V 
 
 - 
 
 
 BOOK 
 
 Los *"*e/ 
 
 Ca/ ,
 
 DISEASED COMMUNITIES. 
 
 Australia, New Zealand 
 
 AND 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS J. DIVEN 
 
 AUTHOR OF 
 
 "AZTECS AND MAYAS" 
 
 AND 
 
 "THE 20TH CENTURY PHILOSOPHER" 
 
 Published by the ANTIQUARIAN CO. 
 
 180 N. Dearborn Street 
 CHICAGO 
 
 1911
 
 INDEX 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Page. 
 Australia The Country ..................... 5 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Present State ............................... 28 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 \ The Way Thither . . ......................... 51 
 
 <S- 
 
 ^ CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Australians ............................ 80 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 ^ Diseased Australia .......................... 104 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 The Chinese Question 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 New Zealand ............................... 144 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 State Socialism in New Zealand ................ 173 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 "Look to Home" ............................ 211 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 Our Lesson . . . 239
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Australia The Country. 
 
 Australia is an individual continent lying 
 south of the equator, west of the 180th degree 
 of longitude. Its length east and west is, 
 roughly speaking, about 2,500 miles; its 
 breadth, 2,000. Its northern limits are within 
 ten degrees of latitude south of the equator, its 
 southern limits about forty, so that it covers a 
 range of climate from Chicago to Panama. In 
 area it is about the size of the United States, 
 excluding Alaska, or nearly that of Europe 
 with its more than 300 millions of people. It 
 is all an English colony, under one govern- 
 ment, with individual states much like the 
 United States. With the exception of an in- 
 considerable number of aborigines who cut no 
 figure whatever, a very few Chinese and Hin- 
 doos, the inhabitants are all white, Europeans 
 
 5
 
 6 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 who speak only English, are Christians, and 
 overwhelmingly Protestant. So that the Aus- 
 tralians have no boundaries conterminous with 
 that of another race with different color, lan- 
 guage, and largely different religion, as in our 
 case with Mexico; or the same boundary with 
 the outpost of a jealous foreign power, as in 
 our case with Canada, where its chief states- 
 craft lies in fitting canals to our great lakes so 
 that in case of war with England that country 
 could, within two weeks, take possession of and 
 reduce to ashes, or levy tribute, on Buffalo, 
 Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Duluth, Milwau- 
 kee and Chicago. To digress a little, while the 
 last statement seems big I have never heard it 
 questioned by any politician in the country 
 since the elder Carter H. Harrison, thirty 
 years ago while mayor of Chicago, made the 
 first determined effort to meet that problem by 
 opening the ship canal to New Orleans, which 
 step was then, as it is now, blocked by the 
 jealousy of the railroads. Nor will it be solved 
 so long as the great wealthy state of Illinois 
 elects representatives who are pledged to block 
 the scheme by the well-known political process 
 of "queering" as I was informed was the case
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 7 
 
 by United States officials several years ago in 
 Washington. 
 
 So that, aside from the inevitable problems 
 arising to all the human race, front to front 
 with all the forces and laws of nature, benefi- 
 cent only when we understand them, the Aus- 
 tralians have only social questions to consider. 
 They have no defense problem other than that 
 which occurs to all of Greater Britain. They 
 have no race problem like our negro question, 
 which problem the Australians are so fond of 
 throwing in our faces, which matter, however, 
 the writer, who thinks he is as well informed 
 on that subject as any man in the country, 
 does not even consider a problem, but which, 
 however, he considers a greater question in 
 South Africa than even the Boor question. 
 
 The religious question with them is purely 
 academic. That question the chief and most 
 disturbing political problem in British Amer- 
 ica, the vital and overwhelming and insoluble 
 problem to the European colonies in North 
 Africa, the question which looms up so por- 
 tentously on our horizon as our people are 
 destined to become overwhelmingly Catholic 
 or infidel, does not cause them, and need not 
 cause them, a moment's reflection. And yet
 
 8 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 in no country in the world except Canada is 
 that question, Protestantism vs. Catholicism, 
 fought over so bitterly, as shown in the corre- 
 spondents ' columns of the Australian news- 
 papers. 
 
 So that "Down Under", "The Underworld", 
 or "The Colony", as they are fond of calling 
 the great continent of Australia, is a clear field 
 where the people of British blood, language 
 and religion, have a chance untrammeled by 
 adverse circumstances to work out what is 
 best in them, and they think what is in them 
 is the best there is on earth. So that if there 
 be any falling oft' in any particular they must 
 bear, without modification, palliation or ex- 
 cuse, the full blame for their shortcomings. 
 
 Like the Jews of old, they think they are the 
 particular pets of God Almighty who watches 
 over them with more care and affection than 
 the rest of the human race. In fact, they talk 
 and write as though they had a proprietary in- 
 terest in Him, that they are His only legiti- 
 mate children, while the rest are bastards who 
 are only allowed to exist at all as a great con- 
 descension. Wherein they are deficient, they 
 cannot throw the blame upon the slavery ques- 
 tion, the civil war, the negro question, the vot-
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 9 
 
 ing privileges of the indigested hordes of for- 
 eigners, as we do ; nor upon the Catholic ques- 
 tion, as does Canada; nor can they attribute 
 anything to growing pains, or to over-rapid 
 development. I am only endeavoring to 
 measure their degree of success in the light of 
 the present century. I think I have the right 
 to do so. 
 
 And Australia is a continent. I think we 
 are not allowed, even by a stretch of the imagi- 
 nation, to term it an island. It is more truly a 
 continent than Europe. It is as much so as 
 North America or Africa. It is washed on all 
 sides by the ocean's waters, but so are North 
 and South America. Cuba is an island because 
 its fauna and flora are precisely the same as on 
 the adjacent American continent; so England 
 to Europe, or the island of Vancouver to Brit- 
 ish America. Australia is independent, self- 
 risen from the primeval waters. It is trite to 
 say that while it is summer there it is winter 
 here. To one who has spent over twenty 
 winters in warm climes, ten of them within the 
 tropics, that applies to most of the world ; that 
 while it is day here it is night there; that ap- 
 plies even in our own country, as while the sun 
 is still shining on busy San Francisco the peo-
 
 10 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 pie of New York are comfortably settled in 
 their theatres just when the villian is most 
 triumphant, or asleep in their beds ; that while 
 it is Saturday here it is Sunday there. In our 
 part of the universe lighted by the sun no one 
 minute is more holy than any other minute, 
 but what is more important to a scientific man, 
 it is one of the centers of the world 's develop- 
 ment. Agassiz, who fought the Darwinian 
 theory to his last breath, asserted it was one of 
 the five creations. As we go south by train 
 from Chicago we experience no shocks. Every 
 mile almost discloses the northern limit of 
 some well-known plant, scrubby and insignifi- 
 cant at first, then larger and more abundant 
 until too familiar to notice ; then another, and 
 then another, until nearly under the equator 
 one arrives at the apex of vegetation familiar 
 and satiated. Not so in Australia. The scien- 
 tific man arrives there as though projected 
 from a catapult on to another world. Leaving 
 out the question of European culture, it is 
 another world. The minerals are, of course, 
 the same, but we are taught by scientists that 
 they are precisely the same on every body in 
 the universe. The same revolutions and ages 
 may be traced in Australia as elsewhere in the
 
 f 
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 11 
 
 world, but a geologist could probably find 
 nearly similar ones and read them as easily on 
 Mars. But the shells are different, the corals 
 different, the fish mostly new and different, 
 while the vegetation and animal life is almost 
 wholly strange. The gloomy, dirty, stinking 
 eucalyptus, an exotic in North Africa, is there 
 the prevailing woods. It offers no incitement 
 to rambling, as the woods of Europe or Amer- 
 ica. Together with the strange plants and 
 flowers it gives one a sort of unearthly feeling, 
 which, I believe, can never be eradicated. It 
 is said that the poetic significance of the palm 
 is ' ' Far from home. ' ' To me, familiar with the 
 palm since my twentieth year, that tree is a 
 friendly, beneficent relative, the green cocoa- 
 nut the mother of a second childhood. Not so 
 the eucalyptus. It represents to me all the 
 strangeness, unfamiliarity and repugnance of 
 an individual of another race, color and lan- 
 guage. Perhaps I could in time overcome the 
 feeling of dislike it causes in me, but I doubt 
 it. The beautiful woods around my home by 
 the Kankakee River have never seemed so 
 dear to me as since my stay in Australia and 
 New Zealand. 
 I am not a naturalist, and animals interest
 
 12 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 me but little. During forty years residence in 
 Chicago I have never seen its zoological gar- 
 den. The stuffed animals in the excellent 
 Sydney museum, however, were a revelation 
 to me, and of absorbing interest. I did not 
 dream that there were in all the world so many 
 varieties of the marsupials, or pouched ani- 
 mals, represented on the whole American con- 
 tinent solely by the opossum, as are found in 
 Australia. For instance, there are thirty-seven 
 varieties, the authorities say, of the wallaby. 
 Pretty much all of the mammalia are pouched. 
 There were no indigenous ruminant, or grass- 
 eating animals There was the dingo, or so- 
 called wild dog, not pouched, but whether it 
 really belongs to that family (the canine) or 
 not I was not sufficiently interested to investi- 
 gate. There was also the bear, a little animal 
 hardly larger than a cat, but whether really a 
 bear or not I do not know, but except these and 
 some other exceptions, all the mammalia seem 
 to be pouched, even the rats, mice, hares, and 
 squirrels, I suppose some hundreds of varie- 
 ties, and there is always the ornithorhynchus, 
 or duck-billed platypus, all of which are so 
 strange that it caused Australia to be con- 
 sidered as one of the original scenes of crea-
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRV. 13 
 
 tion. That the continent is favorable to ani- 
 mal life is shown by the kindly manner with 
 which it has treated all imported life. Pheas- 
 ants, ducks, geese, turkeys, chickens, thrive as 
 well there as any where on earth. English 
 foxes were introduced, and have prospered so 
 well that now they wish they had not intro- 
 duced them. Hares were introduced and have 
 multiplied "like rabbits", until now they are 
 the chief pest of the country. Their hogs, 
 while not attaining the elephantine propor- 
 tions and weight of our Illinois pigs, are better 
 eating from their greater proportion of lean 
 meat. Their hams are sweeter from their man- 
 ner of curing them, and are also lacking in the 
 vitriolic creosote taste of our Chicago prod- 
 ucts. Their cattle, like those on our great 
 Texas and Montana ranges, increase tremen- 
 dously, but, like them, are tough and stringy. 
 Like all of the rest of the people in the world 
 who never ate corn-fed beef, the Australians 
 do not know what good beef tastes like. I 
 know in this assertion I am stirring up a 
 hornets ' nest. You may insult the nobility, or 
 even the royal family; you may deny the Eng- 
 lishman's God and he will bear it patiently, 
 but if one dares to allege that English beef is
 
 14 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 no good he flies right off. the handle and burns 
 to wash out the reproach with the blood of the 
 " alligator." I only know that except one 
 piece on the Mariposa, I did not eat one mouth- 
 ful of good beef from the time of leaving Chi- 
 cago until I returned to that town. On the 
 other hand, Australia is the best home on the 
 earth for sheep. No where on earth can sheep 
 be raised so easily, with so little effort and so 
 cheaply as in Australia and New Zealand, and 
 no where else do they have finer lamb and mut- 
 ton. The product of New Zealand is superior 
 to that of Australia, but even that of Australia 
 has spoiled me for mutton eating in the United 
 States. All that I have eaten since reaching 
 home, whether lamb or mutton, has seemed 
 dry and tasteless, but then it may have been 
 goat masquerading as sheep. And then, too, 
 one must take into consideration that pork and 
 mutton are the only things on earth the Eng- 
 lish know how to cook. In the matter of sheep, 
 the figures will startle anyone from the United 
 States. From traveling on the same trains and 
 stopping at same hotels in New Zealand and 
 Sydney, I became quite well acquainted with 
 an Australian farmer and his wife who were 
 doing a summer's trip. He owned 30,000 sheep
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 15 
 
 and seemed to think he was only a small sheep 
 farmer, while to me, accustomed to the herds 
 of Mexico and the States, the figure seemed 
 overwhelming. One hundred thousand to 
 200,000 sheep with one owner is a very com- 
 mon number, while one man, Mr. Scidmore, is 
 said to own over a million. 
 
 The English race itself at the antipodes 
 gives no evidence of deterioration, but on the 
 contrary I think a decided improvement. I 
 think the men will average a greater height 
 than those in the United States, while in 
 Sydney, at least, the women appear to me to 
 rate some degree better in beauty than those 
 in England. In appearance, dress and style, 
 they resemble more nearly those in America 
 than do those of England, but as this is a dan- 
 gerous subject, and one I know nothing at all 
 about, I drop it. 
 
 Prior to the advent of the white man there 
 were no grains growing in that country, and, 
 except perhaps on the tropical extremity, no 
 nuts nor fruits. All have been introduced, and 
 with some exceptions seem to do well. Oats, 
 rye, barley and wheat grow as well as here, 
 and a great quantity of wheat in sacks is ex- 
 ported to England. Maize, or corn as we call
 
 16 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 it, thrives in Australia, but as it is used solely 
 as feed for hogs not much is grown. As a lady 
 said, "We do not eat corns in Australia; we 
 feed them to our pigs". When one thinks of 
 the hundreds of ways it is prepared for food in 
 our country, what a deprivation we would feel 
 without it, one can only sympathize with them 
 in their blindness. To think that there are 
 millions of white people speaking the English 
 language ignorant of the superlative excell- 
 ence of roasting ears, which with the water 
 from green cocoanuts constitute the two very 
 best things on this terrestrial ball with which 
 man can distend his "tummy". Well! Well! 
 This is a queer world! "The heathen they bow 
 down to stocks and stones." "Ephriam is 
 joined to his idols; let him alone!" Of course 
 the real reason is that it is not fashionable 
 eating in London, and the worst is that, as corn 
 will not grow in England, it will never become 
 so. So that the unfortunate Australians for 
 all eternity, or until they have their Fourth of 
 July will be barred from knowing the excell- 
 ence of maize as an article of human food, will 
 never feast on succotash. One wishes, for their 
 own sakes, that the whole royal family, and 
 the nobility down to the last "by courtesy"
 
 f 
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 17 
 
 lord and lady, would issue a jointly-signed 
 proclamation graciously allowing the colonials 
 of Australia and New Zealand to eat maize, 
 assuring them that they would not by so doing 
 lose caste. 
 
 Upon the whole, Australia fares well in 
 fruits, tropical, sub-tropical and temperate. 
 The apples of Tasmania are equal to any in the 
 world. The grapes are perhaps the finest. They 
 are fully equal to the Spanish, and much su- 
 perior to those of California. These two were 
 the best fruits I ate during all the trip, nor 
 could I get enough of them. But all fruit is 
 excessively dear, also vegetables, in strong 
 contrast with meats, which are surprisingly 
 and absurdly cheap. The cheapest grapes were 
 12 cents a pound, ranging from 18 to 24 cents 
 a pound usually for the finer varieties. The 
 prevailing and universal price, as I found it, 
 both in Sydney and the country towns, was 4 
 cents each for apples, pears, peaches, oranges 
 or plums. These things are not sold by the 
 basket and in groceries, as with us, but invari- 
 ably come to market in large cases, and are 
 sold by Italians and Chinese, usually in little 
 shops, where they also sell the limited supply 
 of green vegetables known as green groceries.
 
 18 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 This statement as to price was flatly denied to 
 my face by an Australian on the boat return- 
 ing from thence. I asked him to give me the 
 address of one place in Sydney where one 
 could buy fruit at reasonable prices, as I had 
 been partly keeping house, usually ate fruit 
 from four to six times a day, and had tramped 
 the town over to avoid what I considered an 
 extortionate price. His reply was: "From the 
 push carts". As I did not see a push cart in 
 all Sydney, except for the sale of ice cream, 
 and as he did not live in Sydney, I will let my 
 statement stand, in spite of contradiction. I 
 might have cut out of their daily papers 
 several letters from subscribers bitterly com- 
 plaining of what they call a trust existing 
 among the Chinese and Italians to fix an ab- 
 normal price upon fruit, as though there were 
 any law to prevent any grocer, news stand 
 keeper, meat market owner or, in fact, any one 
 of the many thousands out of employment, 
 from selling fruit at any price he pleases. It 
 is a great deal like the people of our country 
 blaming the lumber seller for the high price of 
 lumber, or Armour for the high price of meat 
 It is on a par with the conduct of the people 
 during the middle ages, when, during famine
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 19 
 
 times, they imprisoned the bakers. As though, 
 where monopolies are not given by direct 
 grant, any combination of men could fix the 
 price on staple articles. While my neighbors 
 are getting, on their farms, eight cents live 
 weight for their hogs, where they used to get 
 three, I will believe there is some other reason 
 for it than the benevolent disposition of 
 Armour. As I was unable to buy fruit any 
 cheaper in the country towns of New South 
 Wales, where I made frequent little excur- 
 sions, I will attribute the price wholly to the 
 disinclination of the natives for intensive 
 farming. The colonial terms fruit-growing 
 and gardening l ' Chinese business that no self- 
 respecting white man would engage in." The 
 Australian would prefer to sleep in the parks 
 and beg for thrip pences on the street corners 
 after dark to making a fortune and losing 
 caste by any such mode of gaining a living. As 
 to profits arising from this despised business, 
 I will let the following clipping, from a Sydney 
 daily, answer. I think anyone would say that 
 $1,300, from little over an acre, adequate re- 
 numeration : 
 
 Mr. H. Jacob, a Mildura orchardist, has had a return 
 of 17 tons of lemons off 1 1-4 acre of land. He paid
 
 20 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 29 as railway freight on the produce going to Mel- 
 bourne. Five years ago Mr. Jacob received only 5 
 from the same lemon orchard, then rapidly deteriorat- 
 ing and threatening to die out altogether. Recogniz- 
 ing that the depletion of the humus of the soil by 
 constant intertillage was the case of the orchard's 
 decay, Mr. Jacob had some portable pens made, and 
 maintained a large number of pigs between the trees. 
 The results of the experiment were striking. Trees 
 that were almost dead took on new life, the foliage 
 of the orchard assumed a more wholesome hue, and 
 each year the crop of fruit showed a marked increase, 
 terminating this year in the heavy crop of 17 tons, 
 which sold for 250. In addition to the great man- 
 uring value exercised upon the land, the pigs returned 
 a direct profit at the rate of 10 per acre. 
 
 All this seems to hold true as to green vege- 
 tables, scarcity considered, but, except in case 
 of radishes and tomatoes, I am not so positive 
 as to question of prices. During four months 
 of Australian eating I would say that nine 
 times out of ten, or nineteen out of twenty, we 
 had no other cooked vegetables, aside from 
 potatoes, than string beans and a sort of 
 squash called vegetable marrow. I grew to 
 loathe the sight of both. Once, thank God, we 
 had boiled onions. My first thought, on placing 
 my foot on the continent of North America, 
 was: "At last I am emancipated from string 
 beans and vegetable marrow" 
 
 Australians make a great deal of wine from
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRV. 21 
 
 their grapes, all the familiar marks being imi- 
 tated. It is a strong, coarse, heady wine, very 
 like the California wine of fifty years ago. A 
 moderate indulgence in it will cause a violent 
 headache, or, as an American living there ex- 
 pressed it, "put one on the blink" for two or 
 three days. Yet I found half a glass full mixed 
 with same quantity of water, drank during the 
 noon meal, a refreshing beverage. The Aus- 
 tralian, however, cares little for wine. He 
 wants "ile" or "Scotch", of which he partakes 
 inordinately, beginning early and keeping it 
 up until late. It is no wonder the liver com- 
 plaint is universal. 
 
 The mineral wealth of Australia is well 
 known. For sixty years it has been one of the 
 largest producers of gold. It has great mines 
 of copper, tin, silver, lead and iron. Its coal 
 fields are inexhaustible. In fine materials, no 
 country on earth is richer in variety. Dia- 
 monds can be mined with certainty, but the 
 find is not large enough to be profitable. 
 Emeralds are not rare, but the crystals are 
 smaller than those of Columbia, South Amer- 
 ica. Azurite is abundant, but only used as 
 copper ore. Malachite, the finest in the world, 
 of a deep velvety green, is only copper ore to
 
 22 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 them. For about $2.00 I bought a finer speci- 
 men of it than I had ever seen in any museum 
 in the United States or, as I remember, in the 
 world. Sapphires and hyacinths, of all colors, 
 are more abundant and cheaper than any- 
 where else in the world. Flawless white to- 
 pazes are considered only as pretty pebbles. 
 I had about a dozen given me. Only for some 
 perfect crystals would they take any price at 
 all. Tourmalines are found, but are rare and 
 highly prized, particularly the green ones. 
 The opals of Australia go all over the world. 
 They are magnificent, and the mining of them, 
 and the search for them, a recognized business. 
 It is the chief gem business of the country. 
 
 To the man versed in Physical Geography, 
 degrees of latitude mean little. He always, in 
 addition, considers the isotherms, or degrees 
 of heat. This is brought forcibly to one 's mind 
 when he lands about the first of April at Vic- 
 toria, British Columbia, and finds every thing 
 green a full month earlier than it would be in 
 neighborhood of Chicago, 800 miles further 
 south. So when we learn that New South 
 Wales is about the same latitude south as 
 North and South Carolina are north, we may 
 not infer that it has their climate. In truth
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 23 
 
 I rather expected it myself, and knowing I was 
 going there during the height of their mid- 
 summer, I braced myself up to suffer as a 
 martyr in the cause of science. I soon learned 
 that Australia would make an agreeable sum- 
 mer resort, at least the eastern part of it 
 would. It is both warmer in winter and cooler 
 in summer than the Carolinas. Oranges, 
 lemons and pomegranates, although all in- 
 ferior in quality, flourish in the latitude of 
 Sydney, which is about the same degree as 
 Wilmington. Araucarias grow wild in the 
 woods, and the rubber tree is the favorite 
 shade tree in the parks and yards. The Royal 
 Palm, too delicate even for Florida, lives out of 
 doors, although not remarkable for size or 
 splendor. The bougainvillia lives and blossoms 
 in the open. In fact, their excellent botanical 
 garden proves that practically all the tropical 
 vegetation will live without protection. 
 
 In summer the winds, usually from the 
 northeast or southeast, always blow, coming 
 over 7,000 miles of the great Pacific. It may be 
 excessively hot in the middle of the day, but 
 with the night it becomes chilly, necessitating 
 wraps and heavy bedding. But whatever the 
 degree of heat, while the ladies dress, or un-
 
 24 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 dress, to suit the climate, the men never do. 
 Putting on light clothes and discarding the 
 waistcoat, which last a New Orleans doctor 
 once told me was the most sensible mode ever 
 introduced among the men, does not find favor 
 with them. Dressed in dark, closely-fitting 
 coats and waistcoats, they are uncomfortable, 
 and look uncomfortable. With perspiration 
 pouring down their faces they look at the 
 casual American, passing with his loose-fitting 
 coat and trousers, and negligee shirt, with a 
 stubborn, dog-like air, as though they would 
 say: "I know I am suffering, but I will die be- 
 fore I break away from London and follow 
 American ways." To the said American they 
 recall those famous words of the poet: "See 
 the pale martyr in his shirt of fire." One 
 wishes that the royal family and nobility of 
 England would issue a decree allowing the 
 Australians to discard their waistcoats in 
 summer. 
 
 We may say with positiveness that Euro- 
 pean blood does not deteriorate in Australia. 
 If anything, it rather improves. The Aus- 
 tralian men average, I think, rather greater in 
 height than either the English or Americans, 
 but they lack the breadth of shoulders of the
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 26 
 
 latter. We cannot say how much of this 
 narrowness across the shoulders results from 
 the universal custom of English tailors of mak- 
 ing coat and waistcoat too tight and narrow 
 across the shoulders. Anyone who has ever 
 had such work done in London will know what 
 I mean. Americans, with their loose coats and 
 padded shoulders, striving for breadth in that 
 region, have become broad shouldered. My 
 first impression on reaching Honolulu accentu- 
 ated in Seattle, was that the Americans were 
 remarkable for their square build. The Aus- 
 tralians, bound from time immemorial in their 
 straight jackets, have grown narrow chested, 
 while growth that must come ran upwards. 
 They have lost none of the virility of their 
 ancestors. In no country in the world, not even 
 in England nor in America, are athletic sports 
 so cultivated. It is an absorbing passion per- 
 vading all classes and ages, and covers the 
 whole range of sports. Except among college 
 students, pretty much all athletics in our 
 states are given over to professionals. Not so 
 there. I could see little or no signs of profes- 
 sionalism. It is town against town, city against 
 city, province against province, Australia 
 against New Zealand, etc. ' But our newspa-
 
 26 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 
 
 pers are much in error when they assert that 
 baseball is becoming a favorite game there. 
 Looking over the sporting pages every day, I 
 never once saw the name of that game even 
 mentioned. I think it never will be intro- 
 duced. The mere fact that it originated in the 
 United States, regardless of its intrinsic 
 merit, will forever prevent its adoption, owing 
 to the Australian bent, to be treated upon 
 hereafter. 
 
