Arthur Patchett Martin

“ It is curious to notice that twenty-five years ago this Australian in England should ask who is to govern the country half a dozen years hence. "The old statesmen are dying off. The next six years will make terrible havoc with the- names that have been most familiar to the ears of the last two generations. As they descend into the valley of shadows, where are the men of calm strength and vigour coming up the other side of the hill bearing the standard of either party?" He prophesied that if the hand of death should spare them, Cobden, Gladstone, and Stanley would combine and govern England. ”

“ It is certainly a singular illustration of the law of reflex action that, owing to the American Civil War, the two Australian Emigration Commissioners should have been so completely baffled in England. The most influential English journals pointed to the struggle across the Atlantic as the inevitable outcome of a state of things where one man was, at least in theory, as good as another. What America to-day is, argued these wiseacres, Australia will become to-morrow. ”

“ Until of late I had lived under the impression that the Americans had a deal to answer for in cherishing a bad feeling towards England, which was entirely unjustified by the disposition of the English people towards them; but a worse spirit than anything I have ever read of in America is constantly displaying itself among the factory squires and shopocrats of England, while the sympathies of the aristocracy are undisguisedly offered to the rebellious Southerners. ”

“ There was never a time when a certain class of successful colonist did not come "Home"—as he fondly calls the mother-country—to fashionably flicker out his latter days. "A good deal of London flesh," once said Sir Archibald Michie, "is Australian grass." But a very different type of colonist, especially within the last few years, has been in the habit of coming to England, as a bird of passage merely, always regarding his particular Colony as his real "home." The recent Colonial Exhibition at South Kensington brought a good number of such visitors to England. ”

“ SIR HENRY PARKES IN ENGLAND.
If, as I venture to think, an Imperial lesson may be learned from the Colonial public career of Lord Sherbrooke, so too may we perhaps learn something from the "impressions of England" formed during a prolonged visit by the present Prime Minister of New South Wales.
It is always good "to see ourselves as others see us"; but this is especially the case, it seems to me, with the members of so vast and so widely divided an Empire as ours. ”

“ Let us reason as we will, we cannot free ourselves from the painful consciousness that we are about to plunge into a fratricidal war—about to vindicate our honour in the shadow of the blood-red banners of slavery. ”

“ In all directions the deep slopes, where the railway spans some valley, are thickly starred with the pale primrose, and the maidenly cowslips nod to the passengers from the brows of the cutting through the gentle hills. ... The railways do no more than run their fine lines through the rural landscape, making sunny banks for the flowers and shrubs most loved by the English people. ”

“ If you meet with a manufacturer or a travelling factor in a hotel or railway carriage, he is sure to amuse you with some clumsy and ignorant attempt to ridicule the Americans, and it always turns out that their greatest blunder and greatest crime consists in not sending their cotton to England and in not taking England's manufactures. ”

“ Every second morning a tone of misgiving seems to soften the reckless bravery of the Times. It will not do; people cannot satisfy their consciences, though goaded on by the sense of insult, that it is a high Christian thing to burden the nation with debt, and to spill the nation's blood on the wrong side of the American civil broils. ”

“ Viewed in this light the sympathetic comprehension displayed by the Australian politician towards America is perhaps a fore-glimpse of the time when the various communities of the Old and the New Worlds, which speak the English tongue, and are mainly of English race, shall, under whatever number of local governments, be as one people and as one nation. ”

“ Of Lord Palmerston's speech in reply to Mr. Disraeli, the Australian parliamentarian is somewhat contemptuous. "Your Mr. Cowper," he observes, with an adroit hit at a very capable rival Sydney politician, "might have said all that the Prime Minister of England said, and said it with quite as much oratorical effect. But there was this difference between Lord Palmerston's commonplaces and Mr. Cowper's: the old English Minister knew exactly the limits within which he must confine himself, and seemed perfectly to know the temper of his audience and the state of feeling outside." ”

“ There are thousands of men who sail under the stars and stripes who possess the adventurous spirit and desperate courage which fit the privateer for his peculiar kind of aggressive operations in a naval war. You had better lose no time in preparing for your defence. Do not lull yourselves into a false sense of security by depending too much upon the naval superiority of England. ... Sydney and the surrounding district ought to muster five thousand volunteers. ”

“ Over a quarter of a century ago a pair of very remarkable Australian colonists visited England in the capacity of Emigration Commissioners. Had they been ordinary individuals they would doubtless have been styled Emigration agents, but they were prominent politicians; and prominent politicians, even in the most democratic communities, are wont to bestow upon themselves high-sounding titles, just as in England they raise one another to the Peerage. ”

“ His long public career in New South Wales has been one of ceaseless strife and frequent vicissitude, and it is no secret that as in the case of greater statesmen he has shown himself more capable of controlling the affairs of the community than of managing his own. ”

“ Liberal journalists and popular lecturers repeat each other without end; but no one thinks it worth his while to investigate the causes of the quarrel with earnestness, and place the whole case before the public in the light which the history of the last five-and-twenty years might throw upon it. ”

“ Then we had in London a number of prominent Colonial public men, each of whom regarded his individual colony as his true sphere of public labour, and none of whom desired to be merged in the ordinary ruck of the purely British population. ”

“ Those who are little affected by feelings of brotherhood, or sympathy with freedom, see reason to pause in the loss of trade and the increase of taxation, and I doubt much whether if war be declared it will long remain a popular war. ”

“ In the meantime, he travels about from town to town, at one time seeing the widowed Queen pass through Stafford on her way to the Highlands, at another, encountering Prince Arthur, "a fine little boy of twelve," at Gloucester. In his general survey of the social condition of England he seems to have been much struck by the large and increasing number of societies among the working classes for their self-improvement. Next to this, he notices the movement for extending the sphere of employment among women, and singles out Miss Emily Faithfull as its leading pioneer. ”

“ Who can forget Sir Henry Taylor's own account of Lord Palmerston's behaviour on this occasion, when Professor Wheatstone expounded to him the wonders of Telegraphy? "The man of science was slow, the man of the world seemed attentive; the man of science was copious, the man of the world let nothing escape him; the man of science unfolded the anticipated results—another and another, the man of the world listened with all his ears ”