IX. TWO CITIES 181 X. THE NOVELIST AND HIS SELECTION 204 XI. THREE WRITERS OF VERSE 225 XII. FOUR PRIME MINISTERS 252 XIII. THE IMPERIALIST 277 XIV. THE LITTLE AUSTRALIAN 296 INDEX 313 THE REAL AUSTRALIA I VIRTUES AND VICES Over the ball of it, Peering and prying, How I see all of it, _Life_ there outlying! Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as national character. That is to say, there is no set of qualities peculiar to any one nation. In every known country extremes meet. They meet now, as they met in the days when history began. Greece has had its Zeno and its Epicurus, Rome its Octavian and its Vitellius, France its Barrère and its Chateaubriand, Germany its Heine and its Bismarck, England its Cromwell and its John Wilkes. Why multiply the list? Why assert of the contrasted characters that exist always side by side that one is typical of the people as a whole, and the other is not? Why imply that one class of individual ceases to exist at a particular parallel of latitude, and another begins there and then to take its rise? But while there is no such thing as national character--except in the sense that historians find it convenient to use--it is yet a fact that certain people encourage each other in certain practices, and that these practices come in time to assume the proportions of public virtues and vices. One environment may permit an individual to wear a species of garment, or to indulge in a form of language that would be among other surroundings either legally forbidden, or frowned out of existence. The unwritten law in regard to externals insensibly modifies both the law of conduct and the habit of thought. In Australia there are opposing tendencies at work. There is, in the first place, the tendency to freedom and to license which the remoteness from an older civilisation fosters. Opposed to this, and rapidly overcoming it, is the tendency of a country, as it develops settled institutions, to mould itself on the ambitious models of fashionable society elsewhere. As a third factor, and an undoubtedly powerful one, there is the influence of climate. This is tending in Australia to produce a different race of beings, physically and morally, from that in the Northern Hemisphere. It is tending to do so--but up to the present it has produced a crop of half results, of insufficiently proven theories, and of partially established types.