 While their excessive fondness for sports is 
 owing greatly to the fact that, looking to Eng- 
 land for everything and condemning every- 
 thing not first favored there, willingly taking 
 an inferior and subordinate position in litera- 
 ture, theatricals, arts, politics, etc., they must 
 let their superfluous enthusiasm vent itself 
 upon something, which something most natur- 
 ally gravitates to athletic sports. Still, we 
 must say it is a sign of virility, the reverse of 
 physical decadence. If Australia has any 
 national peculiarity, we may say it is its pro- 
 clivities for out-of-door exercises, accom- 
 panied with the spirit of emulation. 
 
 In conclusion, I think we may assert that in 
 climate it is superior to the United States, 
 while in soil, barring the wonderful Mississippi
 
 AUSTRALIA THE COUNTRY. 27 
 
 Valley, agricultural and mineral products, it is 
 as favorably situated as that country for the 
 sustenance and physical, moral and industrial 
 development of hundreds of millions of the 
 human race. If it does not equal our country, 
 in its growth, in wealth and population, we 
 must look for other reasons. We must disre- 
 gard the environment and the natural laws, 
 and look to the people themselves and their in- 
 stitutions. And this should be done as firmly, 
 as mercilessly, and yet as kindly, as with a 
 surgeon's knife.
 
 28 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Present State. 
 
 The population of Australia is now about 
 four million three hundred thousand. These 
 are occupying a region about as large as the 
 United States. In 1788 Port Jackson (now 
 Sydney) was founded as a penal station for 
 criminals from England. * * * "The colony, 
 however, from 1821 has made a fair start in 
 free industrial progress." (Brit. Enc.) In 1851 
 gold was discovered in large quantities, and 
 from that date to this the country has been as 
 well known as any other to the civilized world. 
 So that now we can hardly term it a pioneers ' 
 country. The towns do not have the air of 
 frontier settlements. Sydney looks older than 
 New York. It is older than Chicago, Seattle 
 or San Francisco. The country is making 
 heroic efforts to attract to its shores the sur-
 
 PRESENT STATE. 29 
 
 plus population of Europe. No boom on any 
 newly-built railroad in the United States was 
 ever more assiduously worked. They hold it 
 up before all the world by immigration agents 
 and hundreds of pamphlets and newspaper 
 articles as the country of all the world best 
 fitted for the laboring man. They openly de- 
 clare it is the poor man's country, and that 
 they will always keep it the poor man's 
 country. As a particular inducement to that 
 class they boast that it is a white man's 
 country, and that they will always keep it a 
 white man's country. In their eyes a tinge of 
 black, yellow, brown or red is an unpardonable 
 sin. God may permit it, but they will not. But 
 God in this respect, they think, showed a 
 lamentable lack of wisdom in creating such. 
 Negros, Hindoos, Chinese and Japanese are 
 wholly excluded; even if already British sub- 
 jects; otherwise no country could go further in 
 encouraging immigration, particularly from 
 the United Kingdom of England, Ireland and 
 Scotland. I learn from the latest Australian 
 year book that any woman of apparent good 
 character who will say she wishes to engage in 
 service will have her passage money paid to 
 Australia. I suppose she may not work longer
 
 30 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 than a day. It would seem from the wording 
 that the declaration is sufficient. That any 
 man of family who will advance five pounds 
 will have the balance of the passage money for 
 the entire family advanced by the common- 
 wealth, and then third-class fares from Europe 
 are very low by all the lines, English and Ger- 
 man. The trip need cost very little more, time 
 considered, than an artisan or laborer would 
 pay in his hotel for board while out of work the 
 same length of time. Reaching the desired 
 land an affectionate paternal government ad- 
 vances to his aid and guides every step. Money 
 is loaned to him sufficient for him to start in 
 farming and to build his house, payable in an- 
 nual installments at a low rate of interest, 
 while state-owned land is leased to him for a 
 term of years. On every side he is taught that 
 the government is run solely for the benefit of 
 the laborer; that as the state owns everything 
 and he is the state, he is actually and poten- 
 tially rich ; that millionaires, which term in the 
 United States is applied to every man worth 
 $50,000 or over, and corporations are not de- 
 sired nor permitted. Really Utopia is reached. 
 One wonders why with the abundance of land, 
 flour, meat and fish and the favorable sky,
 
 PRESENT STATE. 31 
 
 the starving or the ambitious millions of 
 Europe do not pour themselves on to their 
 shores. Not to go there seems the height of 
 foolishness on the part of any man of the lower 
 classes of Europe. You would really think 
 that not to avail himself of the opportunity 
 ought to deprive anyone of the submerged 
 tenth of all sympathy and charitable assist- 
 ance. One wonders how with all these induce- 
 ments ships enough could be found to trans- 
 port the seekers of the ideal and long-dreamed- 
 of perfect commonwealth. In the midst of this 
 pastoral symphony breathing of peace, rural 
 abundance and joy, he soon catches a note of 
 discord, and as in the overture to William Tell, 
 soon breaks on his ear a storm unparalleled 
 with anything he ever heard before, a storm of 
 curses, complaints, fault finding, epithets and 
 vituperation. Instead of the new land quiver- 
 ing with life and hope in the vanguard of pro- 
 gress and advancement, of private wealth and 
 individual freedom expanding by leaps and 
 bounds, as he and I expected to find it, he 
 sees a land decadent and moribund, dragging 
 out its existence like a young athlete of 
 gigantic frame worn out with his excesses and 
 bad habits, the object of pity and almost dis-
 
 32 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 gust. Instead of the millions of happy home 
 builders exhausting the resources of language 
 in praising their great country and its institu- 
 tions, looking forward to an independent old 
 age, to their children taking a higher position 
 in the social scale than themselves, we find a 
 discontented disillusioned crowd cursing the 
 country and all its institutions, and pointing 
 out the Argentine, Canada, and trust-ridden 
 America as more favored lands, where the 
 poor may gain an honorable competency. This 
 is not, as in the United States, confined to the 
 beer-soaked bums of the great cities. It is the 
 openly expressed opinion of the college pro- 
 fessors, the successful business man, the skill- 
 ful artisan, the day laborer and the hobo. It is 
 reflected in hundreds of letters to the news- 
 papers which the press there is bold enough to 
 print. It is the opinion of every man I actually 
 talked with, which I may say did not include 
 the office holders nor their dependents. 
 
 Is this true, or do I see yellow? The popu- 
 lation, mind you, is only four million three 
 hundred thousand. Of these over one-half the 
 population reside in the cities, and Australia 
 is not a manufacturing country. In fact very 
 little manufacturing is done there. The four
 
 PRESENT STATE. 33 
 
 cities of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and 
 Adelaide alone have nearly two millions of in- 
 habitants. In those cities the unemployed 
 swarm by thousands. On every side one is 
 importuned for a penny or tuppence. Where 
 a man is so importuned once in Chicago he is 
 ten times solicited in Sydney. From morning 
 until night the wharves swarm with idle men 
 whose visages express only hopelessness and 
 despair. I am always willing to pay some- 
 thing for information and the invariable reply 
 to my questions in return for my pittance was : 
 " Australia has nothing for the laborer but the 
 sheep farm. There is not much in that with 
 the market 14,000 miles away, while its pursuit 
 is a living death. 
 
 As soon as the train leaves the great city you 
 are in the wilderness. That sense of fatness 
 even to bursting that pervades the favorable 
 regions of the United States is wholly missing. 
 The people with their primitive surroundings 
 and improvements seem not to be living but 
 camping. It is the bush. They are pioneers 
 with the intention of returning home. They 
 are colonists. It is down under. They are 
 apologetic. The man's grandfather may have 
 immigrated but "Home" lies on the other side
 
 34 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 of the world. They looked kind of surprised 
 when I told them that in all my life I had never 
 heard a person who had been born in the 
 United States speak of any other land as 
 home. That pride in their country, that deep- 
 seated love for the soil and air that is so per- 
 ceptible even in the children born of foreign 
 born parents in the United States is noticeably 
 absent. Almost the first utterances of the 
 American-born child are to deride the habits, 
 language and land of his fathers. The mere 
 fact that they did so-and-so in the old country 
 will make the immigrants' children shun fol- 
 lowing the same manners. If the parent ad- 
 dresses his child in the language of the father- 
 land the child replies in the language of the 
 United States, nor will whipping prevent him. 
 The Australian child is ever fearful lest some 
 thought, some expression or some step will 
 show his colonial origin. He is a stranger in a 
 strange land. As to yourself, when in the 
 country you do not feel that you are in another 
 nation as you do in Spain, or Morocco or 
 Columbia. Nor do you feel as though you 
 were in your own, and the country towns im- 
 press you just as unfavorably. Where you 
 expect to see important shire towns like Gales-
 
 PRESENT STATE. 35 
 
 burg or Kankakee are found only collections 
 of ramshackle sheds with its business houses 
 no better. Even important railroad towns that 
 you would expect to be like Fort Wayne or 
 Wichita, to your surprise you find with their 
 chief business streets a row of shanties one 
 board, thick with hit-and-miss sidewalks, that 
 is, one business place will have a walk in front 
 of it and perhaps the next not even that, while 
 in its shops you will search in vain for some 
 characteristic Australian object. Every object 
 you see is either made in England or so close 
 an imitation of an English object that you can- 
 not distinguish. In the largest city or the 
 smallest village the clock seems turned back 
 sixty years to the beginning of our civil war, 
 and you somehow feel that it never will ad- 
 vance. As the biblical apologists claim that 
 anterior to the creation there was no time, so 
 you feel that for Australia the clock has 
 stopped. In that country there is no time. 
 
 Every boat leaving for British Columbia is 
 filled in all three classes with people intending 
 to settle in Canada or the United States. The 
 boat I came in had six stowaways. I can offer 
 no proof, but I estimate that today 300,000 
 men and women in Australia would start for
 
 36 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 those countries if their passage money were 
 paid. To hundreds of state-assisted immi- 
 grants that country is only a temporary stop- 
 ping place on the route to Vancouver. 
 
 Mexico is always referred to as the land of 
 manana, the place of the morrow, where it is 
 always three o'clock in the afternoon, and so 
 forth. To me who has made nine trips to 
 Mexico extending over some twenty years, 
 during which I have visited practically every 
 part of it, it seems compared with Australia as 
 a land forging ahead with almost incredible 
 speed. English, Germans, French, Italians, 
 Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and Americans are 
 pouring into the country by thousands, while 
 under the fostering care of President Diaz, 
 easily the greatest man now on earth, beside 
 whom all our English and American politi- 
 cians are but children, wealth is piling up with 
 rapidity. Within twenty years it has placed 
 itself among the foremost nations of the earth. 
 I have no figures at hand as to its increase by 
 immigration, but the large cities such as 
 Puebla, Guadalajara and Mexico City seem to 
 me much more modern and convenient in their 
 way of living than those in Australia, while 
 the tremendous increase in the number of
 
 PRESENT STATE. ' 37 
 
 great factories proves to the sight its pros- 
 perity. 
 
 Canada has not anywhere a pleasant cli- 
 mate. Except for two months in the summer I 
 never heard of anyone seeking it for that rea- 
 son. For generations it has been the stock 
 subject for jokes by Americans on account of 
 its sleepiness. From Saturday to Monday in 
 any of its towns is said to be an ordinary life 
 time, and yet no country on earth is today the 
 scene of greater activity and progress. Com- 
 ing out of Vancouver by way of the Great 
 Northern Railway on my way home, the third 
 time I had visited the city, as I saw the hun- 
 dreds of new frame buildings lying at one time 
 within sight like the camp of some great army, 
 I turned to a companion of the boat and re- 
 marked: "That is more new building than I 
 saw in all my stay in Australia." United 
 States government figures right at hand show 
 that for the twelve months ending March 31, 
 1910, American citizens to the number of 
 103,789 departed for a permanent residence in 
 Canada. How many at the same time came 
 from Europe and Asia I have no means of 
 ascertaining without research and inquiry.
 
 38 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 A gentleman from Michigan in conversation 
 with one of the most prominent men in Syd- 
 ney, in my presence, expressed himself as fol- 
 lows: "Australia impresses me as a country 
 suffering from the dry rot." As I thought at 
 the time a very apt allusion. 
 
 A commercial traveling man, born there, 
 who went all over Australia twice a year, with 
 whom I conversed on a train, said: "No man 
 has any business to come to Australia who is 
 not ready to do any rough work that turns 
 up. ' ' I replied : ' ' That explains to me the tre- 
 mendous immigration from the United King- 
 dom into the United States. Do you think an 
 expert book-keeper, plumber or machinist will 
 come to this country, live in the bush and 
 shear or herd sheep for four shillings a day 
 when he can command five or six dollars per 
 day in our large cities?" He further said: 
 "We traveling men know the drawbacks and 
 deficiencies of the country as well as anyone 
 can tell us, but we are powerless. The poli- 
 ticians control everything." In all my travels 
 I have found commercial travelers the most in- 
 telligent men I converse with. On board the 
 steamer with his wife, bound for Seattle to 
 live, was a young civil engineer. Both of them
 
 PRESENT STATE. 39 
 
 were natives of Melbourne. They were travel- 
 ing first-class and they were both such in 
 every respect, both as to education and breed- 
 ing. He said: ''With the highest techincal 
 education to be procured with money I find 
 myself constrained to leave my native land. 
 There is nothing there for a man of my stamp. 
 I know what I am talking about for I have en- 
 circled the globe and have seen the United 
 States before. No scientific man can have a 
 career there except as a favor from some 
 political boss. Every year shows it nearer to 
 pure socialism." 
 
 "All this", says the Englishman who has 
 never been in Australia, "is merely your un- 
 corroborated assertion." We will call in their 
 own opinions. One of these clippings is from 
 the Sydney Herald, the other from the Sydney 
 Times, the two great morning papers of the 
 city: 
 
 NOTES AND COMMENTS. 
 
 The net number of arrivals over departures into the 
 Commonwealth last year is officially stated as 28,933, 
 against 13,150 during the previous year. 
 
 Some improvement is apparent, but the aggregate 
 figures are still painfully small.
 
 40 
 
 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 A satisfactory expansion is shown in the Common- 
 wealth immigration returns for last year. The net 
 addition through immigration to the population of 
 Australia was 28,933, or more than double what it was 
 in the previous year. The following classifies the 
 countries from which immigrants arrived, and for 
 which emigrants departed : 
 
 COMMONWEALTH IMMIGRATION RETURNS. 
 
 
 
 19J8. 
 
 
 
 1909. 
 
 
 
 Arriv. | 
 
 Depart. 
 
 Net 
 Gain. 
 
 Arriv. 
 
 Depart. 
 
 Net 
 Gain. 
 
 U. K 
 
 21,416 
 
 12,086 
 
 9,330 
 
 29,959 
 
 12,490 
 
 17,469 
 
 Rest of Em- 
 pire 
 
 39,838 
 
 38,320 
 
 1,518 
 
 40,773 
 
 33,047 
 
 7,276 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Total British 
 Foreign . 
 
 61,254 
 10.954 
 
 50,406 
 
 8,652 
 
 10,848 
 2.302 
 
 70,732 
 12.877 
 
 45,537 
 9.139 
 
 25,195 
 3.738 
 
 Totals [72,208159,058113,1501183,609154,676128,933 
 
 Taking the white nationalities, the year's net im- 
 migration was 29,703, as compared with 14,345 in 1908. 
 As regards colored races, the departures exceeded the 
 arrivals by 770, as against 1190 in 1908. There is 
 always shown an excess of colored departures, es- 
 pecially Chinese ; and yet the numbers do not decrease. 
 
 The following is from one of those two 
 papers, I did not label it. I had already learned 
 by numerous references as an old piece of 
 news that the Swedish and Norwegian govern- 
 ments had already issued similar warnings:
 
 PRESENT STATE. 41 
 
 EMIGRANTS WARNED. 
 
 'Don't Go To Australia." 
 
 By Telegraph. Press Association. Copyright. 
 
 Copenhagen, February 8. 
 
 The Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs has issued 
 in the newspapers a notice dissuading emigrants from 
 going to Australia and New Zealand, as the difficulties 
 of subsistence there have increased considerably. 
 
 And here is an Australian 's opinion of state 
 of affairs : 
 
 SYDNEY'S PHENOMENAL GROWTH. 
 
 (For the "Sunday Times.") 
 
 Sydney now contains more inhabitants than any 
 city of the civilized world did at the beginning of last 
 century, except London alone. It contains more than 
 any did seventy-five years ago, barring London and 
 Paris. Still, though its growth has been wonderfully 
 fast, it does not constitute a record, several American 
 cities having surpassed it in the rapidity with which 
 they have attracted population. What, however, does 
 constitute a record, shared with Melbourne and Ade- 
 laide, is that of the inhabitants of the State of which 
 it is the capital, over a third are collected within its 
 limits. And the proportion within them is steadily 
 increasing. 
 
 Some people profess to regard this citification, as 
 one may call it, of our population with complacency. 
 But can a country be called healthy in which 600,000 
 people choose to pack themselves within 142 square 
 miles leaving to 1,000,000 the remaining 310,230 square 
 miles 4200 per square mile on a tiny morsel of the 
 area of the country and 3 per square mile on all the
 
 42 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 i 
 
 rest? Of course, an even larger proportion of Victor- 
 ians and South Australians are to be found in Mel- 
 bourne and Adelaide, but nowhere outside of the Com- 
 monwealth is anything in the remotest degree ap- 
 proaching such a state of things to be met with. 
 
 Out of 4,300,000 Australians inhabiting a continent 
 nearly as large as Europe, some 400 square miles 
 suffice 1,500,000 of them, and to the balance of 2,800,000 
 are abandoned 2,972,506 miles. On an area so small 
 as to appear only a dot on an ordinary map, 4000 
 people to the square mile, on the remainder not quitr 
 one to that space ! 
 
 It may seem to a writer in a daily paper, who 
 asserts that Sydney grows because it is entitled to 
 grow, and because it is best for the country, that the 
 accumulation of so enormous a proportion of our Aus- 
 tralian population within three or four cities is a good 
 thing. It will appear so to no authority outside of 
 the Commonwealth. For how does it happen if this 
 be a sign of progress that Australia is, as a whole, the 
 most backward and by very much the most back- 
 ward of all new countries in respect of population in- 
 crease? We are not adding half as many to our num- 
 bers annually as the United States, with a very much 
 less area, were doing a hundred years ago. We are 
 not adding a third as many as Canada and Argentina 
 are doing now. Has the exceptional influence which 
 their numbers give the city populations over the coun- 
 try nothing to do with this stagnation? 
 
 It has. As while a tumor swells the body in general 
 suffers, so while the cities flourish the State stagnates. 
 To a certain extent the growth of Sydney, to take 
 our own case only, arises from natural causes. But 
 to these natural causes have been superadded artificial 
 ones in the concentration through our centralized form 
 of Government the most centralized in the world, 
 Russia included, until four or five years ago of every
 
 PRESENT STATE. 43 
 
 kind of enterprise, institution or calling over which 
 Government has control on the banks of Port Jackson. 
 Moreover, Government has there encouraged by its 
 example and by legislation, the raising of wages and 
 shortening of hours until city conditions of work are 
 so much superior to rural conditions that country boys 
 scorn to remain on the land, and flock to Sydney. For 
 any city job there are always abundance of applicants. 
 Farmers and ploughmen must be imported from the 
 other side of the globe. Even now, while meetings of 
 unemployed are being held in Melbourne, few Victori- 
 ans can be got to take up the blocks of the lately- 
 opened irrigation settlements, and those who have 
 taken blocks up cannot obtain labor to help starting 
 work on them. Everywhere, of course, the town has 
 an attraction for the countryman. Nowhere but in 
 Australia do Governments deliberately increase this 
 attraction. 
 
 The scantiness of our population compared with the 
 magnitude of our territory is a terrible peril in this 
 age of national land hunger. The peculiar distribution 
 of that population doubles the peril. Were our 4,300,- 
 000 scattered about Temperate Australia only, leaving 
 the tropics on one side, we should be in a very much 
 more formidable position for defence than we are. 
 Suppose that the Transvaal and Free State Boers, in- 
 stead of occupying a back country and following rural 
 occupations, had been strung along the South African 
 coast from Durban to Capetown, living most of them 
 in towns, how long would they have held out against 
 a quarter of the British troops it actually took to sub- 
 due them? 
 
 And another, same paper : 
 
 THE FILLING OF PAPUA. 
 
 The blindness of even prominent Australians to the 
 scantiness of our population is appalling. "I think
 
 44 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 Papua is bound to become a very valuable asset to the 
 Commonwealth as well as to the British Empire. The 
 spare places of the earth are, year by year, being filled 
 up and utilized, and here we have 90,000 square miles 
 of territory, with soil and climate most suitable for 
 the growth of many most valuable products which 
 always command the world's market." Mr. J. G. 
 Jenkins, ex-Agent-General for South Australia, is the 
 author of this very droll statement droll not because 
 it exaggerates the resources of the territory, but be- 
 cause of the cool assumption that it is one of the 
 "spare places of the world/'which ought to be filled up. 
 Is this gentleman aware that Paupa is, according to 
 estimate, nearly four times as thickly populated as the 
 Commonwealth, over six times as much so as Queens- 
 land, twelve times as much so as South Australia, and 
 twenty times as much so as West Australia? If he 
 is not, he ought, from the positions he has held, to 
 possess this knowledge. At the present rate of in- 
 crease it will not be till near the close of the century 
 that the Commonwealth will be able to boast of having 
 as many people to the square mile as this empty ter- 
 ritory of Mr. Jenkins' has, and as to his own State, 
 several hundred years will apparently have to elapse 
 before it attains this figure. 
 
 I think these statements ought to convince 
 anyone that I have really understated the 
 matter. What conclusion can one derive from 
 these figures after considering all that nature 
 has done for Australia other than that there is 
 something rotten somewhere 1 ? That in two 
 years with all their prepaid and assisted immi- 
 grants, and their homes all furnished to new
 
 PRESENT STATE. 45 
 
 settlers, only a net increase of 42,083 is rather 
 staggering. If these were supposed to be per- 
 manent gains it would be one thing. But great 
 advertisements and inducements will draw a 
 crowd anywhere. To hold them is another 
 matter. Australia has no more success in hold-- 
 ing them than it has in drawing them. Those 
 figures show that while in 1909 83,609 came in 
 at the same time 54,676 left. How many of 
 the 28,933 remaining will be found there? Ac- 
 cording to their own figures, from one-third to 
 one-sixth. As it would take a Napoleonic 
 revolution to produce a reaction, what better 
 can they look forward to in the future? And 
 probably when the Napoleon or Diaz arises he 
 will be heartily welcomed. The best elements 
 on the continent would be glad to see him now. 
 After reading above clipping the Englishman 
 who has never been there must admit that 
 either the institutions of the commonwealth 
 are diseased or that the people are diseased. 
 
 Apropos nothing in particular except to 
 show that parts of Australia are still in the 
 condition that the United Sates were a hun- 
 dred years ago, I insert the account of a little 
 incident that occurred while I was there. It 
 was taken from the Sydney Morning Herald :
 
 46 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 TRIBAL FIGHT. 
 
 In Northern Territory. 
 
 Marauders Hacked to Death. 
 
 Port Darwin, Saturday. 
 
