselves, or to escape from the responsibilities and duties which they have pressed too insistently on them in the Old World. In either case they find that their aim is best accomplished by identifying themselves as much as possible with the life of the country and people, which is, indeed, so vital and compelling that it quickly robs them of all national characteristics, so that they, or at any rate their children, very soon become completely Australian. It is very difficult for us, who in England count time by centuries, to realize during how very few years Australia has existed for the white man, and for how still shorter a period Victoria has had a separate existence to New South Wales. Indeed, only in the year 1855 was it declared a State, while but twenty years earlier, in 1835, Melbourne was for the first time occupied by white people. That any country at the most between seventy-five and eighty years old—the average life-span of one man—should have formed out of the conglomerate masses of different classes which have poured into it from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, and in a lesser degree from France and Germany, such a truly distinctive race is scarcely believable, while if it has a little outgrown its strength, if it does suffer at times from that complaint which its own people designate as “swelled head,” is it to be wondered at? For there it is, in spite of all, an indisputable fact, a nation in all its characteristics, and not a dependency. That there must be some strange, ever-moving yeast at work, either in the climate or the circumstances of life, which shows an overpowering tendency to draw all within its grasp; to work on it and with it; to amalgamate it into the general mass, I can quite believe; and this yeast is the spirit of Australia. Something stronger than the entire pull of home apron-strings, of gratitude, of association, and of blood.