 James Runcie M'Pherson, who arrived here a few 
 days ago in his lugger from a trepanging expedition 
 along the coast to eastward, reports that while working 
 in Rolling Bay he witnessed a singularly ferocious and 
 fatal tribal fight between 50 Junction Bay natives em- 
 ployed by him in trepanging and a marauding expedi- 
 tion of Liverpool River natives, numbering 30 or 40 
 braves. The fight took place on a cleared space near 
 the seashore. M'Pherson pulled ashore to his smoke- 
 house on the morning of January 24, and noticed that 
 only a few of his working natives were about. He was 
 told they were expecting a fight with hostile natives. 
 At about 4 p. m. that day a peculiarly blood-curdling 
 yell rang out from some bushes about 200 yards away, 
 and immediately following this scores of ghastly white- 
 painted figures darted out from thick bushes on either 
 side of the clearing at the rear of the smokehouse. 
 The air was soon thick with flying spears, and the 
 combatants approached within 15 yards of each other. 
 The spears used were large, heavy barbed ones. The 
 natives on either side showed amazing quickness in 
 avoiding or warding off these barb-pointed death- 
 dealers. In about a quarter of an hour nearly all the 
 spears were broken. One of the Junction Bay natives 
 was then transfixed by a large spear as he was in the 
 act of stooping to pick up a spear thrown by an 
 opponent. The transfixing of this man seemed to fill 
 both sides with ferocious fury. They immediately 
 closed, and a furious hand-to-hand melee ensued.
 
 PRESENT STATE. 47 
 
 The Junction Bay natives had an advantage in num- 
 bers and weapons, being armed with knives, toma- 
 hawks, and iron bars 4ft long made from hatch battens 
 taken from the wreck of the steamer Australian. 
 Their opponents had only ordinary bush waddies and 
 woomeras. The iron bars proved deadly weapons, 
 inflicting ghastly wounds wherever they struck. 
 Within half an hour the survivors of the marauding 
 party fled into the scrup, leaving 11 of their number 
 on the field. These were immeadiately hacked and 
 beaten to death with tomahawks and iron bars. Those 
 who fled were pursued, and M'Pherson thinks that few, 
 if any, escaped. On going ashore on the following 
 morning M'Pherson found that all the bodies had been 
 cremated, only a few charred bones being left in the 
 still smouldering fire. M'Pherson states that a won- 
 derful lot of odds and ends from the wreck of the 
 steamer Australian is to be found among the natives. 
 Hundreds of miles down the coast in one camp he 
 found a much-prized oval mirror, which probably once 
 adorned one of the steamer's saloon cabins. 
 
 The natives of Liverpool River are of an excep- 
 tionally treacherous and murderous character, as 
 proved by several outrages perpetrated in the neigh- 
 borhood during recent years. It was in this neighbor- 
 hood that two buffalo hunters named Moore and 
 McKenzie were killed in 1898, but in that case it was 
 shown that the murdered men had provoked the natives 
 by forcibly abducting native women. They were shot 
 with their own rifles by two natives named Copperang 
 and Nabaloora, who were arrested, tried, and sentenced 
 to death. Owing to the proven facts, however, the 
 death sentence was commuted, and after remaining in 
 goal 11 months both were released. They returned 
 to their own country, and probably are still alive, and 
 may be more dangerous as the result of their brief 
 experience of the white man's different ways. It is
 
 48 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 only a few months since that Mr. M'Pherson narrowly 
 escaped being speared to death while carrying on tre- 
 panging operations in the Liverpool River mouth. On 
 that occasion, he was suddenly and treacherously at- 
 tacked by a number of these natives while temporarily 
 resting in the smokehouse, in which he had been en- 
 gaged curing trepang. All his own boys at this time 
 were away in canoes gathering trepang. His first in- 
 timation of danger was the suspicious swishing of a 
 dozen or more large spears through the bough-covered 
 structure in which he was sitting, smoking and half 
 dreaming. Fortunately, he was armed with a rifle and 
 revolver, and retreated back towards the edge of the 
 water, while 15 or 20 yelling, dancing natives con- 
 gregated on the scrub-covered bank behind the smoke- 
 house, and continued hurling spears. Some of these 
 he warded off with the rifle, and others he dodged ; 
 while springing to one side to avoid one spear, another 
 missile struck him on the point of the hip. The sharp 
 barbed point penetrated downwards nine inches into 
 the fleshy part of the thigh. At the moment he felt 
 only a sharp twinge of pain, and broke the spear shaft 
 off with his hand. He then fired and shot one of the 
 natives, and the remainder disappeared in the scrub. 
 Subsequently, on board his lugger, he made fast a 
 lanyard to the broken spearhead, and himself dragged 
 it out by main strength, but eight of the barbed points 
 broke off and remained in the wound. Nearly two 
 weeks elapsed before he reached Port Darwin, and he 
 suffered excruciating agonies in the meantime. He 
 was operated on at the Palmerston Hospital, and eight 
 broken barbed points were extracted from the wound. 
 This incident occurred in July, 1909. On the present 
 occasion, Mr. M'Pherson states that when he heard the 
 signal cry come from the scrub, he was sitting on an 
 upturned bucket near the smokehouse cutting up to- 
 bacco preparatory to having a comfortable smoke. He
 
 PRESENT STATE. 49 
 
 remained a passive and fascinated spectator to the 
 whole gruesome tableaux which occurred within 100 
 yards of where he was sitting. The whirring rush of 
 heavy spears to and fro, the ghost-like way in which 
 the wild, white-painted forms on each side avoid 
 these, bounding high in the air, then leaping on one 
 side, and at times dashing the spears aside with sweep- 
 ing cuts of their woomeras or waddies, giving vent 
 the while to wild yells and harsh cries of defiance, made 
 a weird and savage picture. When Mr. M'Pherson's 
 Junction Bay boy Billy was speared towards the end 
 of this duel of spears, both sides appeared to go mad 
 with fury, and become devoid of all sense of fear. 
 As Billy fell, transfixed by a great barbed spear, they 
 "saw red," and, as if fired by mutual impulse, both 
 sides closed up, and a fierce hand-to-hand melee en- 
 sued, such as Mr. M'Pherson had never previously 
 witnessed between natives. In their horrible white 
 masks of warpaint, and with blazing eyes and every 
 feature instinct with the pure savage, devilish and 
 murderous lust for blood, they presented a fearsome 
 and terrifying spectacle to the lonely onlooker. On 
 the termination of the fight, and when the victors 
 started to dash out the brains of the disabled with iron 
 bars and tomahawks, Mr. M'Pherson, sickned by the 
 spectacle, started to walk down to his dinghey. Be- 
 fore he reached his boat, however, a dozen of the 
 Junction Bay boys came running after him, demanding 
 his rifle. Several were bespattered with blood, and 
 on their condition of murderous excitement, he deemed 
 it wise to comply with their demand. He slipped out 
 the cartridges, and immediately thereafter the weapon 
 was plucked suddenly from his hand, and the whole 
 party dashed off in pursuit of their enemies. He had 
 hardly got on board his lugger when some of them 
 came running with the empty rifle, clamouring for
 
 50 PRESENT STATE. 
 
 cartridges, but to this demand he did not think wise 
 to yield. 
 
 The party of Junction Bay natives who went in 
 pursuit of their foes did not return to the camp until 
 late the following day. When questioned by Mr. 
 M'Pherson, they denied having overtaken any of the 
 Liverpool River natives, but as several of them bore 
 dried bloodstains on their bodies, and they appeared 
 completely exhausted, Mr. M'Pherson believes further 
 fighting took place in the bush, and that few of the 
 murderers lived to return to their homes. 
 
 Polling Bay is a kind of neutral territory, situated 
 between Junction Bay and the Liverpool River, and 
 the bulk, or more, of Junction Bay natives were em- 
 ployed by Mr. M'Pherson in his trepanging business. 
 Mr. M'Pherson has brought back with him the Junction 
 Bay native who was wounded, also the spear which 
 caused the wound, and several other specimens of the 
 battle. 
 
 Bearing nothing on the question under dis- 
 cussion, nevertheless it ought to be preserved 
 as a sidelight on the present history of the 
 continent.
 
 f 
 THE WAY THITHER. 51 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 The Way Thither. 
 
 There are two routes from the United States 
 to Australia. On one you go to Vancouver, 
 British Columbia, and take the monthly boat 
 which sails under British flags. By these 
 boats, ostensibly run by the Canadian Pacific 
 R. R., but really by the Union Steamship Co., 
 of New Zealand, you can change boats at the 
 Fiji Islands for Aukland, N. Z., or continue on 
 to same place by way of Brisbane and Sydney, 
 Australia. Or you can go to San Francisco and 
 take the Mariposa, an American boat running 
 every thirty-six days to Tahiti, the French 
 island in the South Pacific, where after a 
 week's wait you can take a British boat for 
 Wellington, New Zealand; or after a three 
 weeks' wait you can take a British boat for 
 Aukland on the north end of that island direct.
 
 52 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 Owing to the ignorance or shortsightedness of 
 our bucolic congressmen from Iowa and Kan- 
 sas, who did not even know there is an ocean, 
 in refusing a subsidy there is no line of steam- 
 ers direct to Australasia thus causing untold 
 loss to our trade with these countries. There 
 are no steamships navigating the prairies of 
 Iowa, why should they navigate the Pacific? 
 What concern have we with countries where 
 it is night when da} 7 here, and where it is sum- 
 mer when winter here? The less we have to 
 do with foreign countries anyhow the better. 
 They do not vote for president and congress- 
 men. If they had seen as I saw the steamer 
 almost loaded with the oranges and lemons of 
 California consigned to New Zealand, and the 
 British boat load on at Brisbane, Australia, 
 600 cases of dried onions consigned to Seattle, 
 U. S., they would think as I think that this is 
 only one little world, and the more people of 
 different climes trade with each other the 
 more they are all benefited. My grocer keeps 
 a delivery wagon with horse. It costs some- 
 thing to be sure, but he is correspondingly 
 benefited in his business; otherwise he would 
 not keep one. On the other hand I never knew 
 our congress to refuse to increase its member-
 
 f 
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 53 
 
 ship, their own salaries, or to build great office 
 buildings costing millions for their own indi- 
 vidual convenience. These were my thoughts 
 when on going from New Orleans to the Isth- 
 mus of Panama I found I had to take a Nor- 
 wegian vessel, there being no American boat 
 leading from the heart of our country to the 
 place where we are supporting a great army 
 of men and spending six hundred millions of 
 dollars. 
 
 As it is there would be no American Mari- 
 posa leaving the United States for Tahiti did 
 not the French government grant it a subsidy 
 as the shortest and quickest route for its mails 
 to its archipelago. Even that has resulted in 
 making those islands virtually an appendage 
 to this country. Only the flag and officials are 
 French. One feels, however, like congratulat- 
 ing the islanders for being under that flag, as 
 for this reason the happy, amiable disposition 
 of their people has not yet been soured and 
 crushed by puritanism. 
 
 As I had had Tahiti on my slate for years, 
 had not been in Frisco after the great fire, and 
 naturally preferred the southern route, I took 
 the Mariposa. 
 
 The voyage to Tahiti is a pleasant trip; the
 
 54 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 boat a comfortable one with large roomy 
 berths and cabins, the officers gentlemanly. To 
 a lover of the sea, like myself, the trip was even 
 fascinating. The gradual dropping of our 
 northern constellations and the arising of new 
 ones, the perfect health and renewal of youth- 
 ful enthusiasm, the absence of all cares other 
 than those pertaining to childhood, mere eat- 
 ing and sleeping, causes one to plan still other 
 voyages, and like Ulysses to keep them up 
 even if eighty years should come to chill one 's 
 ardor in other directions. All other pleasures 
 and experiences pall upon one with advancing 
 years. The feel and smell of the salt sea 
 breeze in the tropics retain to the last the zest 
 they had for me when at twenty -two at Savan- 
 nah, Georgia, I first glanced over the ocean 
 and realized my dreams. It was a typical 
 Pacific crowd. The group of Chinese going to 
 the archipelago "in bond", the French officials 
 returning from a vacation in France, the 
 crowd of tourists bound only to Tahiti, the 
 Britishers bound for the colonies by that route 
 through the States, probably to return and 
 settle there after finding the colonies not up to 
 expectation; the few globe trotters bound for 
 everywhere in general, the reverend gentle-
 
 f 
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 55 
 
 man with a thirst like a Sahara, the actress 
 from San Francisco and Coney Island, skilled 
 musician and more skilled flirt. My, if those 
 kodak pictures are discovered won't there be 
 trouble in Spokane? 
 
 One thing, of course, that increased the 
 pleasure of the trip was the natural cheerful- 
 ness of the crowd, the American crowd. 
 Americans, the residents of the United States, 
 are now the gayest and happiest people in the 
 world, much more so than even the French 
 who in their decadence have lost that, form- 
 erly their chief characteristic. Whatever may 
 be the cause of our national exhuberance, it is 
 irrepressible. It may be the Celtic element in 
 our blood, it may be our marvelous success, it 
 may be the lack of a superior caste, it may be 
 the motley discordant elements in our popula- 
 tion, but the fact remains, and it is quickly 
 noticed by foreigners traveling for the first 
 time in the country, and they tell me they 
 enjoy it. Years ago it was said that a well- 
 known theatre manager in Chicago asked a 
 playwright to write him a play. His only 
 requisitions were that it should have a nigger, 
 a Dutchman, an Irishman, a Chinaman and a 
 jackass. So in our national life we have all the
 
 56 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 elements of a comedy, and we live a comedy. 
 We Americans make fun of everything, sacred 
 or profane, at everybody from the highest to 
 the lowest, and even at ourselves. Mark Twain 
 embodied the national spirit when he advised 
 a friend to go to heaven if he wanted a good 
 climate and to hell if he wanted good society. 
 The Englishman or colonial may be a school 
 teacher from some obscure village. He bears 
 himself with all the dignity and solemnity that 
 is supposed to appertain to the president of 
 Harvard College. The American great banker, 
 lawyer or captain of industry, when off duty 
 tries to travel incognito and he becomes a boy 
 again. If he did not he would be guyed un- 
 mercifully. How often after an outing or a 
 voyage one has discovered the genial conver- 
 sationalist and boon companion to be a man of 
 national or world-wide reputation. But woe 
 to anyone who, misled by this apparent friend- 
 liness, when on land poaches on his preserves. 
 "Off with his head! So much for Bucking- 
 ham!" For one I hope it will be many a cen- 
 tury before we lose that happy, noisy, singing, 
 joking and joshing spirit. It is said to be the 
 favorite jest on the London Music Hall stage 
 when an actor says he has just been around to
 
 f 
 THE WAY THITHER. 57 
 
 some hotel listening to the Americans eat. I 
 hope it will be long before we have to eat 
 carrion and such vile cooking with the silent 
 air of a bulldog bolting his food. 
 
 I wish, for the reader's sake, I could write a 
 traveler's description of Tahiti, the beautiful 
 isle, and its seaport, Papetee the " water 
 basket", which its name implies. I am too 
 old, have traveled too much. The circular 
 sweep of the bay with its cocoa palm trees 
 bending over the water at each extremity of 
 its arms, the background of green mountains 
 covered with fogs and mist, the diving boys, 
 the long row of little stores facing the water, 
 the white even teeth of the smiling dark- 
 skinned natives ! For forty years at intervals 
 they have been familiar to me one place or 
 another, only the natives differing. I fear that 
 now a wholesome meal, a good bed and a rea- 
 sonable freedom from insects concern me more 
 than the turquoise sky, the opalescent sea and 
 the snow-white coral beach of the professional 
 traveler. When away from them I long for 
 them and dream of them. Present, they are as 
 familiar and conventional to me as the corn- 
 fields of Illinois, my native state. Without a 
 new mineral, with hardly a plant unknown to
 
 58 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 me, only the ethnology of the islands could 
 appeal to me. There was at first the dream- 
 like familiarity, as though at some previous 
 time in my life or at some previous existence 
 I had been there. This continued some days. 
 I remarked to friends: "I am at Tahiti, but I 
 don't know I am at Tahiti." One incident 
 awakened me. Some distance out of town on 
 the sea drive to the left was a large house un- 
 occupied, situated in a grove of cocoanuts and 
 mangos. Over the gateway was a board sign 
 painted whereon was one word, "Tabu", and 
 as soon as seen the rest of the world instantly 
 vanished. I was on Tahiti, the "Gem of the 
 Pacific", and no where else. The rest of my 
 stay there was clear and well defined. But for 
 this I might have left not even feeling that I 
 had been there. 
 
 These obsessions, if I may call them so, are 
 becoming too frequent in my advanced years. 
 Three or four years ago just as I emerged from 
 a great office building in Chicago I lost con- 
 sciousness of where I was. I knew I was in a 
 large city, but what one I could not tell. I 
 knew I wanted to be in my office, but where it 
 lay or how to get there I knew not. My first 
 impression was to ask a policeman, but was
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 69 
 
 ashamed to do so, so I went into an entryway 
 and leaned against the wall. At first the 
 crowds passing and the surrounding buildings 
 made no impression. Gradually my mind 
 cleared, the buildings took on the familiar 
 appearance of acquaintances, and I saw I was 
 in the Chicago where I had lived thirty-eight 
 years, and that I had wandered two blocks at 
 a tangent out of my way. Then last summer 
 I was in Denver eating my dinner in a restau- 
 rant. At once I forgot what town I was in. I 
 paid my bill and went outside in dim wonder- 
 ment of what city was holding me. I stood by 
 the door worrying my mind until I saw a sign 
 of the Denver something, and then I knew. 
 My friends on reading this will at once say I 
 was drunk. Perhaps I was. 
 
 I cannot drop Tahiti, however, without tell- 
 ing of two of the funniest things I ever saw. 
 A little inwards from the sea beach was a half- 
 grown pig industriously rooting in the ground. 
 Upon its back was perched very much at home 
 a black jackdaw. At intervals, perhaps when 
 the porker would turn up some morsel desired 
 by said jackdaw, he would jump down, swal- 
 low it, and resume his position on the pig's 
 back watching for another bite. Both seemed
 
 60 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 satisfied; the pig offered no objections, and I 
 for once in my life wished I had a kodak. The 
 other funny sight was a native Tahitan woman, 
 big and fat, lying stretched out flat on her back 
 in the street with head on the ground playing 
 an accordian, while around her were seated a 
 number of other natives listening. Her easy 
 unconventional attitude was both charming 
 and irresistibly ludicrous. In Honolulu a 
 policeman would have told her to be ashamed 
 of herself and to get into her straight jacket. 
 I now know why travelers say that Tahiti is 
 the only unspoiled island in the Pacific. 
 
 As to the bibliography of the archipelago I 
 know very little, nor did I try to inform my- 
 self. Aside from Mrs. Brassey's " Voyage of 
 the Sunbeam" and Herman Melville's 
 "Omoo" and "Typee", all written and read by 
 me many, many, years ago, I know only Dr. 
 Senn's pleasant little book on the islands, 
 which is sufficient for the ordinary reader of 
 travels. Clement Wragg, the "Old Proba- 
 bility" of New Zealand, wrote about it and 
 New Caledonia, the other French island, but 
 the work is the veriest trash. I wish the Chi- 
 cago critics who so unmercifully hammered a 
 previous literary effort of mine had to read it.
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 61 
 
 Then they would be sorry they had treated me 
 so meanly. If I had the power I would inflict 
 on them a still more terrible punishment. I 
 would condemn them for the balance of their 
 lives to read nothing but Indiana novels. Not 
 that I ever read an Indiana novel in all my 
 born days, but I know from their favorable re- 
 views of all of them that they must be some- 
 thing terrible. But perhaps the critics afore- 
 said are Indiana productions themselves. If 
 so they are pardonable because they could not 
 be expected to know what a book is. Ignorance 
 and ill-breeding, they say, are the two things 
 we cannot charge up against anybody. It 
 seems in literature the first offense is the most 
 severely punished, and with every succeeding 
 crime the punishment is lessened, and I 
 thought I ought to be leniently treated because 
 I had never tried to inflict a novel on the pub- 
 lic. When a very young man, afflicted with a 
 hunger as big as a cold storage, I made my 
 bread and a little butter translating French 
 novels for Chicago publishers. I did it for the 
 same reason a burglar breaks into a house I 
 needed the money. I wanted to make a trans- 
 lation of Balzac's works, only one book of 
 which Eugenia Grandet had ever appeared
 
 62 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 in English. Chicago publishers all told me 
 they had never heard of Balzac, but if I would 
 write some readable novels they would buy 
 them. My reply was that I thought I was will- 
 ing to do for money anything that any other 
 man would, but I would draw the line at novel 
 writing. Even that did not count in my favor 
 when they reviewed my " Aztecs and Mayas." 
 With Baratonga, New Zealand, Australia, 
 the Fiji Islands, and possibly New Caledonia, 
 beckoning me on I felt that I could not spare 
 three weeks on Tahiti, so made a week answer 
 and left for Wellington, although this would 
 necessitate doubling the 700 miles of the North 
 Island, once by water and once by rail. I 
 ought to have waited the three weeks and gone 
 direct to Auckland. There was a joke extant 
 about fifty years ago about country town 
 hotels: "There are two hotels in that town; 
 don 't go to the one you intend going to. But it 
 makes no difference which ever one you go to 
 you will wish you had gone to the other. " Per- 
 haps if I had taken the Auckland boat I would 
 advise you now to take the Wellington boat. A 
 couple of days before day scheduled for sailing 
 there limped into Papetee a weather-beaten 
 old hulk with a decided list to port, a little
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 63 
 
 poop deck at the stern while at its level in 
 front was a forest of ventilators and cook's 
 chimneys, while the funnel belched out all its 
 cinders directly in the faces of anyone who 
 tried to sit upon the only space where passen- 
 gers could take air. No deck cabin was 
 apparent. It was the Hauroto, Union Line 
 steamer for Wellington, and we were told it 
 was to be our home for thirteen days. It was 
 decidedly a case of cheer up; the worst is yet 
 to come. We had been told that there were 
 first-class cabins for ten. Eleven first-class 
 passengers were trans-shipped. I hoped I 
 might as an old man be one of the favored. The 
 agent on the dock and the head steward ar- 
 ranged matters after a very simple rule. The 
 Britishers, whether first or second-class, were 
 given the first-class cabins. The Americans, 
 all first-class passengers, were given the sec- 
 ond-class cabins. To my lot fell a second- 
 class cabin in the middle of the boat with 
 its only window looking straight up at the sky. 
 It had as much ventilation as at the bottom of 
 a cistern, and we were in the tropics sailing 
 directly into summer. A little country school 
 teacher from New Zealand was given a first- 
 class cabin all to himself; kissing goes by favor.
 
 64 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 I was in for a crowning experience. I have 
 traveled wide and much, am familiar with 
 American, German, English, French, Spanish, 
 Norwegian and Mexican steamships, but the 
 Hauroto is easily the worst I have ever en- 
 countered. Previously one of the Hall line in 
 the Mediterranean held that pre-eminence. I 
 think in spending thirteen days on the Hau- 
 roto I have atoned for all the sins I ever com- 
 mitted, all that I want to commit, and all that 
 I ever will commit during the balance of my 
 life. Minutes were like hours, hours like days, 
 days like weeks. When I had been ten days 
 on the boat it seemed as though when I last 
 walked the streets of Chicago or San Fran- 
 cisco were in some past existence, and then it 
 seemed as though I were condemned for all 
 eternity to wander around the Pacific in that 
 boat like another Flying Dutchman. I re- 
 called that Prof. George Dorsey had said in 
 his writings that the Australian boats were 
 the worst in the world, how Mark Twain, after 
 traveling on another Australian boat, had said 
 the company ought to insure its boat for 
 several times its value and then set it on fire. 
 If my curses were ponderable I fear the boat 
 would have gone to the bottom with all on
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 65 
 
 board. One night below was sufficient; after 
 that a blanket and pillow on deck were pre- 
 ferred, where I was in a perpetual snow storm 
 of soot and cinders. Every woman on board 
 was sea sick from the moment of starting to 
 the moment of landing, and some of them for 
 a week afterwards. I myself after being at 
 sea twenty-seven days without a qualm was 
 overcome by nausea for the first time in many 
 years, to my intense humiliation. And then 
 the smells rank, fetid, sickening pouring up 
 from the engines and cook's galleys right for- 
 ward under our eyes, with all the ventilators 
 from below belching their foul air right in our 
 faces, penned up as we were on the little deck 
 in the stern of the vessel. To our complaints 
 a colonial remarked: "The Americans must 
 have their sense of smell abnormally devel- 
 oped. Now I cannot notice any disagreeable 
 smells at all. ' ' I later learned why. And the 
 cooking! Twenty years or thereabouts had 
 deadened my recollection of English cooking. 
 It all came back vividly. I like the Italian and 
 Spanish cooking; I even like the Norwegian 
 cabbage soup ; the tamales, chili con carne and 
 tortillas of the Mexicans, and even the kous- 
 kous and kibobs of the Mohammedans, but
 
 66 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 honestly I balk at English cooking, and coin- 
 cide with the opinion of all the peoples of the 
 earth when I say that for badness it bears the 
 palm. When I made this statement it was 
 violently contested by all the English on 
 board. I at once got a copy of the Weekly 
 London Times that was lying with other peri- 
 odicals in the dining room and read to them 
 an article therefrom. It was in substance to 
 the tenor that English cooking was the worst 
 on earth. It wondered why, as the English 
 were so progressive in all other matters (sic), 
 they either could not or would not improve 
 in their cooking, etc., etc. They could not 
 make one word in reply. However bad it 
 was, it was the least objectionable thing 
 on the ship. The roasts of pork, lamb and 
 mutton, and the crackers, or biscuits as 
 they call them, of various kinds were really 
 excellent. So with these and an abundance of 
 wholesome tropical fruits we were in no dan- 
 ger of going hungry. Perhaps someone will 
 say it was not very polite or diplomatic to find 
 fault with a nation's cooking on one of its 
 boats, but on that boat I was neither a gentle- 
 man nor a diplomat. I was a Mississippi River 
 roust-about, or a stowaway on an Alaska boat,
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 67 
 
 or, if you choose, the son of a sea cook. One 
 night one of the cooks jumped overboard. It 
 was his first trip on that boat. He died rather 
 than spend a week longer on that boat and eat 
 its cooking. We Americans all decided that 
 he was a brave, sensible man. My, how we 
 envied him his sleep in the tranquil waters of 
 the warm Pacific. We hoped that if a shark 
 found him it was while he was yet fresh, as we 
 did not want to think of even a shark eating 
 rotten meat. The Hauroto gone but not for- 
 gotten. 
 
 From Auckland on towards Australia, four 
 days, the Moana boat was excellent, excepting 
 for the narrow little berths. On my drawing 
 comparisons between it and the Hauroto I was 
 told a poor boat was purposely kept on the 
 Tahitan route to prevent passengers from 
 Europe going through the States as a warmer 
 and more preferable route, and drive them 
 over the Canadian Pacific R. R., which I de- 
 nounced as a Yankee trick, to their great 
 amusement. The boat was crowded to the last 
 berth. The morning after sailing I noticed at 
 the breakfast table that I was the only one to 
 eat raw fruit. Then I knew I was the only 
 American on board. It was a typical English
 
 68 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 and colonial crowd. They gulped down their 
 food in silence, and swilled down great quanti- 
 ties of ale and whiskey. I ventured a remark 
 to the gentleman at my left, but received only 
 a monosyllabic reply. Nothing more was said 
 at table by either myself or anyone within my 
 hearing during the whole four days. Some 
 cricket was played on deck, and a great deal of 
 gambling indulged in in the smoking room, but 
 the piano was not once opened. There was a 
 theatre party of about forty returning to Aus- 
 tralia from New Zealand, but except for two 
 or three of the ladies I could not pick out a 
 single member of the company. They all con- 
 ducted themselves like everybody else, and I 
 will say very much as ladies and gentlemen; 
 but imagine such a combination on an Amer- 
 ican boat in the summer time. My room mate, 
 an Australian by birth, a manufacturer from 
 Adelaide, a thorough gentleman and excellent 
 companion, had reported that I was an Amer- 
 ican, so the last morning, as we were approach- 
 ing Sydney, several men came to me, tendered 
 their cards and engaged in lengthy conversa- 
 tion. I had often noticed that in Europe or 
 Africa even the highest English nobility were 
 glad to converse with me as soon as they ascer-
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 69 
 
 tained I was an American, and they would 
 laugh heartily at my American anecdotes or 
 Yankee slang, when they would not even speak 
 to one of their own compatriots. Why? 
 
 On the Mariposa going down was a violinist 
 from San Francisco, paying a visit to Sydney, 
 his native town. He had lived twelve years or 
 over in California, and was as pronounced an 
 American in his ways as any man on board. 
 With a splendid repertory, it was an excep- 
 tional evening that he did not favor us with 
 selections, sometimes playing to near mid- 
 night. I might almost say he was the life of 
 the party. The minute he boarded the Hauroto 
 he seemed to change his nature completely, 
 settling back in the morose glumness of the 
 English, or their close imitators, the colonials 
 His violin was not taken out of its case. In 
 answer to our repeated requests he would re- 
 ply: "I am afraid if I play the violin I will get 
 sea sick." 
 
 I noticed that at the band concerts given in 
 the parks at Wellington, Auckland and Syd- 
 ney, the audience never applauded. 
 
 I will confess the Briton on his native heath 
 is not an amiable object, whatever he may be 
 abroad, but they are not so bad as to justify
 
 70 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 their hating themselves to the exent that they 
 do. 
 
 I suppose it is a matter of taste as to whether 
 one prefers the ice-bound reserve of the Eng- 
 lish or the ready sociability of all the other 
 civilized peoples. As I have already stated, we 
 Americans in this, as in most other ways, fol- 
 low the continental rather than the English 
 manner. I have often noticed that after a 
 twelve months ' residence in the United States 
 the Englishmen themselves are as frank and 
 full of jollity as a native born. I have yet to 
 meet an Englishman who after twenty or more 
 years residence in the United States, having 
 made his fortune and retired, was content to 
 pass the remainder of his days in the land of 
 his nativity. It would be impossible to relate 
 all the circumstances in reference to this that 
 have come under my observation. I will relate 
 one : A few years ago on the train going to the 
 coast was an Englishman going to San Fran- 
 cisco where he had formerly lived for many 
 years; retiring well-to-do he had returned to 
 England, leaving Frisco for good. In England 
 he didn't like the climate, he didn't like the 
 cooking, and the hide-bound ways aroused his 
 constant indignation. He went to Paris and
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 71 
 
 soon tired of that. Naples, with its cheap 
 opera which San Francisco lacked, held him 
 captive for two years. Then realizing, as he 
 expressed it that France and Italy had nothing 
 for a live man but dissipation, he determined 
 to return to the Pacific coast. "One lived", he 
 said, "more in one year of San Francisco than 
 in four of any European country. After years 
 of that live electric atmosphere every Euro- 
 pean city seems stagnant. ' ' I met our violinist 
 of the Mariposa in Sydney, his native town. 
 He asked me how I liked the town. On my re- 
 plying that it was a very beautiful place he 
 smiled rather derisively and said: "Y-e-s, if 
 you look at it in that way." 
 
 The direct way home is by way of Brisbane, 
 the Fiji Islands and Honolulu, by one of the 
 crack steamers of the Union line, now meta- 
 morphosed into a Canadian Pacific affair. As 
 passengers will be supposed to come eastward 
 over that road, and all through tickets read 
 that way, they did their best. The Marama, 
 upon which I sailed, was the second best 
 steamer of the line. Except for those narrow 
 berths in which a large man could not turn on 
 his side, in appointment and personnel nothing 
 better could be desired. In fact thev made
 
 72 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 things too comfortable for the passengers. A 
 little sun, sea breeze and rain will kill nobody, 
 but they kept the promenade deck tightly en- 
 closed, top and sides, with canvas so that even 
 the sea could not be seen except through a 
 two-inch aperture. I had a chart of the south- 
 ern sky which I had bought in Australia, and 
 had planned to study the summer constella- 
 tions of the south. I did not even get a glimpse 
 of the stars. On the Siberia, one of the finest 
 vessels that plow the Pacific, there is an upper 
 deck where one can see sun and sky if he de- 
 sires. The Marama lacked that and used alto- 
 gether too much canvas around what deck it 
 did have. To a man living in the country as 
 I do, the impression was constraining. I had 
 long before ceased to look for agreeable cook- 
 ing. Having almost lost my life in Australia 
 from eating rotten food, I was necessarily 
 cautions. Still it seemed an aggravation to see 
 on the bill of fare such things as golden pheas- 
 ant, wood cock, hare, pigeon, shrimp and 
 oysters, and yet not be able to touch one of 
 them. It seemed almost like a swindle as I had 
 paid for them. I often ordered them, but to 
 sight, taste and smell they were disgusting. 
 Usually I could not continue my meal until
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 73 
 
 they were removed from in front of me. I 
 might attribute this to my natural crankiness, 
 which I confess to be great, were it not that the 
 French, Germans and Americans on board ex- 
 pressed their opinions on the matter to pre- 
 cisely the same effect. One, a German business 
 man who had been over the line before, told me 
 he had sent a five dollar piece (a pound) down 
 to the cook with orders that if there were any 
 meats on board that were not rotten he was to 
 get them, and under no circumstances to send 
 any other to his plate. Said he: "When I am 
 on a French or German boat I can eat freely 
 without regard to consequences. When among 
 the English I must watch every bite I put in 
 my mouth or suffer the consequences." The 
 English can never call themselves civilized 
 until they rid themselves of the habit of eating 
 carrion. Anyhow they ought to eat it in the 
 seclusion of their own homes, and not inflict 
 it on the rest of the world. The Canadians are 
 half Americanized. During ten trips into 
 British America I have had no occasion to find 
 fault with the eating. Those boats claim to be 
 Canadian. The majority of the passengers are 
 American, at least they were on the Marama, 
 as they invariably are on the Atlantic liners.
 
 74 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 They ought for their sakes use some sanitary 
 precautions and engage a cosmopolitan cook. 
 It is said bears, dogs and Indians can eat 
 putrid meat without evil effect. I suppose the 
 English can also because they early become 
 immune. We know from the old novelists, 
 Smollett, etc., down to our own experiences 
 that meat was by them not considered good 
 until "high" and that the fumier, as they call 
 it, so disgusting to an American, was an agree- 
 able part of the repast. Much has been said 
 and written about the evil effects of eating 
 tropical fruits, but in many winters spent in 
 hot countries I have never once experienced 
 any evil consequences from unrestrained in- 
 dulgence. Several times I have been, there as 
 well as in Australia, brought to the verge of 
 the grave by rotten meat or fish. I am too old 
 now ever to become immune to that trouble. 
 Of course no one ever expects to get coffee fit 
 to drink among the English, but they ought to 
 learn how to cook eggs and make good bread. 
 I thought I would like to bring home a piece of 
 the bread from the boat, heavy, sour and 
 soggy, as I felt no one would really believe ex- 
 cept upon inspection that any people could eat 
 such stuff, and that is what one invariably
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 76 
 
 got everywhere in Australia and New Zealand. 
 As to eggs, they could soft boil them. To fry 
 or poach them, the only other ways that people 
 ever attempt to cook them, was to reduce them 
 to the state of sole leather. Nor could we ex- 
 pect them to make good ice cream, as they 
 think eating it a barbarous habit. They are 
 going to unheard-of lengths in accommodation 
 to serve it at all on the boats. It is not served 
 in their hotels. At one town, never getting it 
 in the hotel, I went to a little fruit store where 
 the woman gave a tablespoonful of very poor 
 ice cream for 12 cents. I remarked that in the 
 United States ice cream was supposed to end 
 every dinner. She replied with a sneer: u lce 
 cream at dinner. Fawncy." There were 
 numberless violations of all the rules of good 
 taste as accepted by all the rest of the world, 
 one of the chief of which was the sacrilege of 
 boiling a turkey. Other than by boiling I 
 never saw turkey served in all Australia. 
 Imagine an American housewife throwing up 
 her hands in horror at the idea. A turkey 
 should be roasted. "A turkey boiled is a tur- 
 key spoiled." Boiling reduces it to a slippery, 
 gelatinous mass, and is a crime worthy of the 
 severest punishment. Celery, supposed by the
 
 76 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 rest of the world to be a hors d'oeuvre, is eaten 
 by the colonists at the end of a meal with the 
 dessert, or as they call it the sweets. I was 
 rather glad of this, however, as it was there on 
 the table to be eaten, which gave us Americans 
 first chance at the best portions. Going from 
 winter into full summer, back into winter 
 again, the boats have the best markets in all 
 the world to draw upon; and they do draw 
 upon them. In variety of productions and 
 abundance of the best no fault can be found, 
 still the result is distinctly unfavorable. De 
 gustibus non est disputandum is an exploded 
 theory. There is a distinct standard of taste, 
 and not to conform to it is a sign of barbarism. 
 The rest of the world will never accommodate 
 itself to rotten sea food and game. 
 
 The late John J. Knickerbocker of Chicago, 
 an extensive traveler, once said to the writer 
 on a French boat that he never took an English 
 boat when he could avoid it because they did 
 everything but knock a man down and take his 
 purse out of his pocket. The form of organized 
 robbery practiced on the English boats is 
 aggravating, and the Marama is one of the 
 worst offenders in that respect. I had to tip 
 ten persons to get off that boat, and two more
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 77 
 
 wanted something and were much disap- 
 pointed by not getting it. On the American 
 boat only four. But considering this all as 
 legitimate they took up two subscriptions on 
 the Marama for shore charities, besides the 
 usual English custom of a charitable concert. 
 And then was practiced a scheme for extract- 
 ing money that was new to me, although it 
 may now be usual on their transatlantic liners, 
 as it is nearly twenty years since I crossed 
 that water on English boats. A committee on 
 sports was appointed and they called on all 
 the male passengers for five dollars each as a 
 fund for prizes. I supposed at the time that 
 the five dollars so raised was merely a form 
 of gambling or lottery, and that the money 
 would be merely redistributed. Not at all. 
 As we were going into Honolulu the sports 
 ceased and the prizes were exhibited in the 
 ladies ' salon. They consisted of a few teapots, 
 hair brushes and other toilet articles. If the 
 whole kit had been given to me I would not 
 have paid excess baggage to get them home. 
 I would say that $35.00 in Chicago would have 
 purchased the lot. An American lady told me 
 she won a prize. It was a Japanese teapot for 
 which they had paid in the barber shop
 
 78 THE WAY THITHER. 
 
 seventy-five cents, but which she could have 
 purchased in any store for twenty-five; that 
 she did not know what she would do with it 
 when she got it home, etc. After leaving Hono- 
 lulu the report of the committee was posted 
 up in the gangway. Of the $500 contributed, 
 $90 were spent for prizes, $140 were given the 
 servants as tips (this in addition to the in- 
 evitable excessive tips), and the remainder 
 was appropriated to some land charity whose 
 name I did not bother to remember. I should 
 say that this was a rake-off that would have 
 satisfied the heart of even a Chicago politician. 
 I suppose I ought not to comment on this pro- 
 ceeding as I refused to participate in the 
 games. I have seen rich suckers often swin- 
 dled by professional gamblers on the Atlantic, 
 and Alaska laborers lose in one night the re- 
 sult of a whole summer's work; but it has 
 always been a rule rigidly adhered to by me 
 not to risk money on games of chance, under 
 whatever guise or nature. Then when ashore 
 on the train in the United States others told 
 me they did not approve of it at all, but lacked 
 the moral courage to refuse. The English have 
 much to say concerning begging in Spain, and 
 their usual appellation for the whole race of
 
 THE WAY THITHER. 79 
 
 Spaniards is " Beggars". So they cannot con- 
 sider it unfair for me to point out wherein 
 they are themselves deficient in that respect. 
 
 Two days in the Fiji Islands are not enough ; 
 a month in mid-summer rather too much. 
 They deserve a separate trip in their winter, 
 with Samoa to share the time. Then dear old 
 Honolulu, the glorious Stars and Stripes and 
 "Auld Lang Syne." Then Victoria for the 
 third time, formerly seeming so sleepy, now by 
 contrast so quick and modern ; then marvelous 
 Vancouver, already well known to me, des- 
 tined probably to be the largest city in Canada, 
 pulsating with life and vigor, where every eye 
 seemed full of hope and daring ; no stagnation, 
 no dry rot there. The only trace of the English 
 bull-headedness was in the steamer baggage 
 arrangements. As usual, having been given 
 no checks, I had to make three trips and hunt 
 personally a whole day for a missing trunk, at 
 my age no light undertaking in the pouring 
 rain, and then pay liberally for an employee to 
 help me in the search. If it had been carried 
 away on the through train by someone else, as 
 I really thought it had been, I would have had 
 no recourse, and no way of identifying my 
 trunk three thousand miles away. Blank the 
 Romans, and blank the way the Romans do.
 
 80 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 The Australians. 
 
 The first impression made upon an American 
 by the people is that they do not talk English, 
 that is United States English. Irish brogue is 
 familiar and easily understood by me, and the 
 Scotch dialect is not so very difficult. I could 
 make my way around London fairly well with- 
 out an interpreter, but to my astonishment 
 found on landing in Sydney that ordinary con- 
 versation was as unintelligible to me as Choc- 
 taw. I could sit in the cabin of a small boat or 
 in the compartment of a railway car, or even 
 between two men in a store who talked almost 
 over my head, without knowing anything at all 
 of what they said. Only here and there catch- 
 ing a familiar word, and this too while their 
 newspapers were written in clear, correct, in- 
 comparable English that far surpassed any-
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 81 
 
 thing that our Chicago papers would or could 
 use. I saw that Webster's International Dic- 
 tionary was everywhere in use but surely they 
 found no authority therein for their pronuncia- 
 tion even if they did for their spelling. Some 
 rules soon formulated themselves, however, in 
 my mind. A thing in a shop had been 
 "sowled", a man was very "bowled", the day 
 was very "cowld". The letter A except in ap- 
 pearance had dropped out of the language, and 
 its place taken by our long I. The "mide" 
 wished to know whether I would drink "ile" 
 or tea. The newsboy would ask me to buy a 
 "piper". The clerk in the shop told me they 
 were having a "sile" of caps; the jeweler that 
 the amethysts of Australia were too "pile" to 
 be valuable; the shipping clerk that the 
 steamer would "sile" on the 10th, etc. Then 
 our broad A has become broad 0. Glass was 
 "gloss', mass was "moss", pass was "poss", 
 my hat was "hot", a cat was "cot". This, 
 however was not strange to me as none of the 
 Europeans use our broad A. Then with all this 
 sprinkle the English themselves who dropped 
 the H where it should be aspirated and put on 
 the H where none should be used, and you can 
 imagine where it left a man who knew no other
 
 82 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 English than the universal slang of the Chi- 
 cago newspapers. To use the best Halsted 
 Street of which I am capable, it was fierce. My 
 thought was: "This is the last in my mind of 
 the theory that English will become the world- 
 wide language." Long before that might oc- 
 cur Australians and Americans will become 
 absolutely unintelligible to each other, as 
 much so as Germans and English. And yet I 
 met professors, scientific men and newspaper 
 writers who talked in lucid English with the 
 pronunciation such as we were taught in col- 
 lege, and which I remember to have been used 
 by English much-travelled noblemen met on 
 the continent or in Africa. 
 
 The second thought was: I didn't know 
 there was such a backward, unprogressive 
 people in the world. I had lived in Madrid 
 during the session of Parliament, boarding at 
 the hotel most frequented b}^ their statesmen. 
 I found them as advanced in ideas as any men 
 in the world, and as fully aware of the short- 
 comings of Spain. They saw as clearly as any 
 American could have done what was needed to 
 regenerate their country and its people. 
 Wrongly or rightly, they placed the failure to 
 advance upon the church. As they expressed
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 83 
 
 it; "The army supports the imperium, the 
 imperium supports the church, and the church 
 puts a damper on all our efforts. " I had found 
 in the larger Central and South American 
 cities as eager a thirst for science and advance- 
 ment as in the United States, and as persistent 
 a desire to place themselves abreast of the 
 United States, Germany and France in all the 
 results of modern investigations, as one could 
 expect, considering their poverty. It really 
 seemed as though where they were lacking it 
 was not through their own fault but owing to 
 their poverty, the ignorance of the great ma- 
 jority of their people, and the Indian and 
 Negro blood which predominates in those 
 countries. In Australia I could see neither 
 advancement nor even the desire for advance- 
 ment. With them the acme of perfection was 
 reached the day Nelson won the battle of 
 Trafalgar. They do not know or believe there 
 is such a word as progress. They as firmly 
 believe in the ultimate perfection of every- 
 thing English as it existed a hundred years 
 ago as they believe in their own existence. In 
 every country I had hitherto visited I found 
 an enlightened class that saw the light and 
 strove to reach it. In Australia there is no
 
 84 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 enlightened class. If Nelson or Wellington 
 did not use any given object in his daily life no 
 one need use it during the rest of the globe's 
 existence; to do so would be treason to their 
 memory. It is given to very few of the human 
 race to command great fleets in a naval battle. 
 Every human being eats, sleeps, strives for en- 
 joyment, suffers pain and sickness, plays his 
 little role as best he may according to his lights. 
 The little things that affect his comfort or 
 health are of greater importance to him than 
 military glory in another. To him he is the 
 universe. To the small Roman shop keeper or 
 farmer I suppose it made little difference 
 whether Augustus or Marcus Antonius headed 
 the government so long as he was undisturbed 
 in his little home with his wife and children. 
 So little difference did I consider that it made 
 to me whether Parker or Roosevelt was elected 
 president that I did not take the trouble to 
 vote for either of them. It makes very much 
 difference to me whether my sleep is disturbed 
 by flies and mosquitos and whether I am 
 poisoned by my food or not. 
 
 In considering what they term small mat- 
 ters, which I do not so term, I concede that 
 hitherto the English sailors have been the best
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 85 
 
 in the world, that the possession of the strong- 
 est fleet enables a nation to conrol any number 
 of savage peoples, that such control is for their 
 own good, and that the English have done a 
 great work in the world; also that even the 
 Australians are far ahead of naked cannibals. 
 The question is whether they are seeing the 
 end of their usefulness through their own stu- 
 pidity. 
 
 Writers in their periodical press and their 
 speakers are constantly harping on their in- 
 dependence, that Australia is as free as Eng- 
 land is free, that only liens of amity and blood 
 unite them, that when they desire, finding it 
 burdensome, the} 7 will cast off even that tie, 
 etc. They impressed me as being the worst 
 slaves on earth. I have spent several winters 
 under the greatest autocrat on earth, Diaz, 
 President of Mexico, and yet the Mexican 
 people impressed me as a free people working 
 out their way through eclecticism without 
 pressure from any direction. Having learned 
 the Spanish pronunciation in Madrid I have 
 occasionally criticised some Mexican for his 
 pronunciation. He invariably replied that 
 they did not speak Spanish, but Mexican. I 
 have in my library a copy of Gomara's history,
 
 86 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 " translated from the Spanish into Mexican by 
 ." The Australians are slaves 
 
 to English conventionality and to their fear of 
 the caste of nobility. They are constantly as- 
 serting their freedom of thought and action. 
 They do protest too much. Privately with an 
 American they express their dislike for the 
 nobility, but publicly their fear of their disap- 
 proval sways every action or impulse. They 
 carry this to an absurd extent. Even if they 
 do not know of one of that caste being present 
 they fear there might be and govern their 
 actions accordingly. Only in a lesser degree 
 do they worship the raw Englishman. The 
 cockney struts around with a lordly overbear- 
 ing air that would be decidedly irritating to a 
 Yankee. His opinion is law there, and whereas 
 here he would soon be filed into the semblance 
 of a cosmopolitan, there he grows more and 
 more cockney to his end. For instance, there 
 are no rocking chairs in Australia. Until the 
 nobility in England make them fashionable 
 they never will have them. As one who often 
 visits the English colonies, I really wish the 
 king would buy a few and put them in St. 
 James Palace, Windsor Castle, Balmoral and 
 Sandringham. Then the nobility would use
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 87 
 
 them, then the officers of the navy and army 
 would use them, then the clergy and learned 
 professions, then the tradesmen, then the 
 workers, and then the Australian hotels, and 
 I might have an easy chair to sit in when I am 
 reading in my hotel bedroom in far off Aus- 
 tralia. When one thinks how popular the 
 great bent-wood rockers are in Austria, Ger- 
 many, France, Italy, Spain, and through the 
 whole length and breadth of Latin America 
 and the isles thereof, and the number of Amer- 
 icans who, for one purpose or another, stop at 
 Australian hotels, this fact seems only an indi- 
 cation of bull-headed stubbornness. As it is, 
 the greatest hotel in Australia considers that 
 the innovation of rocking chairs would plunge 
 the whole British fabric into chaos. 
 
 "But this", says my English friend, "is a 
 very small matter to fulminate against." 
 When that hatred of innovation is carried into 
 every detail of hotel and restaurant life it be- 
 comes an intolerable vexation. Every hotel 
 bedroom in Australia is furnished precisely as 
 every other hotel bedroom, whether you are 
 staying in a place for which you pay $1.50 for 
 your room and three meals or whether you are 
 paying $2.00 for a room only in one of their
 
 88 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 greatest caravansaries. Instead of trying, as 
 in other large cities, to avail themselves of 
 every modern idea in comfort or sanitation 
 they, even their best hotels, try to slavishly 
 follow the oldest English inns. The furniture 
 all of a piece with the smallest country tavern, 
 the flat table as a washstand with its bowl and 
 pitcher, the wardrobe and dresser and infini- 
 tesimal looking glass placed so low that a man 
 cannot look into it unless he sits down, the two 
 kitchen chairs, the little iron bed with its 
 woven-wire hammock letting a stout man 
 down against the slats, its slippery hard mat- 
 tress stuffed with a tough wiry fiber known as 
 kaipok which by morning is half off the bed, 
 its pillows, hard as a chunk of lead, stuffed 
 with the same material, the room filled with 
 flies and mosquitoes, and the absence of heat 
 even in cold weather, and we have partially 
 the highest they try to attain in an Australian 
 first-class hotel. I say partially because in no 
 respect are their hotels within sixty or more 
 years in time with what the rest of the world 
 considers necessary. The hotel I lived in in 
 Sydney used, it is true, electric light, one to a 
 room, so dim and placed in so inconvenient a 
 position that I was compelled to buy candles
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 89 
 
 in order to read in my room, which candles 
 were all the more necessary as the light was 
 turned off all over the hotel at midnight, at 
 which hour the lift also stopped running not 
 to start again until 8 o'clock in the morning. 
 As I want my morning paper not later than 6 
 a. m., this necessitated my climbing down and 
 up five pairs of stairs. The bell boys? There 
 were none; only "mides" who never took less 
 than fifteen minutes to answer a call, usually 
 nearer three-quarters of an hour. Nor were 
 the restaurants, whether in hotel or in the city, 
 more convenient. Nothing before 8 a. m. if 
 you were starving. While you can get light re- 
 freshments, as they call tea and cake at any 
 time, you need not ask for a bit of meat before 
 noon sharp. If it is only fifteen minutes to 
 that time you may sit and wait for the magic 
 hour. Short orders and meals at all hours do 
 not go, nor can they even conceive the possi- 
 bility of such a thing. After 7 p. m., if you 
 have been so unfortunate as to be delayed on 
 your outing, you will find the hotel dining 
 room and all the restaurants closed. You may 
 find some place where you fill up on tea and 
 scones or go hungry. After the theater if you 
 hunt vigorously you may find some place
 
 90 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 where you can get some ice cream and cake, 
 but unless you know of just the place you will 
 visit six or seven well-known places before 
 you find one open. Night, which in other 
 quarters of the world is a period of joy and 
 gaiety, in Sydney is like a Sunday evening in a 
 New England village. By 9 o 'clock the people 
 are all in bed and asleep. 
 
 The worst plagues in the hotels and restau- 
 rants are the flies and mosquitos. Fleas are 
 no worse than in California, but every traveler 
 can use his own precautions. Before the 
 swarms of flies and mosquitos he is helpless. 
 So far as I could see no precaution is taken 
 either to diminish their number or to guard 
 against their ravages. Some of the beds have 
 nets to let down at night to keep away mos- 
 quitos, which is a very antiquated manner, 
 smothering in hot weather, preventing read- 
 ing on account of danger from fire, and totally 
 inadequate, as the hard mat they call a mat- 
 tress always slides to one side exposing from 
 one-fourth to one-third of the bed's surface to 
 the little pests from beneath. As against flies 
 they have neither fly paper, poison nor screens. 
 As we learn from Herodotus that the Egyp- 
 tians in his time used netting as screens, I am
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 91 
 
 constrained to say that the Australians are 
 three thousand years behind the times. Be- 
 coming acquainted with a gentleman and his 
 wife living at Brisbane, after thirteen years' 
 residence in the United States, I asked him 
 why they in particular did not use them. He 
 replied that the wire cloth was not to be 
 bought in Australia. So far as I could see, 
 their only method of exterminating flies was 
 by eating them. I am sure I found them in 
 my chocolate, in my coffee, in my milk, in my 
 sugar, in my soup, in the sauces by my meats, 
 and in my sweets, which they so term what we 
 call desserts. The sugar bowls on the tables, 
 always without covers, were usually black 
 with flies, so I had to mine towards the bottom 
 in order to get a spoonful uncontaminated. 
 They swarm free and unconstrained in the 
 markets, the groceries, the bakeries, fruit 
 stores, and in fact wherever food products are 
 offered for sale. They are as oblivious of them 
 as an Indian is of dirt. The answer is that the 
 royal family and nobility in England do not 
 use screens. I really wish the king would buy 
 some so that the nobility and all down the line 
 successively could use them, and I taking my 
 after-dinner nap in far off Australia would not
 
 92 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 have my forehead, which extends to the back 
 of my neck, used as a skating rink. (This idea 
 is for the benefit of colonials, as it is old and 
 worn out in the United States). But there is 
 a more serious aspect to this matter, as we will 
 show a little later on. 
 
 Except in freezing carcasses for export to 
 England, there is no refrigeration in Australia. 
 There are no ice chests in meat markets, gro- 
 ceries, restaurants or private families. In 
 front of every meat market is an iron grill, 
 closed at night and on Sundays, behind which 
 hang the meats with no other protection from 
 the flies, dust from the street, and deteriora- 
 tion from heat in a climate where the rubber 
 tree and palm live out of doors all the year. 
 While I was there it was seriously discussed 
 whether or not an ordinance should be passed 
 compelling the butchers and meat markets to 
 install ice chests. It was voted down on the 
 ground that it would subject them to expense. 
 On a Sunday I have often stopped to watch 
 through the grills the thousands of flies at 
 work on the meats which perforce might be 
 my fate to eat on the morrow. On buying but- 
 ter in a grocery it is not given to you in pound 
 packages wrapped neatly up in parafine paper
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 93 
 
 right from the ice as here. It is ladled out of 
 an open box not unlike our old cracker boxes, 
 where it stands in full view exposed to all the 
 flies and flying filthy dust of a great city. I 
 am very, I might say inordinately, fond of sea 
 food, and at first the lobsters, shrimps, oysters 
 and fish exposed to view in the lunch houses 
 looked very enticing. Beware; you may find 
 them fresh once, but the probability is that 
 three times out of four they are rotten, as they 
 stand thus exposed on the plates day and 
 night until they are eaten. If you were to ask 
 the proprietor why he did not keep them in an 
 ice chest he would not know what you meant, 
 as perhaps he had never seen an ice chest. As 
 a result intestinal diseases are very common. 
 One hears about them on all sides. The hotels 
 are full of them. They take them as a matter 
 of course, as we do the catarrh in Chicago. I 
 found that I could eat with safety only beef, 
 pork and mutton. After a sickness that almost 
 cost my life I had to cut sea food out of my 
 diet altogether. At no time during my whole 
 life have I been so near my death from disease 
 as while there. Disturbed by the commotion 
 causd by me when in agony, a dear old lady, 
 who with her husband occupied the adjoining
 
 94 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 room, with friendly offerings of brandy, etc., 
 said to my nurse: "Now I know he has been 
 eating fish. You must tell him that he cannot 
 eat fish in Australia. They are very unhealthy 
 in this country." I have spent several years 
 on the seaboard in warm countries, and made 
 many trips thither, one of which I have just 
 concluded (Sept.-Oct., 1910), during which I 
 lived upon fish, oysters, crabs and clams to 
 absolute exclusion of meats without evil re- 
 sults. So I must conclude it is not the fault of 
 the fish but the people that I and so many 
 others were made ill in that country. 
 
 I might go on in this matter indefinitely. 
 That backwardness extends through all the 
 ramifications of life. One asks himself seri- 
 ously the question: "Have we the right to 
 place in the front rank of civilized people such 
 violators of all the rules of right living ? ' ' Such 
 methods and ways may have been good enough 
 when George III was king. They are as anti- 
 quated now as a passenger sailing packet. It 
 has been eighteen years now since I lived in 
 England. I am not able at present to draw 
 parallels between the English and the coloni- 
 als, but my winter's trip left on my mind the 
 conviction that the English race is becoming
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 95 
 
 ossified, that like the French before Sedan 
 they think they have arrived at ultimate per- 
 fection, that nothing originating outside of 
 England is worthy of serious consideration. If 
 so they are in for a rude awakening. My con- 
 viction, rightly or wrongly, is that if ever the 
 shock comes between Germany and England 
 the immense colonial empire of the latter will 
 tumble to the ground like a house of cards. I 
 will not say that it would be for the world's 
 betterment to have that cataclysm. I am only 
 stating a mental conviction. 
 
 Although I have been ten times in Canada, 
 visited Africa and Gibraltar twice, been in the 
 black islands and British Honduras, all this 
 struck me with overwhelming surprise. It is 
 one thing to compare a few sparse highly 
 cultivated English with negros, and to com- 
 pare a great nation with the United States. 
 And Canada is much farther ahead of Aus- 
 tralia than is the United States ahead of 
 Canada. The mere fact that the Australians 
 think there is no country can teach them any- 
 thing is itself a proof of decadency. In the 
 swift race of life to stand still is to retrograde. 
 I did not go to Australia on a voyage of poli ti- 
 cal discovery, but I soon found myself think-
 
 96 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 ing night and day over the matter and goading 
 Avhatever intellectual vigor I may have in a 
 search for the cause. I soon found that it was 
 with them and all who have ever visited the 
 country, a threadbare subject. Froude, the 
 greatest English historian, does not take up 
 that phase in his book " Oceania", and yet 
 every speaker is daily asserting vehemently 
 that the English are not decadent. Every day 
 some writer in the press is declaring that there 
 is no halting, that the English blood retains all 
 its pristine vigor and that they are leading in 
 the advancement of civilization, all impres- 
 sions to the contrary notwithstanding; while 
 the very adjoining article in the same paper is 
 a melancholy confession of Aveakness and old 
 fogyism. All the rest of the world, even the 
 Chinese and Japanese, think the English are 
 decadent. That is one thing upon which all 
 the Canadians, Germans, French and Yankees 
 on board the Marama were united in opinion. 
 I believe they feel convinced of the fact them- 
 selves, or they would not among themselves so 
 constantly be asserting the contrary. The 
 woman who is constantly asserting her virtue 
 has been, through all the ages, an object of 
 suspicion.
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 97 
 
 Going down on the American boat was an 
 Austrian Pole about thirty years of age I 
 should judge. He got off at Tahiti and it 
 seems stayed three weeks at the well-known 
 social cranks' colony up the mountain, took 
 the boat from there to Auckland, and not lik- 
 ing New Zealand, went from there to Sydney 
 where I met him. He had lived in Germany, 
 France, London and the United States, and 
 was a thoroughly intelligent cosmopolitan. In 
 a long conversation with me, without my once 
 referring to the matter, he stated that Aus- 
 tralia held nothing for a live man, and that he 
 was going to the Argentine Republic; this ten 
 thousand miles away as though it were across 
 Lake Michigan. He attributed Australia's 
 depressed condition, upon which he dwelt at 
 length giving me many new points that I had 
 not learned, to the flatheadedness of the Eng- 
 lish race who as he claimed were incapable of 
 learning anything. In his own language he 
 said: "The whole world is copying after the 
 United States but the English; that is why 
 they are getting left. No new idea can be in- 
 troduced anywhere in the world that the 
 United States does not at once adopt and im- 
 prove upon. The English will not concede
 
 98 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 that the United States, nor any other people 
 in the world, can teach them anything. In 
 Austria if a man is doing anything in a new 
 manner on being asked why he replies that 
 that is the way it is accomplished in the 
 United States, which brings forth the re joiner. 
 Then it is all right." 
 
 To me it is still an open question whether 
 the country owes her misfortunes mostly to 
 English bullheadedness or to her form of 
 government. 
 
 For all this the Australians are likable fel- 
 lows with many noble traits. They are not 
 puritans. While they observe the Sunday 
 more strictly than they think of doing in the 
 United States, most things that are considered 
 mortal sins here they do not bother about. In 
 this they seem to follow the precept of Marcus 
 Aurelius who says: "Trouble not yourself over 
 the wrongdoing of your neighbor. Perhaps he 
 is not doing wrong." Their newspapers are 
 not filled with the so-called "war on vice" 
 while they keep mum during the time that 
 thousands of millions of dollars are stolen by 
 office holders from the public. Their local 
 administration does not make a great noise in 
 persecuting helpless fallen women, while
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 99 
 
 stealing ten millions a year as in Chicago. Pro- 
 hibition receives little encouragement. As in 
 England, Scotland and Ireland, even the most 
 of the clergy indulge in moderation, which is 
 the sensible philosophical point of view. I in- 
 sert here a clipping to illustrate how the 
 question is entertained in that country. Yet 
 they do not have a law punishing anyone who 
 does not drink liquor. 
 
 LOCAL OPTION IN ADELAIDE. 
 
 A Tempestuous Meeting. 
 
 Adelaide, Wednesday At the local option meeting 
 in ,the Central Market to-night between 4000 and 
 5000 people were present. The speakers were Revs. 
 C. I. Schafer, John Patterson, and Neild. 
 
 It was evident from the beginning that the speakers 
 would get a hostile reception, notwithstanding the 
 presence of a large number of police. 
 
 As soon as the proceedings commenced, a fusilade 
 of rotten eggs and ripe tomatoes assailed the speakers, 
 whose clothes were liberally bespattered. It was im- 
 possible to hear their addresses owing to the crowd 
 keeping up a constant chorus of interjections. 
 
 Mr. Schafer announced his intention of speaking if 
 he stayed till midnight. The crowd kept pushing into 
 the temporary platform, and several times the speakers 
 had to hold on to a convenient pipe for support. The 
 police moving amongst the crowd were tossed about 
 like ninepins. 
 
 Despite the din, the gentlemen continued to address 
 the meeting to the accompaniment of choruses and
 
 100 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 throwing of eggs. Eventually the announcement that 
 the lights would be turned off brought the meeting to 
 a termination amid laughter. Immediately the speak- 
 ers moved off, they were surrounded by a mob, who 
 hooted continuously as they were being escorted by 
 six policemen to the Pirie-street Methodist Church. 
 
 Horse racing, which in the States is the sum 
 of all the villainies, is there a popular sport 
 and is, I was told, often attended by the 
 Episcopal and Catholic clergymen. The writer 
 has not seen a horse race since the year 1872. 
 but he can see no more wrong in it than in 
 school boys racing. If anyone loses more than 
 he can afford by betting upon them that is his 
 lookout, not the public's. Boxing, one of the 
 finest of all exercises to breed up manly men, 
 is everywhere as popular and as little frowned 
 upon as any other form of exercise. As a re- 
 sult the Australian uses his fist where the 
 American uses his revolver, or the Italian his 
 knife. On the boat going from Auckland to 
 Sydney one evening two of the sailors on the 
 main deck stripped for a four-round setto 
 under all the rules There was a referee and 
 seconds. The rounds were timed, and many of 
 us passengers above, ladies as well as gentle- 
 men, crowded to the rail to watch it. It was 
 a pretty exhibition. It made my blood move
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 101 
 
 quicker, and my only feeling was admiration 
 for the sturdy handsome fellows who could 
 stand up and take blows without wincing. I 
 thought of the Greek philosopher who to im- 
 press upon his son the discipline of boxing 
 called his attention to the fact that when a 
 hard blow was struck the people witnessing it 
 cried out, but not the athlete receiving the 
 blow. A nation of boxers may be extermi- 
 nated, but they can never be reduced to 
 slavery. 
 
 Of course a common council's first duty is 
 to save the souls of its burghers, although they 
 may rob them of their wealth in so doing. In 
 the United States murder is a trivial amuse- 
 ment, and stealing almost a praiseworthy en- 
 terprise. In Australia, strange to say, both 
 are more severely frowned upon and sup- 
 pressed than boxing and horse racing. Upon 
 the whole I think that regard for the law is 
 much stronger there than here. The verdicts 
 of the juries as recorded in the legal columns 
 of the daily press seem to make this statement 
 unquestionable. While I was there two officers 
 of trades unions were sentenced to the peni- 
 tentiary for striking. I know this statement 
 seems incredible, but I challenge contradic-
 
 102 THE AUSTRALIANS. 
 
 tion. Of course no one believes a jury could 
 be found in the United States that would con- 
 vict a union man of mayhem, arson, murder or 
 any other crime in the penal code. As a lawyer 
 of over forty years standing I think myself 
 entitled to say that our trials by jury are only 
 Judge Lynch courts, that the juries are only 
 swayed by their sympathies to the absolute 
 exclusion of the law and evidence. 
 
 In truth-telling and honesty in petty mat- 
 ters I think they lead the world. I soon learned 
 to my great surprise that I could rely upon the 
 statements of their shopkeepers. They seemed 
 entirely above lying in order to sell goods. I 
 think our storekeepers are far ahead of 
 Europe in this respect, immeasurably above 
 those of some nations I might mention, but in 
 some places ours are bad enough. With some 
 exceptions the storekeepers of New York will 
 lie as easily and quickly for five cents as for 
 five dollars. In Chicago they are almost as 
 bad. I would like to tell my experiences in 
 Chicago, my own town, since I returned. Upon 
 the whole I regard the Australians as a kind- 
 hearted, generous and praiseworthy people. I 
 made some friends among them whom I shall 
 ever remember with pleasure, and I parted
 
 THE AUSTRALIANS. 103 
 
 from the entire population with perhaps 
 warmer feelings than from any other foreign 
 people whatsoever. I sometimes, however, 
 felt like grabbing them by the coat collar and 
 shaking them for their stupidity. Even the 
 girls, but this spanking at long distance is in 
 no way incited by hatred. 
 
 I only met their professors, newspaper men, 
 clergymen and high-class business men. As I 
 am not a student of sociological questions I did 
 not meet the proletariat, but frequently read 
 their daily newspapers. The men with whom 
 I talked, without exception, admitted Aus- 
 tralia's deficiencies and even gave me un- 
 known examples in proof of it. They, how- 
 ever, would not concede that it was due in any 
 respect to English inborn stupidity. They at- 
 tributed it wholly to another cause, which I 
 will proceed to take up in another chapter.
 
 104 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Diseased Australia. 
 
 Australia is, with the exception of New Zea- 
 land, the country in the world where state 
 paternalism is the strongest; I mean where 
 the state, the commonwealth, the res publica 
 endeavors to do the most for the individual 
 and the most curbs his own efforts to work out 
 his own welfare, where the state steps in and 
 tries to take on its own shoulders all the re- 
 sults of profligacy, idleness, wastefulness and 
 thoughtlessness on the part of the individual. 
 I will call it socialism. They refuse to call it 
 by that name in Australia, but that is a mere 
 choice of terms. They call it "public owner- 
 ship of utilities" and other pet names. 
 Avowed socialists in the United States admit 
 to me that it is experimental socialism. I shall 
 call it that.
 
 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 105 
 
 I ought to admit right at the start that I am 
 not a socialist. That theory is not strong 
 among farmers. I believe firmly that if people 
 were to live sensibly nine-tenths of all the 
 trouble in the world, whether from poverty or 
 otherwise, would disappear; that three hours 
 of work per day from each individual would 
 suffice for all needs, but I would say to every 
 individual you must live sensibly and do those 
 three hours work or take the consequences. 
 But the trouble is that most people do not 
 want to live sensibly, that is the thing they 
 most try to avoid. What they most try to 
 realize is the escape from the penalty. I take 
 it that socialism puts the penalty on industry 
 and thrift, and gives the reward to idleness 
 and improvidence. As I have been farming 
 for twenty-five years, am now eating the fruits 
 plucked from trees of my own planting, and 
 daily work in my garden for some hours, I 
 have a right to such belief. When I further 
 say that I have a long, long record of altruistic 
 efforts in behalf of individual members of the 
 Chicago so-called poor, every one of which met 
 with total failure, I think I may draw on my 
 experience in support of my position. On the 
 other hand I have, as a Chicago landlord, been
 
 106 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 
 
 personally reproached for hard-heartedness 
 by individuals who were probably destined to 
 die in the poor house or county hospital, who 
 never in their whole lives made an effort even 
 on their own behalf, let alone others, except to 
 spend all their own money before they got it. 
 This much is certain, however, I returned 
 from Australia less of a socialist than when I 
 went thither. 
 
 American papers often refer to Australia as 
 an argument in favor of the single tax theory, 
 which they claim is a halfway house to Henry 
 Georgeism. Whether movable goods in Aus- 
 tralia are subject to a specific tax or not it did 
 not occur to me to ask, but I deem it not ma- 
 terial to the issue whether they are or not. 
 While people are paying from four to six per 
 cent every year on the selling value of every 
 non-income-producing vacant lot they own in 
 Chicago as a tax, while one man who is said to 
 own over thirty million dollars worth of in- 
 come producing stocks and bonds in the same 
 place pays tax on only $200,000 of them, I 
 think we are near enough to single tax for all 
 practical purposes. I know that Australia 
 does not have a single tax. Every receipt, 
 every check and every legal document must
 
 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 107 
 
 be stamped the same as letters are with us. 
 All of us who went through the Civil and 
 Spanish wars know what a burdensome, vexa- 
 tious and oppressive tax that is, and then 
 every business from that of the poor widow 
 with her few boarders to the great hotel must 
 pay for a license or permit. Possibly the dis- 
 ciples of Henry George would not call that a 
 tax. Then there is the income tax and import 
 tax, and I wish I could enumerate all that 
 might come under that head. My impression 
 is that the country element pays many more 
 kinds of tax than the American farmer who 
 pays only on his land and his stock. Postage 
 we can hardly call a tax as that is for service 
 directly rendered, while the government does 
 not draw up your receipts, checks or legal 
 documents. 
 
 It is not possible for me to give a complete 
 list of all government functions in that coun- 
 try. I could not get in any form a complete 
 catalog and its extent; what I did get would 
 make a larger book than this will be and more 
 tiresome to read, I believe. I might say it 
 leaves to the individual the task of bringing 
 the successive generations into the world and 
 little beyond. The state owns all the railways,
 
 108 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 
 
 all the street cars, all the telegraphs, 1 tele- 
 phones, lighting plants, water plants, owns 
 most of and is trying to own all the lands and 
 mines. It runs banks, sleeping cars, railway 
 eating houses. It insures your life and your 
 old age. It regulates just what wages you 
 shall receive or pay. I append the following 
 clipping from a Sydney daily paper, as above 
 statement may seem incredible. I saw 
 numerous other references to this question, 
 and its correctness may not be doubted. 
 
 JUDGE ON "BLACKLEGGING." 
 
 Have Men No Manhood. 
 
 In the Industrial Court yesterday a carter admitted 
 that he had signed for 2 3s per week for some con- 
 siderable time, although his employer paid him only 
 2. 
 
 Judge Heydon : Well, if people will sign a thing 
 that is false 
 
 Witness: What was I to do? Am I to leave my 
 wife and children to starve? 
 
 Judge Heydon : What are you to do ? You, a man 
 there, and asking me that? Are men prepared to 
 make no sacrifice for their manhood? I am perfectly 
 astonished. A man seems to think that pressure of 
 circumstances is excuse for a thing of this kind. 
 
 Union Representative : We wish to take certain 
 steps to do away with this kind of thing. 
 
 Judge Heydon : We've had a strike on for some- 
 thing like four months. No question of starving en-
 
 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 109 
 
 tered into that. Here a man comes into court who 
 has signed for a wage by which he has blacklegged, * 
 and has helped to defraud his fellow men, and does it 
 because, as he says, he cannot allow his children to 
 starve. Men seem to be willing to enter into a con- 
 spiracy with their employers to defraud their fellow 
 men. You go and accept a lower wage, and allow the 
 award to crumble away. What is the use of making 
 an award? You then come into court and pull a poor 
 mouth. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. 
 
 The state says just what time you may open 
 your shop and at what hour you must close it, 
 I saw reports in court proceedings of store 
 keepers who were arrested and fined for keep- 
 ing open fifteen minutes after legal time for 
 closing. It says that in addition to Sunday 
 you must close for half a day as holiday, which 
 must be either Wednesday or Saturday after- 
 noon, which time, however, you register with 
 the government. As customers usually do not 
 know which day is taken dealers usually close 
 both, as they told me because while expenses 
 go on the alternate days nobody comes in. To 
 a reporter said one store keeper who had been 
 arrested several times and fined for keeping 
 open a few minutes after time to accommodate 
 customers then in the store: "I am so har- 
 rassed by officials that I am greatly inclined 
 to close my doors for good and never open
 
 110 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 
 
 them again." This I read myself in one of 
 their daily newspapers. Your books must be 
 constantly open to unexpected visits of in- 
 spectors; every detail is under their super- 
 vision. If you are making too much money 
 you are warned. If the government wants to 
 conduct same business you are ousted. This 
 on the authority of a man who had been in 
 business there and who was coming to try his 
 fortune in Canada. In our country every dis- 
 tillery, in the theory of the law, is conducting 
 a branch of government business; that the 
 owners are only supervising the business for 
 the government. I would say that applies to 
 every line of enterprise in Australia. Nor is 
 the family exempt; wages of domestics are 
 regulated, their hours of work, holidays, per- 
 quisites, laid down to utmost degree. I do not 
 know if the law regulates the number of times 
 each week a man may kiss his wife. 
 
 You are not permitted to introduce a new 
 enterprise or invention without government 
 sanction. Australia raises much wheat which 
 is exported to England. It is put into sacks, 
 unloaded by hand from wagons at the stations, 
 piled up in great stacks on the platform, where 
 it stands exposed to the pouring rain for days
 
 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. Ill 
 
 One time while there it rained steadily for a 
 week upon it. Then loaded into the goods 
 vans by hand, unloaded by hand at port, and 
 carried into the hold of steamers by hand, 
 where I bade good bye to it. An American 
 went there and attempted to introduce a sys- 
 tem of elevators as in this country. Govern- 
 ment refused to allow him to build even one, 
 stating that when they thought elevators 
 needed they would build them themselves. 1 
 have this on reliable authority. While there 
 a mere boy of a scientific turn of mind rigged 
 up a sort of wireless telegraph at his own ex- 
 pense and caught a message from a British 
 man of war lying in a port at New Zealand. 
 The newspapers made a great ado about the 
 matter, both on account of its being done by a 
 boy and being the first time a message had 
 ever been received on land in Australia. Of 
 course there is no wireless in that land. 
 Government stepped in and stopped him. On 
 his appealing to the press he was told by same 
 authority that upon payment by him of $20 
 per year he might experiment, but that on no 
 account might he receive or send any message ; 
 that it was fully decided by government that 
 no new enterprises by individuals would be
 
 112 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 
 
 permitted. I usually in a foreign land try to 
 keep my mouth shut, that is as far as a portion 
 of Irish blood would let me, but this was too 
 much. Sitting in a club where some news- 
 paper writers were seated I denounced the 
 condition. I stated that I thought I had at 
 times seen the limit of executive stupidity in 
 America, but that this far surpassed the limits 
 of even my vivid imagination. 
 
 The human race has not yet sounded the 
 depths of nature ; like its ruler it is infinite. As 
 many great principles still lie undiscovered as 
 have been disclosed by man to the present 
 time. The investigation of natural principles 
 respond to encouragement; it will be as easily 
 chilled by discouragement. Australia will 
 never lead in the search for new truths. No 
 Marconi or Edison will ever arise in that 
 country. If one should make a discovery, 
 which is improbable, he will go to Canada or 
 the United States to reap the harvest of his 
 ingenuity. 
 
 All over the United States little villages and 
 communities have established their own sys- 
 tem of telephones. In some places, where I 
 live for instance, with two telephone systems 
 a few relatives have their own little telephone
 
 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 113 
 
 for their own privacy and family convenience. 
 Such a state of affairs could not exist there. 
 
 How far all this goes I have not the infor- 
 mation at hand nor the space to give it if I had. 
 I append, however, this clipping from Pear- 
 son's Magazine, an English as well as Amer- 
 ican publication : 
 
 Nor is there such a venerable parasite in New South 
 Wales, Victoria or South Australia. In all of these 
 places, the capatalistic grafter has been cut out, so 
 far as the marketing of farm products is concerned. 
 New South Wales not only undertakes to kill, dress 
 and market cattle, hogs and sheep, but kills and mark- 
 ets poultry, besides handling butter, grain, wine, fruit, 
 honey, or anything else of the sort that the farmer 
 wants to put on the market. 
 
 All of which sounds very attractive, but the 
 result of which is that there the farmer is 
 more fleeced to support hordes of city dwellers 
 than in any other country on earth. Put all 
 your money in my pocket and I will do you 
 good is a plea that has humbugged the human 
 race since man was first created. 
 
 Where a people have made such strides to- 
 wards the millennium one naturally looks for 
 a happy, prosperous, contented people. You 
 ask what more could a people possibly want? 
 The first thing that assails the visitor is a 
 clamor that reaches the sky, exceeding any-
 
 114 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 
 
 thing we have heard in this country since the 
 anti-slavery crusade. No words are spared, 
 no epithets neglected; every property owner, 
 every business man, every person who lends 
 money, is termed a robber, an undesirable. He 
 is told that he and his kind are to be extermi- 
 nated, that the sooner he leaves Australia the 
 better. Every year new laws are made to 
 check the business man's success; every year 
 he finds harder to do business. On the other 
 hand the office holders are called every name 
 that vigorous Anglo-Saxon dialect can imagine. 
 They are told they deserve hanging. The 
 whole matter only stops short of throat cut- 
 ting and internecine war. The feeling is as 
 bitter as in our own country between slave 
 holder and abolitionist in 1860, and Australia 
 suffers from it all, without any prospect of 
 healing of its wounds throughout all time. I 
 grant the newspapers there give their readers 
 the right to express their thoughts, whether 
 it agrees with the editorial tone of the paper or 
 not, in strong contrast with our own which 
 only publish coincidence with their own 
 views, and some of the letters published are 
 specimens of vigorous English. Nor do indi- 
 viduals use less direct language in conversa-
 
 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 115 
 
 tion with reference to the popular leaders. 
 Nobody in the United States really wants to 
 hang Joe Cannon or Roosevelt. The conserva- 
 tive business element would really like to hang 
 their leaders. And yet socialism in Australia 
 has, according to its advocates, only made a 
 beginning, that efforts would not cease until 
 government owned everything. I append 
 their platform as taken from the leading union 
 labor organ, a daily paper : 
 
 FIGHTING PLATFORM. 
 
 With the items already mentioned, our platform 
 includes : 
 
 1. Maintenance of White Australia. 
 
 2. The new protection. 
 
 3. Nationalization of monopolies. 
 
 4. Graduated tax on unimproved land values. 
 
 5. Citizen defence force. 
 
 6. Commonwealth Bank. 
 
 7. Restriction of public borrowing. 
 
 8. Navigation laws. 
 
 9. Arbitration Act amendment. 
 
 10. Insurance, including insurance against unem- 
 ployment. 
 
 Under one name or another the different functions 
 of the old regime have ruled Australia since con- 
 stitutional government was granted. The progressive 
 legislation of recent years is due, not to them, but to 
 the influence Parliamentary and educational of the 
 Labor Party. We now ask the electors to give us a 
 majority to break down land monopoly, develop 
 Australia, give effect to our own platform, and ad- 
 minister our laws.
 
 116 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 
 
 The greatest fight is now being made for 
 government wages for the unemployed. This 
 of course has the hearty support of the thou- 
 sands and thousands of idle men who hang 
 around Circular Quay and the parks, and of 
 the orators who nightly orate to applauding 
 multitudes in the public squares. When I 
 asked one of them what would be done in that 
 case with the immense and ever increasing 
 army of unemployed I was told that govern- 
 ment would apportion them off and compel 
 each one to labor a given time at government 
 industries. En passant; I earnestly desire 
 that Australia would introduce both of those 
 laws. I believe in vivisection, otherwise try- 
 ing it on a dog. 
 
 The great question that has been always 
 asked me since I came home was: "What ser- 
 vice does the state give the people?" Bureau- 
 cratic service, that is, as little for the money 
 as possible, formal, careless, indifferent and 
 blundering. Try doing business in the Chicago 
 City Hall or County Court Building, and then 
 do business with some great bank or mercan- 
 tile establishment and you will learn what 
 bureaucracy means. I was taught this lesson 
 when a young lawyer. I wished to ascertain
 
 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 117 
 
 whether a certain class of United States bonds 
 existed as I suspected a swindle based on their 
 alleged ownership. I went to the subtreasurer 
 in Chicago, a man who for many years had 
 held all the positions within the gift of the 
 people except that of president of the United 
 States. He did not know, he stated, but re- 
 ferred me to his cashier, who had formerly 
 been sheriff of Cook County. He did not know 
 but referred me to an employee of the First 
 National Bank of Chicago, who he said, might 
 
 know. Mr. S , the employee in question, 
 
 hardly looking up from his work replied: 
 "There are no such bonds, and there were 
 never such bonds." 
 
 Their bureau of information is state owned. 
 They answer your question by giving you a 
 printed sheet through a wicket. That friendly, 
 chatty interview so common and so instructive 
 all over our states is wholly foreign to them. 
 It is like buying postage stamps. I am not 
 able to speak of their telegraph and other 
 state service in all its ramifications, but judge 
 from the volume of complaints that constantly 
 arise there is the same chilly bureaucratic air 
 of great favor conferred in attending to the 
 matter at all.
 
 118 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 
 
 In their railway service I can speak more 
 definitely. It fully exemplifies the truth that 
 all public enterprises are terribly shiftless, 
 expensive and inferior. Australians pay just 
 twice as much for first-class fares as we do in 
 Illinois, same being there four cents per mile 
 against two here. Their sleeping car rates on 
 top of that are about the same as in our Pull- 
 mans, but there all comparison ceases. No- 
 where in all the United States, in Florida, 
 Arkansas or Arizona will one find such poor 
 equipments as their first-class cars. Dirty 
 cars with seats covered with leather cushions 
 full of holes and fleas, leaking in the rain, 
 dripping oil all the time, running over wab- 
 bling road beds while making about twenty 
 miles per hour, is the best they can offer to the 
 highest rate payers. Second-class cars are 
 about equal to our freight cars, with cloth- 
 covered, straight-back benches. Of our splen- 
 did efficient service in all its branches they 
 cannot even dream. If anyone favors state 
 ownership of railroads I would advise him to 
 visit that country before he votes for it. 
 
 A small matter, but I note that time tables, 
 or as we call them "folders", which in the
 
 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 119 
 
 United States are given away are there paid 
 for at two cents each. 
 
 As to their street car service it is equally 
 lacking; it is scarce and vexatious. They make 
 much of their two-cent fare, but that is only 
 for a few blocks with no transfer. The towns 
 are cut up into sections which you do not 
 know, and you may get on one block short of 
 a section, then off one block beyond a section. 
 You have ridden perhaps half a mile and paid 
 six cents. To ride as far as from State Street 
 to Austin in Chicago would cost fourteen 
 cents, as against five cents with us. I found 
 that to visit a suburban village about four or 
 five miles from Circular Quay would invari- 
 ably cost me ten cents each way. Upon the 
 whole I found street car fares cost me con- 
 siderably more in Brisbane or Sydney than in 
 any American city. It was hardly worth 
 while risking one's life getting on and off for 
 the three or four blocks covered by a penny or 
 two cent fare. The cars run only on the best 
 streets where they will make a good showing. 
 The passengers from New Zealand boats are 
 landed at the foot of a hill in Sydney perhaps 
 seventy or eighty feet high, half a mile away 
 from the street cars. I saw women leading
 
 120 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 
 
 little children, lugging great telescopes and 
 bundles up that great height where a man 
 would not care to climb. A street leading di- 
 rectly along the wharves runs towards the city 
 hall, which is the real heart of the town, from 
 which with transfers one could go in any di- 
 rection. One reason of this scarcity of lines, 
 they tell me, is that bonds must be sold to lay 
 every mile of track, which costs the govern- 
 ment twice as much as though laid by private 
 enterprise, and the interest on those bonds is 
 paid by taxation. So that the tax payer pays 
 for street car rides if he does not even live in 
 the town. I think if I were a sheep raiser 
 living sixty or eighty miles from a railroad I 
 would say: "It is all right for you to enjoy the 
 dissipations of city life, which are dearer to 
 you than existence itself, but pay for them; 
 don't ask me to do so." And this, in addition 
 to poor, expensive service, is just what they 
 are doing. Their intelligent men all admit 
 that their whole system of government tends 
 to congest everything in their state capitals, 
 and to support at high salaries great hordes 
 of shirking, time-stealing officials at the ex- 
 pense of the farming element and to the de- 
 terioration of the agricultural regions. As a
 
 DISEASED AUSTRALIA. 121 
 
 large city shut up by siege soon reaches the 
 starvation point, so a city would soon tax it- 
 self to poverty and bankruptcy if it did not in 
 some way contrive to bleed the outside with- 
 out compensation. In Australia they have 
 carried this to a fine point. The country now 
 does everything for Melbourne, Sydney and 
 Brisbane but feeding and housing the people, 
 and they are clamoring for that; I think they 
 will get it. If the sheep raiser submits to it he 
 deserves the bleeding he will certainly get. 
 
 The system not only robs the country ele- 
 ment but it deprives even the young city man 
 of all incentive to exertion. He looks forward 
 only to holding an office in some bureau. That 
 air of reaching out for great things so common 
 to our young man is wholly wanting. His is 
 the air of a serf who does not even dream of 
 liberty. If he is not thinking of holding an 
 office he is planning to emigrate. As a result 
 of it all I predict that Australia fifty years 
 from now will be further behind in the race 
 for comparative wealth than now. She will 
 still have the land. All the rest will be owned 
 by the bond holders in Europe, and her own 
 children will curse her name.
 
 122 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 The Chinese Question. 
 It ill becomes any man residing in the 
 United States, considering our inhuman treat- 
 ment of the Chinamen who have sneaked into 
 our country, to criticize Australia for exclud- 
 ing them. However, as I do not agree with 
 our policy in that respect I think I have that 
 right. In fact I will assume the prophet's 
 right which has existed since the beginning of 
 the world: "You must not do as I do but do as 
 I say." I don't want any colonial to throw 
 back at me that because I exclude a poor 
 undersized human being who lacks every 
 expert trade or profession and cannot even 
 speak the language of the country where he 
 wants to earn the little he eats, he, the said 
 colonial, is thereby justified in so doing. I 
 may be a fool, but that is no reason for your 
 doing foolish things.
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 123 
 
 Personally I agree with Socrates wherein he 
 says: "I am not merely a citizen of Athens. I 
 am a citizen of the world." I believe that the 
 world belongs to all the people in the world; 
 that every man has a natural born right to go 
 anywhere in the world to earn his bread and 
 butter and rear his little family where he 
 stands the best chance of elevating them above 
 his standard; that all peoples are either human 
 beings or beasts of burden. If humans they 
 should be so treated, if beasts of burden the 
 more of them in the country the richer it is, 
 the same as though they were mules or horses. 
 It does not necessarily follow from this that 
 they should vote or govern us. On the con- 
 trary we haA'e been going too far in letting 
 foreigners who have only been in our country 
 six months or a year to decide our elections, 
 but even that has damaged us less than the use 
 of unlimited suffrage in our large cities. 
 Where foreigners have gone out with the rest 
 into the wilderness as pioneers it is right they 
 should help build up the state from its founda- 
 tion, and upon the whole it has been for the 
 country's benefit. Any European of good 
 habits who has moved into the wilderness and 
 put his shoulder to the wheel is a help to the
 
 124 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 community, even if he can only count his resi- 
 dence by months; and that problem is a very 
 short one; life is very short. Of the great 
 German and Irish immigration of forty years 
 ago nearly all the participants are dead; they 
 did not wreck the country; they did not come 
 here for that purpose. Nor will the new comers 
 wreck the country if our people act in a sensi- 
 ble manner; they do not come for that pur- 
 pose. The principle of allowing one set of men 
 to spend the money and compelling another 
 set to pay all the bills is a much more danger- 
 ous heresy. If the country be wrecked it will 
 be through the vicious, penniless element, the 
 voters who now decide all our elections except 
 in the rural communities. So far the system 
 has proved a failure in all our large cities, and 
 one hundred years' trial shows that the city 
 loafer and lodging-house bum is a more dan- 
 gerous element in the community than the 
 newly-arrived immigrant even though the 
 tough's ancestors may have come over in the 
 Mayflower. Still I would lay it down as a 
 principle that no man should vote unless he 
 has lived twenty-one years in the country, and 
 that no man should vote to say how taxes 
 should be spent unless he also paid taxes.
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 125 
 
 While I think it is the proper province of the 
 state legislature to pass restraining laws of all 
 kinds, I do not take it to be the province of a 
 city administration to save souls. A city should 
 be a great corporation run for the benefit of 
 the stockholders the same as a great modern 
 hotel is run by its stockholders. These princi- 
 ples being agreed to, which I do not expect the 
 average city man to agree to, no immigrant 
 unless he be an out-and-out criminal can be a 
 menace to our form of government or other- 
 wise than a benefit to the community, as much 
 so as a mule or a horse, or a steam engine or a 
 water mill. 
 
 While our immigration laws are supposed to 
 exclude Asiatics, the fact is that they do not. 
 Possibly Hindoos, but certainly only the 
 Chinese are kept out. They have only to come 
 by way of the Atlantic Ocean and all the Jews, 
 Armenians, Turks, Arabs, Syrians and Rus- 
 sians of Asia can come in. Also the Japs from 
 the west if provided with a passport. Such a 
 rule convicts any country of barbarism, so 
 much so as the Egyptians when it was death 
 for a stranger to enter their kingdom, even 
 ship-wrecked sailors being put to death. So 
 that it all simmers down to the fact that we
 
 126 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 fear the Chinese and no other people on earth. 
 Before we take up that question with refer- 
 ence to Australia, I think we may ask how far 
 that discrimination is justified with reference 
 to ourselves. A winter spent in Honolulu 
 about eight years ago enlightened me greatly 
 on that matter. They had been well treated 
 under the native Hawaiian government, and it 
 was they who really created the islands. It 
 was the best place I have ever been in to study 
 their development under favorable circum- 
 stances. Americans who had lived long on the 
 islands were unanimous in expressing the 
 opinion that they were an industrious, temper- 
 ate, honest, law-abiding and provident people. 
 My own eyes taught me that when prosperous, 
 as many of them were, they lived in as fine 
 houses, ate as well, dressed as well, and spent 
 money for entertainment as freely as any peo- 
 ple of same circumstances from Europe. Many 
 of them kept fine horses and carriages and 
 coachmen; all rode on street cars freely and 
 bought American or European made goods 
 when they suited their convenience. Nor did 
 they all try to stay in the city loafing around 
 the streets by thousands or earning a pre- 
 carious existence by any and every despicable
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 127 
 
 method imaginable like so many of our Euro- 
 pean new-comers. They were the main stay 
 of the sugar plantations, the gardeners and 
 fishers. Up against the sides of the mountains, 
 down in the swamps, wherever a space not 
 much larger than an American house could be 
 cut out lived a Chinaman, patient and satis- 
 fied. He was yellow and a heathen, but for one 
 I felt that so long as he lived that way he had 
 the right to go anywhere that he could repeat 
 the act, get the little he ate from the soil itself 
 and the little roof to cover himself and his 
 family. The second generation was even 
 a more interesting study to me. I found the 
 young men born and brought up on the island 
 scholarly and bright, as thoroughly American- 
 ized in looks, clothing and demeanor as any 
 descendants of Europeans in Chicago. One, a 
 fine looking merchant at the head of a large 
 business, I asked how he found the new 
 American regime as compared with the old 
 native rule. "Much worse", he replied; "sugar 
 stocks have gone down more than one-half; 
 everything is in a slump; every week sees 
 some store close; even the Chinese merchants 
 are selling their goods for whatever they can 
 get and going back to China. On top of this the
 
 128 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 United States government is taking away 
 from the islands every year eleven hundred 
 thousand dollars more than it expends here." 
 I was too astonished and paralyzed to say 
 another word. I hunted up my newspaper 
 friend and mentioned what the Chinaman had 
 said. He said it was true. "Then", I ex- 
 claimed, "it means the ultimate bankruptcy of 
 the whole community, as it cannot long stand 
 the clear drain of over a million a year." I do 
 not know that I started it, but the papers took 
 it up, published columns on that subject, and 
 were ringing the changes on it even when I 
 left. 
 
 I found what he had said to be true to the 
 letter. Honolulu was in the grip of an unpar- 
 alleled depression. While I was there over a 
 dozen American stores closed their doors by 
 actual count. The hotels were being run at a 
 loss. Every boat was filled with whites leav- 
 ing the islands for good, whereas it was com- 
 monly said in the good old days of Kalakaua 
 among the Americans diamonds had been 
 more common than ice, and champaign had 
 flowed more freely than water; while at the 
 same time whites in all lines of expert work 
 were paid much higher wages than in Cali-
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 129 
 
 fornia. The whole history of the Hawaiian 
 Islands demonstrates that every non-criminal 
 Chinaman is an addition to the wealth and 
 prosperity of a country. Tahiti also proves it 
 today. 
 
 About thirty-five years ago I met a lumber 
 manufacturer from some place in Northern 
 California who was stopping in Chicago. In 
 answer to my question concerning that coun- 
 try I remember distinctly his stating that two 
 years of California would spoil any man, that 
 the streets of San Francisco were filled with 
 idle men who claimed to be hunting work, 
 while away from the city he could get no one 
 to do any work at all but Chinese, and not 
 enough of them. In his very language: "They 
 won't work themselves and they want to pre- 
 vent the Chinese from working for us. " After 
 three extended stays in San Francisco I can 
 say that the same is absolutely true today. Of 
 all the large cities on this side of the Atlantic 
 Ocean I would say that that city and Sydney, 
 Australia, have the largest body of habitual 
 idlers. Of course in both cities there are very 
 many men so low, so drunken, depraved, lazy 
 and dishonest that neither the pressure nor 
 the absence of Chinese can help. These we
 
 130 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 may totally disregard in our considerations, 
 except that each of them has a vote. The 
 others are simply standing in their own light. 
 There are sensible men found living even in 
 the great cities, but their voice has little 
 weight. There have been men all along, even 
 in California, who saw the truth. Coming east 
 across the Pacific Ocean on the great Siberia 
 a number of years ago I became acquainted 
 with one of the lealing business men of San 
 Francisco. In a talk with him on those ques- 
 tions he said: "California needs badly and 
 could take care of thirty thousand Chinese 
 immigrants each year. They would only make 
 more easy jobs for so many more lazy whites 
 who are now going hungry. ' ' A Texas gentle- 
 man told me that that state was crazy for 
 labor. That a hundred thousand Chinese a 
 year going thither would tend to make the lot 
 of every white man and woman in the com- 
 monwealth lighter and their lives more pleas- 
 ant. Living as I do in the country fifty miles 
 from Chicago, where it is impossible to get 
 help, man or woman, I can say the same thing 
 of Illinois. 
 
 But we draw the line at Chinese. All the 
 Negro Fellahs and Bedouins of Africa could
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 131 
 
 come unrestrained into the United States; all 
 the degraded natives of the black islands and 
 the Carribean coast ; all the Indians of Mexico, 
 South or Central America could flock hither, 
 but not into Australia. They tell me that 
 neither Chinese, Negros, Hindoos nor Indians, 
 even though they be British subjects born 
 under the British flag, may now go into Aus- 
 tralia; nor even the Japanese, their national 
 allies. This they call maintaining the white 
 Australia. 
 
 This plea comes with particularly bad grace 
 from Englishmen. They have never stopped to 
 consider whether the aborigines of any coun- 
 try were black, yellow, red or brown when 
 they wanted to go there. The mere fact that 
 they were off color was a very strong induce- 
 ment to go into their country. The discovery 
 of a people not white living anywhere on the 
 globe gave them divine right to go there and 
 take possession. No nation since the begin- 
 ning of the world has ever so thoroughly and 
 so extensively exploited the colored races as 
 the English. Even now were a large island 
 discovered anywhere on the earth, with people 
 other than white, they would at once go there 
 and raise their flag. As they say in the South
 
 132 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 Sea Islands: "First comes the trader, then 
 comes the missionary, then comes the 
 soldier, and then we belong to the great 
 father". It is quite certain that Australia 
 was not a white country when the Eng- 
 lish first entered the country, the aborigi- 
 nes being the blackest of the black. Even now 
 they are booming Papua, an equatorial conti- 
 nent lying to the north of Australia, which is 
 said to be inhabited by about half a million of 
 people belonging, according to authority, to 
 the same race as the Fiji Islanders ethnologic- 
 ally. Almost every day one sees letters from 
 there and editorials setting forth its advant- 
 ages for whites in rubber raising, etc., telling 
 the needs of prospective settlers, etc. This, 
 although not much over one per cent of Aus- 
 tralia itself has been touched. We hear no 
 talk about the maintenance of a black Papua. 
 
 I cannot conceive why the English should 
 fear the inferior races. It is a mighty poor 
 Englishman who cannot get on the backs of a 
 dozen " niggers" and make them carry him. 
 In fact the whole nation is carried on the backs 
 of the "niggers", as she calls them. Without 
 her dependencies the English are fitted to
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 133 
 
 compete with neither the Frenchman, German 
 nor Yankee for the world's trade. 
 
 Talking in a club I asked a Sydney gentle- 
 man of intelligence why they excluded the 
 Chinese. He replied that they wanted a white 
 Australia. I asked him if they were not per- 
 mitted to vote how that would affect their 
 ownership of Australia. Without replying to 
 the question, he broke out: "They would 
 marry our white women". "There is no law 
 compelling any white woman to marry a 
 Chinaman", I rejoined. "Yes, but they will 
 do it", he answered. "Well then", I said, "if 
 any woman wants a husband so badly that she 
 will marry a Chinaman she ought to be 
 allowed to do so." He would talk no further 
 on the subject. 
 
 Since when have the English been so par- 
 ticular about keeping their blood pure ? They 
 go to China and marry the Chinese, to India 
 and marry the Hindoos, to North America and 
 marry the Indians, to New Zealand and marry 
 the Maoris, to the black islands and marry the 
 Negros. Every place I have ever been on the 
 broad earth I find Englishmen married to 
 native women of another color. Do not under- 
 stand me to reprobate it. I believe the inhabi-
 
 134 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 tants of Germany and Great Britain, for what- 
 ever cause, to be the best racial stock now on 
 earth, and that all inferior races, and there are 
 inferior races, are greatly benefited by its in- 
 fusion, whether accompanied or not by the 
 priest 's blessing. The blood question is merely 
 a childish subterfuge. 
 
 I will not speak of the Hindoos, because I do 
 not yet know that people except as I have seen 
 them in the Fiji Islands and British Columbia. 
 I will express it as my sincere conviction 
 that twenty millions of Chinamen living on the 
 continent would put Australia in the rank 
 where she really belongs. If there be any man 
 or woman on the place that would not be bene- 
 fited, then God help them; they are beyond 
 human amelioration. Five millions more 
 Britons would soon follow them to share in 
 their pickings. Taking part at first in the 
 most unskilled labors and menial offices it 
 would increase to an enormous degree the de- 
 mand for expert skilled labor. With more 
 trains to run it would necessitate more engi- 
 neers, more conductors, more employees of all 
 kinds from repair men to book keepers. It 
 would mean more street cars, and conse- 
 quently more conductors and motormen, and
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 135 
 
 more electricians. It would mean more law- 
 yers, more doctors, more preachers, more 
 actors, more saloon keepers, more gamblers, 
 more thieves. It would mean more police, 
 more bailiffs, more clerks, more judges. It 
 would mean a large army of employees to levy, 
 collect and keep track of the taxes to pay off 
 the preceding. Then it would take a smaller 
 army to levy and collect the taxes to pay the 
 preceding army of tax levyers and collectors, 
 then a smaller army to levy and collect the 
 taxes to pay the preceding, then a smaller 
 army to levy and collect the taxes to pay the 
 preceding, then a smaller army to levy and col- 
 lect the taxes to pay the preceding, and so on 
 to the end of this book. And then it would 
 give an excuse for a standing army to parade 
 around with dashing officers, and a navy very 
 ornamental with officers to make love to the 
 ladies. The maid who now cleans your room 
 would then wear her furs and diamonds as the 
 wife of some fat office holder, and scold the 
 Chinese houseman and the Chinese cook. And 
 then they would get better cooking. And then 
 if there were any Englishmen so worthless as 
 to be made no use of at all they could do as we 
 do in the United States put him on the pay-
 
 136 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 roll on general principles; and the Chink 
 would dig and grub and pay for it all. I think 
 we could conservatively estimate that every 
 five Chinese men could support one English- 
 man in ease and luxury. 
 
 Land which now finds no sale at $5.00 per 
 acre would then be in demand at ten times that 
 price. 
 
 There is another aspect to this question. 
 Australia is now more fully awake to this mat- 
 ter than either England or the United States. 
 I refer to what is popularly known as the 
 Yellow Peril, although neither the Japanese 
 or Hindoos are yellow. I have been knocking 
 abound the Pacific Ocean and its shores in 
 many trips extending over nearly twenty 
 years, and as many friends will testify, have 
 been fortelling conditions to arise ever since 
 the night the Russian warships were blown up 
 in the harbor at Port Arthur. We are now 
 face to face with the most momentous period 
 since Mahomet preached his jehad on the 
 deserts of Arabia. It may be averted by skill- 
 ful management, but I have great fear that 
 within twenty years we will see the Japanese, 
 Chinese, Hindoos and probably the Philip- 
 pines arrayed in battle against the whites with
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 137 
 
 the cry: "Asia for the Asiatics". When it 
 does occur, woe to the whites. It will take a 
 great deal of blood to wash out the insults and 
 contumely of four hundred years. It may up- 
 turn our present social fabric as completely as 
 did the eruption of the Goths and Vandals in 
 the latter period of the Roman Empire, and 
 start everything anew. What would the 
 language and institutions of England be at 
 present with the continued predominance of 
 Roman ideas From their standpoint they 
 have a just cause, a great prize to work for 
 the Christian example and the incentive of 
 loot which throughout all the ages has been an 
 army's strongest impulse. It is so sweet to 
 reap where another has sown. I feel thajt if I 
 were a Chinaman I should work steadily with 
 that object in view, knowing myself to be 
 justified. I know the Japanese are so doing. 
 When in Alaska I was told by missionaries 
 that the Japanese working in the salmon 
 canneries there are telling the Indians that in a 
 few years they will be owning Alaska. I be- 
 lieve that today they could pick up that terri- 
 tory, the Hawaiian Islands and the Philip- 
 pines as easily as taking candy from a baby. 
 For that reason I believe every able bodied
 
 138 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 young American should be compelled to give 
 one year's service in camp and military train- 
 ing. Our whole history proves that the first 
 thing a militia does when facing an enemy is 
 to turn and run. They have never been able 
 to fight even Indians, as Crawford's, Harner's, 
 St. Glair's and many other campaigns have 
 shown. I believe that without extended notice 
 and time for preparation on our part a hun 
 dred thousand Germans or Japanese could 
 march from New York to San Francisco. Such 
 time for preparation will not be given in the 
 next great war. The United States are now in 
 the placid fatuous condition that Persia was in 
 when Alexander with 30,000 Greeks over-ran 
 the country and subverted the monarchy. 
 
 If these things be even approximately true 
 with reference to our country with its ninety- 
 five millions, and I believe them to be wholly 
 true, what may be the state of Australia facing 
 India and China with less than five millions'? 
 They are fully alive -to their peril. One of their 
 public speakers while I was there said in a 
 public speech that Australia was the weakest 
 spot in the empire. An editorial said that 
 Australia was now in greater danger than at 
 any time in her history. Another speaker that
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 139 
 
 Mr. Roosevelt did Australia the greatest pos- 
 sible injury that could be done to her in calling 
 the Portsmouth conference. My views on 
 those subjects, which at first met so much 
 derision in Chicago, met with complete acqui- 
 escence in that country. They are even pre- 
 paring for the event. They are trying to enroll 
 every young man of fighting age, and every 
 evening in the parks one sees them drilling 
 until a late hour. It is almost like our country 
 at the beginning of the Civil war. 
 
 How can there be any difference of opinion 
 among sensible men on this subject? There is 
 China with her swarming, congested four 
 hundred millions of people living like animals 
 who only ask a chance for a little land upon 
 which to earn bread and roof, with no door 
 open to them but Mexico and a few French 
 islands. Over there lies Australia with room 
 for four hundred millions more, with millions 
 of square miles lying idle and they kept out. 
 It is contrary to the eternal laws of nature. 
 While I might sympathize with the Aus- 
 tralians for blood reasons, still in case of their 
 conquest I could only say: "You got what you 
 deserved." 
 
 Japan would take the Hawaiian Islands,
 
 140 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 Alaska, the Philippines, and probably some of 
 the other Dutch or English islands; India 
 would be given her independence, and China 
 offered as her reward for participating, Hong 
 Kong, Cochin China and Australia. Germany, 
 probably a participant, would take Africa and 
 the whole of Papua. England would not have 
 a friend outside of the United States and de- 
 crepit France. We will probably get our dose 
 first and fight our battles alone. 
 
 "How in the name of goodness then will 
 twenty millions of Chinese strengthen Aus- 
 talia?" I am asked. Anything that tends to 
 relieve the pressure in China tends to prolong 
 the day of reckoning. So long as they can go 
 into a country freely there will be the less 
 inclination to fight for entrance. No German 
 or Scandinavian ever had to fight to enter our 
 country. They had to fight, and did fight suc- 
 cessfully, to enter England, France and Italy. 
 Steam allowed to escape in the proper manner 
 is a beneficent agent, confined is a destructive 
 explosive. All revolutionists have felt what a 
 power the army and the administration has as 
 against mere numbers. Neither Russia nor 
 Spain can become a republic until the army is 
 reduced. Australia with ten millions of whites
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 141 
 
 organized, and her probable half million of 
 men ready for the field, with twenty millions 
 of Chinese for forced work and to pay the 
 costs by their taxes, to furnish the sinews of 
 war in fact, could put up a successful fight on 
 interior lines against any army coming several 
 thousand miles. We all know how much the 
 slaves aided the South in continuing the strug- 
 gle during our Civil war. Such a civilian work- 
 ing force would probably allow the whites to 
 put over a million and a half fighting men into 
 the field. 
 
 It is well known that the ties of religion are 
 stronger than the ties of blood. The French 
 Hugenots were ready to assist foreigners fight 
 against their own people; so in Germany and 
 the low countries during the Thirty Years 
 war. If the Christianized Chinese had not as- 
 sisted the legations in the Peking siege the 
 story might have ended very differently. And 
 the matter of rearing and education is very 
 powerful. Northern people living in the South 
 with few exceptions took part in our Civil war 
 with their neighbors. 
 
 Cardinal Richelieu used to say that if you 
 wanted to make a man become a dog treat him 
 like a dog. Conversely, if you want to make
 
 142 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 
 
 a man out of a Chinaman treat him like a man. 
 The best manner to secure the physical safety 
 of Australia is to anglicize the Chinaman. 
 Take them from their cradles, educate them as 
 they do in Hawaii; let the native born vote and 
 hold positions as other native born sons. It 
 would be found that the love of the country 
 where their eyes first opened, and where their 
 infant years were passed, would predominate 
 over every feeling whatever. Their whole 
 affections, sympathies and efforts would work 
 to maintain the statu quo. They would fear 
 the establishment of an Asiatic power with as 
 great an abhorrence as we now would the 
 supremacy of a European monarch. Still more 
 would the thousands who were Christianized 
 from birth or who might claim the united 
 blood. We of colonial descent in the United 
 States know what that feeling means. When 
 I was a boy books were scarce and those 
 largely tales of accounts of our Revolutionary 
 war or our War of 1812. I well remember 
 reading and rereading them, and listening dur- 
 ing the long winter evenings to the stories told 
 by our elders of those wars when they were 
 still recent events, and particularly of the 
 border Indian wars when those savages, even
 
 THE CHINESE QUESTION. 143 
 
 against their will, were incited and compelled 
 by the English to war against the colonists, 
 their own flesh and blood, of the atrocities 
 committed by them against helpless women 
 and children; how even after the treaty of 
 peace they were still urged on by a defeated 
 foe to keep up an endless struggle, giving 
 every year new and sufficient causes for war 
 until it culminated anew in open war; and I 
 remember how my cheeks would burn with in- 
 dignation and a desire when grown up to par- 
 ticipate in a war against that country. And 
 yet I felt no hatred for any single Englishman 
 such as constantly come into our country, only 
 for that indefinite existence known as the 
 England. This kept up over our whole country 
 until the memories of those events were 
 drowned by the tremendous events of our 
 great civil struggle. With me they remained 
 until, a grown man, I visited many colonies 
 ruled by England and saw the really excellent 
 work done in all of them. On the other hand 
 England has never repeated that error. She 
 did not attempt it in South Africa. 
 
 If Australia some day doesn't equally rue 
 her policy in excluding all other races I shall 
 be greatly mistaken. Her policy in this re- 
 spect, no less than her policy of state owner- 
 ship, is equally a mortal disease.
 
 144 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 New Zealand. 
 
 The two islands with Chatham Island con- 
 stituting the country of New Zealand (a very 
 poor name) lie between 34 1 /; and 47 degrees 
 of south latitude, or say from Wilmington, N. 
 C., to Lake Superior. The climate, however, 
 is much more equable than that between the 
 same degrees of our country. It is cooler in 
 summer and warmer in winter. Tree ferns 
 grow larger than I had ever seen them before 
 in the open. Palms, rubber trees, orange and 
 lemon trees live as far south as Auckland. For 
 some reason, however, neither oranges nor 
 lemons are grown, all seen coming from Cali- 
 fornia. As this, however, proves true of other 
 fruits, such as grapes, etc., I shall think it may 
 be attributed to disinclination to cultivate 
 them on state owned ground. I found winter
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 145 
 
 clothing, a heavy cap and an overcoat neces- 
 sary at Wellington in February, answering to 
 our August. I noticed everybody going simi- 
 larly clad. In fact at times a fire would have 
 been comfortable. It is geologically a true 
 continent, having all the characteristics and 
 formations of such an independent existence. 
 Scientific men of Australia say it formerly 
 constituted a part of that continent. I did not 
 read llieir reasons as their geological reports, 
 so far as furnished me, did not treat of that 
 phase, but to me it looked as distinct from 
 Australia as Cuba is from Florida. If ever 
 connected it must have been prior to the ad- 
 vent of warm blooded animals, as no four- 
 footed beasts at all, unless we except the rat, 
 were found in New Zealand, while, as formerly 
 stated, Australia is wonderfully rich in mam- 
 mals. Practically all the clays and building- 
 stones are found, while coal, iron, gold and 
 some gem stones are abundant, notably the 
 famed jade, or more correctly speaking, 
 nephrite, which they wrongly term green 
 stone. In fertility of soil and abundance of 
 timber adapted to building material it far sur- 
 passes Australia. In beauty of scenery it 
 possibly may be compared with Central Amer-
 
 146 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 ica, but taken as a whole I know of no other 
 country that may rank with it. One of its 
 rivers may even excel the Hudson or Rhine in 
 grandeur. It is the paradise of the sheep. I 
 noticed that there they wander in couples or 
 solitary, owing to their having lost the sense 
 of fear from the total absence of their natural 
 enemies. In most countries, particularly in 
 our continent, they flock together from a sense 
 of insecurity. 
 
 The soil seems to be of incredible fertility. 
 Statistics that they furnish us of the yield in 
 wheat and oats per acre beat any record we 
 have ever esablished in Illinois. Ditches dug 
 along the railroads for drainage proved the 
 soil to be black and waxy down to four or five 
 feet in depth. The fruit trees I saw seemed 
 to be heavily loaded, so that the scarcity and 
 very high price of fruit seemed to depend upon 
 the little attention given to its cultivation 
 rather than any natural reason. Upon the 
 whole I can coincide with the general impres- 
 sion when I say that nature has done for New 
 Zealand all that it can do for any country on 
 this material sphere. The superiority of the 
 Maoris, its original race, over that of any other 
 South Sea people incontestibly proves its
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 147 
 
 natural adaption as a home for the human 
 animal. 
 
 The sea is as generous to our race as the 
 land. The surrounding waters swarm with 
 fish of many kinds. I am not a fisherman, but 
 a friend that is, who tried his luck on the in- 
 terior fresh waters, told me fish were too 
 abundant to furnish sport. 
 
 Considering its favorable position, its fer- 
 tile soil, its abundance of resources in timber 
 and the products of the mines, its climate and 
 abundance of land, we have a right to say that 
 the British race there may be held to a strict 
 accountability. That if they are ruining the 
 country for all time they should be held up to 
 all the world for reprobation, and if they are 
 lagging behind the thirsty desert known as 
 Mexico, with its ten millions of full-blooded 
 Indians, they may plead no extenuating cir- 
 cumstances; nor can they say that I, who have 
 always spoken so highly of British Columbia, 
 am a prejudiced observer. If the latter coun- 
 try, also mostly British, forges ahead of them 
 with startling rapidity it cannot be otherwise 
 than in the people themselves. Either I am 
 lying or the British race has lost its vigor or 
 the institutions of New Zealand are wrong.
 
 148 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 The shortest way out of it for a Briton would 
 be to say I am lying. 
 
 I will admit my ideas of the country, formed 
 from previous reading, may have been unduly 
 exalted. We have been taught by our social- 
 istic writers that of all the countries in the 
 world in beauty, fertility, climate, productions, 
 and the advanced nature of its institutions, it 
 was in the lead. I never saw a reference to it 
 in a newspaper or a magazine where it was not 
 held up to us as an example or a model to fol- 
 low. Since a young man I had always thought 
 that if fate made it desirable for me to leave 
 my native land and sink my past, New Zea- 
 land is where I would go. The present trip 
 found me going neither as an emigrant nor 
 with the object of either praising or finding 
 fault with its institutions, or with the object 
 in fact of writing about them at all. I am not 
 a student of sociology. This is a new role and 
 was, I might say, thrust upon me. I found 
 upon landing my impressions half met and 
 half disappointed. The country is all my 
 dreams had pictured it ; in every other respect 
 I found it the least desirable country I had 
 ever seen lying between Eastern Asia and 
 Europe. I had thought that if I ever looted a
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 149 
 
 bank of six or seven millions of dollars I would 
 hide myself in New Zealand. As the result of 
 my inquiries there I have concluded not to loot 
 a bank of six or seven millions of dollars and 
 stay in God's country. 
 
 I landed in Wellington, the capital of the 
 commonwealth, about noon. By evening I 
 found myself living in the second hotel in rank 
 of the town, a place of such unparalleled bad- 
 ness that I wondered why it was kept open at 
 all. Nowhere, even in Africa, had I found one 
 so bad except in the native caravansaries. I 
 had yet to learn that in all New Zealand there 
 was no hotel, only boarding houses, and those 
 with one or two exceptions execrable. Before 
 evening I had remarked that unless I was 
 greatly mistaken there was a general slump. 
 Instead of the vivid and noticeable prosperity 
 I had anticipated, there was the depressed, 
 stagnant air so familiar at times in the United 
 States towns where every countenance seemed 
 to say "The boom has burst". While the pub- 
 lic buildings were fair the whole town as well 
 as the people looked shabby. The whole town 
 seemed to need paint and something else in- 
 describable. Not a well-dressed man or woman 
 did I see on the streets. They all had a hope-
 
 150 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 less, discouraged look. This preceded in time 
 my visit to Australia, but in comparison even 
 Australia seemed immeasurably bright and 
 advanced after leaving New Zealand. Outside 
 of my pet hobby, there was nothing else to do 
 but study sociology. As well may one live in 
 Florence and not absorb art as to live there 
 and not thresh over experiments in robbing 
 one man by means of law for the benefit of 
 another. It is not in the nature of an English- 
 man to be robbed of his fortune, his business, 
 or even a shilling, without a protest. In New 
 Zealand he squeals like a pig going to 
 slaughter, but his squeal is as futile. The 
 visitor hears it on all sides, however; in fact it 
 drowns all other sounds. Aside from sport, 
 nothing else is talked about but state owner- 
 ship. 
 
 First I learned that with a capacity for a 
 population of over forty millions of people the 
 commonwealth had only about one million, 
 that in the previous ten years the population 
 had increased by all ways, whether by birth or 
 immigration, less than one hundred thousand, 
 that in two of those years there were more de- 
 partures of emigrants seeking to better their 
 lot than of immigrants entering to throw in
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 151 
 
 their aid to the new fertile country. On every 
 side arose the wail of thousands out of employ- 
 ment, of decadent and languishing industries. 
 Only the sheep business seemed to thrive 
 that and office holding. For instance, the 
 painters' union of Wellington in their annual 
 meeting reported most of their men as idle, 
 that many of them had gone to Australia or 
 the United States in search of work, that only 
 lack of means kept others from leaving, etc.; 
 and yet it seemed to me that every house in 
 Wellington needed a new coat of paint, the 
 town being almost wholly built of frame. The 
 commonwealth was talking of launching a new 
 loan in London, although the debt per capita 
 was already greater than that of any other 
 country in the world, not even excepting won- 
 derfully rich France. I went over their year 
 book carefully, but thought it was not worth 
 $2.00 to me, or I could give the figures to prove 
 this, but it cannot be contested. 
 
 My first impression was one of surprise that 
 no street cars ran to the Queens Wharf where 
 all the great liners landed, upon which fronted 
 the post office. From the appended clipping 
 from a Wellington daily, I see it is contem- 
 plated :
 
 152 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 EXPENSIVE TRAMWAY EXTENSION. 
 
 Sir, I am surprised to see that the estimated cost 
 of extending the tramway from the Bank of New Zea- 
 land corner to the Post Office is 6000. This is an 
 enormous cost for the very short piece of work to be 
 done. I thoroughly believe the work could be done 
 for a quarter of this money by any contracting firm 
 in this city, and as a ratepayer I protest against the 
 squandering of public money by the City Council. 
 The public works which have recently been carried 
 out would not have cost half as much money had 
 they been done by contract, notably Anderson's Park 
 and Duppa Street Park. These two works are glaring 
 instances of money being squandered. It is no wonder 
 that the ratepayers of Wellington have to suffer, and 
 that people have to pay high rents. Owners of pro- 
 perty are weighed down with an enormous burden, 
 principally due to mismanagement. The City Council- 
 lors seem to pat each other on the back and stand idly 
 by to see the people's money thrown away. 
 
 Another grievance of the ratepayers and property 
 owners is that the majority of the staff employed by 
 the City Council are impolite when applied to for any 
 information or details on public business. I am, etc., 
 
 ANTI-SQUANDERER. 
 
 Wellington, January 21. 
 
 While there one of the daily papers in a long 
 article on some political question not particu- 
 larly germane to this book, referred casually 
 to the fact that the previous year nearly 18,000 
 workers had left New Zealand for Australia; 
 I presume it to be true, but the authority was 
 not given. I know of no better way to demon-
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 153 
 
 strate the truth of all written above than to 
 call upon themselves as witnesses. I append 
 the following item taken from a Wellington 
 daily paper: 
 
 A RECORD OF "GOD'S OWN COUNTRY. 
 
 The glowing accounts regarding "God's Own Coun- 
 try" which are circulated at Home induced a certain 
 schoolmistress to make her way to New Zealand about 
 four years ago, but, now, finding that it is not the 
 Paradise she imagined it to be her soul is full of 
 indignation. 
 
 At the Magistrate's Court, Christ church, she was 
 sued for two installments on a phonograph, interest, 
 broken records, etc., amounting to 3 9s. lid. She 
 did not appear, but sent the following note to the 
 Clerk of the Court: 
 
 "I hired the machine, thinking it would be a benefit 
 to the country children in training the ear, as they 
 have little opportunity of hearing good music, and I 
 am expected to teach music in the school. The com- 
 mittee objected, however, and as I found I could not 
 keep the hire going when the school did not reach the 
 standard I had expected, I thought the most honorable 
 thing to do was to send it back. It was very little 
 used. 
 
 "Since coming to New Zealand about four years 
 ago we have on four different occasions tried to settle 
 in a place, but as no work could be had we were 
 compelled to sell our belongings in order to get a 
 little food to enable us to exist. No other word could 
 be used, as it was merely 'existing,' it wasn't living, 
 and as a result my husband's health suffered. I ob- 
 tained my present employment a year ago. It is value 
 for 108 per annum, and I have six children to feed
 
 154 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 and clothe. I cannot expect to overtake my debts in 
 less than another year. 
 
 "All I can say is that New Zealand is not a country 
 for strangers, either educated or uneducated, as our 
 circumstances go to prove. We have had to exist for 
 four years on less than two years' work, and that at a 
 very low rate of pay. At present anyone coming to 
 examine my enforced manner of living and think that 
 I am a school teacher would find the position a bit 
 ludicrous, as I have barely necessaries. However, the 
 old maxim still holds good, 'Once a lady, always a 
 lady.' 
 
 "In the Old Country my husband could keep his 
 family, and there was no need for me to work, and 
 our name never had occasion to be made public for 
 debt or anything else, but in 'God's Own Country' I 
 have had to turn to, and all I can say is that I am 
 thankful my constitution has not suffered as much 
 from the 'existing' as others of my family. We could 
 pay all our passages to New Zealand, and we had five 
 children ranging from six months to eight years. We 
 were not assisted in any way either to come to New 
 Zealand or since we arrived, and if I had my passage 
 money again I would inquire what kind of country 
 it was before I would believe all the reports sent 
 Home to the newspapers. It is a crying shame 
 to bring families to a country like this to starve 
 them. Many a colony would only be too pleased to 
 have a family to increase the population, and would 
 see to it that the father would get work at his profes- 
 sion to keep them in food and clothes. We had our 
 eyes open as we passed through the Australian cities 
 Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney and we believe that 
 if we could get back to either one of these cities we 
 would get on all right. It seems to me there is nothing 
 in New Zealand but boycott. I am always willing to 
 pay when I have the means."
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 165 
 
 The letter caused a great deal of amusement in 
 Court (states the "Evening News"), and as Mr. Mos- 
 ley, who appeared for plaintiff, could not produce an 
 agreement to pay interest, the case was adjourned for 
 a week. 
 
 Also following editorials from the New Zea- 
 land Herald of February 4 and 10, 1910: 
 
 IMPERIAL MIGRATION. 
 
 The practical cessation of the great stream of British 
 migration, of a most desirable character, which poured 
 from the United Kingdom to Australasia during the 
 middle period of the Nineteenth Century, makes of 
 supreme interest any proposals, such as those discussed 
 at the Royal Society of Arts, which have in view the 
 renewal of Imperial migration upon a large scale. 
 Taking New Zealand as a type of the outlying States 
 of the Empire, any thoughtful person must be im- 
 pressed by the vivid contrast between the migrations 
 to this country forty and fifty years ago and now. In 
 those days, men and women were not afraid to leave 
 comfortable homes and secured positions in the 
 Motherland and to adventure in small sailing ships to 
 the furthest ends of the earth, there to settle in the 
 face of hostile tribes and every conceivable hardship. 
 They were frequently six months afloat, in days when 
 there were neither tinned meats nor refrigerators, nor 
 any of the common comforts and universal luxuries of 
 the sea-travel of modern times. They landed in an 
 undeveloped country, where the very coast settlements 
 were struggling, and went back into the roadless bush 
 to wage a desperate battle for bare existence in the 
 confident hope of winning-out to future prosperity. 
 These immigrants built New Zealand, as their brothers 
 and sisters built the new Australian States which grad-
 
 156 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 ually broke away from the parent colony of New 
 South Wales, and as their uncles and aunts had built 
 up Ontario before them. Today, the long ocean pas- 
 sage has become a pleasant ferryage, served by huge 
 steamers equipped with every modern device, them- 
 selves veritable floating cities, in which every comfort 
 is available and every care lifted from the shoulders 
 of passengers. That ocean-trips are taken, in every 
 class, for recreation and pleasure, is sufficient proof 
 that to the vast majority of people ocean-travel has 
 now neither hardship nor terror. More than this, 
 colonial life has so developed that the many difficulties 
 still to be encountered are but the shadow of the 
 difficulties once so fearlessly faced. The Maori no 
 longer fortifies his pas against the King's troops and 
 comes raiding down against the frontier settler. We 
 have schools in every corner of the land, some sort of 
 road is being made wherever there is settlement, and 
 in the South Island, at least there are more railways 
 than the Government quite knows what to do with. 
 Yet we have no great stream of immigration. Doubt- 
 less this is largely due to our absurd land laws, but 
 the Australian States have also no great streams of 
 immigration as they had in the golden days of the 
 '50's, the '60's, the '70's and even the '80's. And all 
 the time, in the United Kingdom, there are surplus 
 multitudes who have no work, as well as millions who 
 might be supposed to grasp with avidity the manifold 
 opportunities offered by our population-lacking lands. 
 The proposal made at the Royal Society of Arts was 
 that the municipal and urban authorities of the United 
 Kingdom should take migration in hand and direct 
 their surplus peoples to definite areas acquired in the 
 overseas dominions, with the aim not merely of afford- 
 ing outlet to surplus populations, but of "creating new 
 sources of industry and revenue." We need not dis- 
 cuss the details of any vague migration scheme, for
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 1B7 
 
 in the nature of things details are always winnowed 
 and revised under practical discussion. But the gen- 
 eral conception that the unoccupied lands of the over- 
 seas dominions should be systematically opened to the 
 unemployed people of the Mother Country is abso- 
 lutely sound. The vast lands of the great overseas 
 dominions were certainly never given to a mere hand- 
 ful of British settlers to be used or locked up at their 
 sweet will and pleasure. New Zealand belongs to the 
 New Zealanders, as Australia to the Australians, and 
 Canada to the Canadians, only in trust. It is patriotic 
 policy to hold these British lands against the Asiatic 
 whether Chinese, Japanese, or Hindo but it is an 
 unpatriotic and untenable policy to hold these British 
 lands against the British. Admittedly, there is no un- 
 qualified attempt to exclude our countrymen ; but 
 equally admittedly, there has been an inclination in 
 Australasia to belittle the right of the British im- 
 migrant to join our community and to take up land 
 under our guardianship. This period of discourage- 
 ment of migration may be at an end, for the question 
 is now attracting an immense amount of attention and 
 receiving a great deal of sympathy. Every public man 
 in the British dominions will agree that it would be a 
 good thing for all parties if suitable transferences of 
 population could be made from the Mother Country 
 to his particular state, and he will also declare himself 
 strongly in favor of this. But great migrations cannot 
 be arranged by mere words or satisfactorily set going 
 by empty good-will. Particularly is this so of the 
 migrations of to-day, after two generations of civilized 
 living have apparently softened the fibre of the peoples 
 from whom came the Nineteenth Century pioneers of 
 New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and Natal. The 
 Canadian Pacific Railway Company is recognizing this 
 in its great scheme for building a house and for fencing, 
 ploughing, and sowing the land before inviting settle-
 
 158 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 merit on one of its prairie farms. This sound scheme 
 of offering the immigrant somewhere to go, where he 
 can step into a new home and go to work on land 
 already prepared for his coming, will probably have to 
 be followed, wholly or in part, by any country seeking 
 to encourage immigration today. If British authorities 
 and colonial Governments would co-operate in this 
 direction, upon lines acceptable to both, because assist- 
 ing both to overcome their opposing population dif- 
 ficulties, great good might eventuate; the lives of 
 many hundreds of thousands of men and women would 
 be made brighter and better, and the aid of future 
 millions of industrious and loyal settlers would be 
 secured to the Empire in its time of need. Nothing, 
 however, can be done without an Imperial Conference 
 on migration, which ought to be called as soon as 
 public interest in the question is sufficiently advanced. 
 
 IMMIGRATION TO NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 The warnings against emigration to Australia or 
 New Zealand which have been issued upon the author- 
 ity of the Swedish and Danish Governments are the 
 reverse of complimentary to the Administrations of 
 the Commonwealth and the Dominion. We need not 
 trouble ourselves about the Australian phase of the 
 question, for we have enough to do if we consider 
 fairly and dispassionately the meaning to New Zealand 
 of this most uncomplimentary Scandinavian opinion. 
 In the first place, it must be recognized that while 
 British colonies naturally prefer immigrants of British 
 stock they unitedly and unanimously give to Scandina- 
 vian immigrants a whole-hearted welcome. Whether 
 Swedish, Danish, or Norwegian, the Scandinavian is 
 a very close cousin to the British, and is absorbed by 
 any English-speaking community more easily and 
 more quickly than any other foreigner. He has no
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 159 
 
 disadvantage but his language, and this is to a very 
 considerable extent counterbalanced in him by the 
 strength of common racial qualities which have too 
 usually been weakened in the United Kingdom. Our 
 political institutions are almost identical with his, for 
 they are drawn from the same source and have been 
 developed under much the same conditions of isolation 
 from the continental conditions of Europe Proper. He 
 is intelligent, industrious, brave, and orderly, with the 
 same standards of comfort and the same conceptions of 
 civilization. Moreover, though Scandinavia is the 
 true mother of what we commonly call Anglo-Saxon- 
 dom, it has built up no World-Empire, and does not 
 set up any such claim upon the patriotism of its em- 
 igrating children as can interfere with loyalty to the 
 lands of their adoption. Lastly, though not leastly 
 the Scandinavian is a genuine land settler, preferring 
 the country to the town, and having that healthy land 
 hunger which is the most desirable stimulant to per- 
 manent colonization. If any colonial statesman were 
 asked to place his finger upon that part of the map 
 of the world, outside the United Kingdom, from which 
 he would wish to draw the immigration which is the 
 very life blood of new lands, he would unhesitatingly 
 cover the peninsulas lying between the Baltic and the 
 North Sea. No English-speaking country, British or 
 American, has ever been able to secure enough Scandi- 
 navian immigrants, has never had to complain that they 
 endangered its institutions, demoralized its civilization, 
 or lowered its standards. We cannot, therefore pass 
 lightly over what is practically an impeachment, by 
 free Scandinavian Governments, of our colonial ad- 
 ministration. We may fairly say that, as far as New 
 Zealand is concerned, there is a certain amount of 
 exaggeration in the official warnings which have been 
 issued ; and we can honestly believe that, in spite of 
 everything, the Scandinavian would find greater in-
 
 160 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 dustrial opportunities in this under-populated Dom- 
 inion than in his over-populated peninsulas. But we 
 cannot conceal the unhappy fact that when we locked 
 the land against eager settlers, under the iniquitous 
 "taihoa" policy, we made New Zealand an undesirable 
 goal to the land-settling people, British and Scandi- 
 navian alike. 
 
 Sir Joseph Ward has the partisan virtue of cleaving 
 to his friends, even when they make such a hopeless 
 muddle of departmental affairs as does Mr. James 
 Carroll ; he can construe figures to mean almost any- 
 thing, and is rarely at a loss for statements and argu- 
 ments wherewith to justify the administrative system 
 for which he is responsible. Unfortunately, this par- 
 tisan virtue and these arithmetical agilities do not alter 
 facts ; they cannot transform the locked-up wilderness 
 through which the Main Trunk runs for so many miles 
 into the populous and productive region it should be ; 
 they cannot give a section of bush land to the land- 
 seeker who knows that we have millions of unoccupied 
 and fertile acres in the North, and foolishly imagines 
 that fair official words mean that the Government en- 
 courages settlement. During 1909 our increase in 
 population by excess of immigration over emigration 
 was only 4000. This pitifully small result, in a country 
 which could easily have gained 40,000 under sound and 
 capable administration, was undoubtedly due to the 
 "taihoa" policy. For the prices of our agricultural 
 produce have been cheeringly and steadily good. There 
 is no likelihood of any sudden collapse in prices, and 
 every prospect of their continued maintenance. Our 
 seasons are the envy of the agricultural world. Our 
 land will compare for fertility with any land on the 
 face of the globe. But settlement has been deliberately 
 and wilfully blocked, as every would-be settler knows 
 by the painful experience which is more convincing 
 than all the arguments of official apologists. We shall
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 161 
 
 probably be told that at this very moment and for this 
 present month 1,126,000 acres are being opened for 
 selection by the Government; to which it may be re- 
 torted that if this is the sort of thing which has been 
 held out as an inducement to immigrants it is no 
 wonder that the Scandinavian authorities are suspic- 
 ious. For this nominally huge area includes the fol- 
 lowing pastoral leases, which as everybody knows are 
 formally reopened as they fall in : Marlborough 81,- 
 852 acres; Westland, 128,660 acres; Otago, 739,526 
 acres; Southland, 141,066 acres. In other words, 
 nearly 1,100,000 acres are non-agricultural, are rough 
 pastoral runs being passed again through the leasing 
 machinery. The small balance includes sections 
 offered under the rack-renting lease only, as well as 
 those offered under the optional tenure. Comment is 
 needless. As long as the Government refuses to allow 
 the natural growth of settlement on Crown lands, and 
 takes no effective steps to remove the taboo laid by the 
 Maori Landlord policy upon native lands, so long will 
 our own urban population suffer recurrently from dull- 
 ness of trade and lack of employment, our finances 
 feel the evil in falling revenue and unprofitable services 
 and Scandinavian Governments find good reason for 
 advising their emigrating men and women to keep 
 away from New Zealand. It is shameful that this 
 should be, but, to be just, the shame falls not upon 
 Sir Joseph Ward or Mr. Carroll, but upon the self- 
 governing people that permits itself to be thus mis- 
 governed. 
 
 In the country, no less than in the towns, 
 the result seemed discouraging. Except in a 
 small tract just south of Auckland, the people 
 had the air of being camped out. People liv- 
 ing on it do not love the soil. It is not their
 
 162 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 property their home. Nor can they say it is 
 because it is a new, raw country. I have just 
 returned from a trip along the Gulf coast of 
 Southern Texas where they have only had a 
 railroad five years. The difference is too 
 great to be described. In one case New Zea- 
 land the settler is working for the public; in 
 Texas, for himself, his old age and for his 
 children. 
 
 He was an out-and-out socialist. He be- 
 lieved and openly asserted that all ownership 
 of property was a crime, that state ought to 
 resume and retain all land and conduct all 
 enterprises, etc., etc. So aggressive was he 
 and so little did he know what an argument 
 was that it was positively painful to talk with 
 him. He was not a German nor a Frenchman, 
 but a Canadian of British descent. When I 
 called his attention to the result of his ideas 
 in New Zealand he did not even attempt to 
 deny the condition of affairs in that country 
 and the startling contrast between it and even 
 Canada, but attributed it all to the unprogres- 
 sive nature of British blood and ideas. Coming 
 from a man of the race, a man who traveled 
 extensively, this idea is worthy of some at- 
 tention. I will confess that even I cannot tell
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 163 
 
 how much to attribute this backwardness to 
 the people themselves, and how much to their 
 laws and institutions. Take all I have written 
 about the sleepy, antiquated aspect of every- 
 thing in Australia and quadruple it and you 
 can begin to imagine New Zealand. Aus- 
 tralians every summer pour into New Zealand 
 to see the mountains, rivers, lakes and aborigi- 
 nes, as we go to the Rockies. Every year the 
 New Zealanders pour into Melbourne and Syd- 
 ney to shop, enjoy city life and "brush off the 
 hay seed", as our people go to New York or 
 Chicago. The sleepy, backward old towns of 
 Australia, with their poor hotels, are to them 
 wonders of brightness, and they figure on the 
 time when they will get rich enough to go and 
 live in Australia. 
 
 Says their greatest authority: "This New- 
 est England is no Utopia, no Paradise. Both 
 New Zealand and Australia are far behind 
 England and the United States in the new 
 municipal life, which is the most promising 
 thing in our politics, though as yet little more 
 than a promise." 
 
 There was a handsome, stalwart young Eng- 
 lishman who had lived eleven years in Sacra- 
 mento City, going down to New Zealand where
 
 164 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 he had a brother living. He was aged I should 
 say between thirty and thirty-five. He had 
 also lived in South Africa, and was distinctly 
 above the grade of laborer. After twenty- 
 seven days contact with him I should say he 
 was capable of filling any position. I after- 
 wards met him in Auckland. Without myself 
 opening in that strain he at once began ex- 
 pressing his surprise at the antiquated state of 
 everything. In his words: "A man from a 
 little provincial town in England might not 
 notice it, but that it was hard to a man from 
 the States. It is the difference between a candle 
 and an electric light." This was Auckland, a 
 town as large as Denver, and the commercial 
 metropolis of the Dominion. He further added 
 that there was nothing he could do or turn to 
 but sheep farming, and that he was then 
 studying up that industry. He could not en- 
 gage in a better undertaking. 
 
 Some of these ways are ludicrous, and at the 
 same time vexatious. They would be unworthy 
 of mentioning in a book if they did not throw 
 so much light on the nature of the people and 
 country. I had been out to one of their numer- 
 ous beaches, in which Wellington is well sup- 
 plied. It was pleasant to watch the children
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 165 
 
 play in the water and on the sand, and I 
 lingered, it being a mid-summer evening; I got 
 back to the hotel a little after seven. The 
 dining room was closed. I started out to find 
 something to eat on the streets; restaurants, 
 groceries, bakeries and fruit stores were all 
 closed, that is such as they have, there being 
 no regular restaurants. It was a city of the 
 dead. Occasionally a street car passed, the 
 only sign of life in a city of nearly 100,000 
 people and their capital. After visiting about 
 a dozen eating places I at last found a little 
 place open where the woman in charge told me 
 I could get cake or scones, tea, coffee or choco- 
 late, and nothing else. I ordered scones and 
 chocolate. The latter of course had a dead fly 
 in it, so I had to dine on a couple of scones and 
 a glass of water, knowing at the time I could 
 get nothing more to eat until eight o 'clock the 
 next morning. This where the sun was up and 
 shining at 5 a. m., and I up too and anything 
 but shining. 
 
 On Sunday the breakfast hour is 8:30. The 
 street cars do not run until noon, and none but 
 a few heathen Chinese sell fruit or candies. 
 Such things as steam heat, private bath rooms 
 and use of ice to keep provisions from deterio-
 
 166 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 rating are unknown, also screens. At the hotel 
 I stopped in at Wellington the stables were 
 within thirty feet of the dining room, with no 
 screens or even electric fans. The minute pro- 
 visions were placed upon the table they were 
 blackened with flies; the sugar bowl was also. 
 In Auckland my room was like a hive. I think 
 I killed at least five hundred a day with a 
 folded newspaper without any diminution in 
 their number. They had no sense of fear and 
 took my blows without effort to escape. I 
 might state my present idea of perfect misery 
 is being awakened at 4 a. m. by swarms of flies 
 in an Auckland hotel, with no breakfast in 
 sight until 8 a. m. After what I have written 
 concerning these matters in Australia this is 
 an unpleasant, stale subject. It is as unpleas- 
 ant to me to refer to it as it will be to others to 
 read it. I could follow out these ideas to an 
 unlimited extent and point out an infinity of 
 petty matters wherein they are subject to 
 improvement over which their laws and insti- 
 tutions have no influence. They are little, it is 
 true, but the lack of them tend to make their 
 country unattractive to the natives of all the 
 peoples of Europe but those of England and 
 Scotland, and to all of them except to those
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 167 
 
 who know no better. To any criticism there 
 is always the ready reply: "It suits us, so there 
 is nothing more to be said on the matter." I 
 have only referred to them to show that the 
 decadent state of the country may not be 
 wholly attributed to its institutions. Whether 
 my socialistic readers think so or not, I desire 
 to be fair and unprejudiced. If I had found 
 New Zealand as I had had it held up to be it 
 would have given me pleasure to say so. 
 
 I would be unfair, however, if I did not 
 mention one place, a week's stay, at which 
 forms one of the pleasantest recollections of 
 all my travels Rotorua amid the hot 
 springs and its interesting tribe of aborigines. 
 To become acquainted with the Maoris, as the 
 tribe is called, was my chief object in visiting 
 the country. They are mostly gathered in the 
 region of the hot springs, and together with 
 the beautiful mountain lake, the vegetation, 
 the araucarias and enormous tree ferns, and 
 the spouting springs, purely the result of 
 chemical action, form a place well worth 
 traveling thousands of miles to see. The vil- 
 lage is beautiful, much like an American 
 country town, with its neat wooden cottages 
 placed in large yards filled with flowers. The
 
 168 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 extensive and universal culture of flowers 
 among the English is about their finest trait, 
 and nowhere, not even in California pre- 
 eminently the land of flowers do they grow 
 finer ones, cosmos growing up to the eaves 
 of the houses, auratum lilies over twelve 
 inches in diameter, prove the goodness of the 
 soil, as well as their fondness for their cultiva- 
 tion. The unexplained scarcity and high price 
 of fruit still surprises, but as no one individual 
 owns a foot of ground anywhere in or around 
 the town that may account for it. 
 
 There are no hotels, but the boarding houses 
 in all save eating are excellent, and the best I 
 found in all Australasia, while the price is 
 very reasonable. After the horrors of the 
 Wellington house, my Rotorua stopping place 
 seemed a haven of rest. Having seen hot 
 springs in several different countries, from 
 Africa to South America, they did not interest 
 me greatly. Except the common silicious 
 sinter, the creation of such springs, there are 
 no minerals of interest in the neighborhood. 
 So I devoted all my attention to the natives, 
 and they were well worthy of my time, and 
 even a more extended visit, and are worthy of 
 a more extended description than I can give in
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 169 
 
 a book on sociology. I cannot resist saying, 
 however, that as they never had taro before 
 the advent of the whites, but pounded instead 
 roots of a species of fern, this disposes in my 
 mind of the myth so dear to the antiquarians 
 of Hawaii that there was uninterrupted com- 
 munication between them and their relatives 
 at Honolulu in their little canoes over thou- 
 sands of miles of open ocean without compass. 
 I never did believe in it, and now I am certain. 
 The English and their colonials, the New 
 Zealanders, have always been good to the 
 Maoris, considering that they stole their coun- 
 try. " The earth belongs to the saints". With 
 the exception of one little war, they have al- 
 ways lived amicably together, and I could see 
 no evidence of that bitter, unending hatred 
 which the native Hawaiians have for the mis- 
 sionary element in that land. One feels like 
 congratulating them on falling into the hands 
 of the Episcopalians instead of the Congre- 
 gationalists. Their native ways have never 
 been interfered with. Their native dances, so 
 rigorously prohibited in Hawaii, they give to 
 the public every week ; at times under govern- 
 ment auspices in the pump room of the sani- 
 tarium, and the person must have a very
 
 170 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 prurient mind who can object to their boys and 
 girls sweet as little angels bathing in puris 
 naturalibus in the creeks and pools. I suppose 
 a Boston school mam would be willing to look 
 upon them through an opera glass, but not 
 otherwise. Their women have all the winning, 
 fascinating ways of the French women, and 
 the English marry them very frequently and 
 without loss of caste. The term ' ' squaw man ' ' 
 is never applied to them with ignominy, as 
 with us in the West. Upon the whole I think 
 the treatment of the Maoris by the English the 
 most creditable thing in the history of New 
 Zealand. 
 
 A Boston critic, referring to my work 
 on the Mayas, said that a collector was 
 a hog. A hog must be true to his nature, and 
 as, through the kindness of the museum direc- 
 tors, I succeeded in acquiring both plunder 
 and information, I shall always consider my 
 trip to New Zealand and my acquaintanceship 
 with the Maoris as having been successful be- 
 yond my expectations. 
 
 While at a village in the Maori country I 
 had the satisfaction of witnessing a native law 
 suit, one according to the tribal law common 
 to primitive people all over the world. It
 
 NEW ZEALAND. 171 
 
 seems that a member of that village which has 
 an unspellable and unpronounceable name had 
 run away with the wife of a Maori living in 
 some other village. In Chicago the man whose 
 wife had run away would have been arrested 
 and sentenced to jail; in Hawaii the whites 
 would have arrested both elopers and made 
 them work the roads for a few years. The 
 New Zealanders let the Maoris settle the mat- 
 ter in their own way. A delegation from the 
 other village, headed by a handsome middle- 
 aged man with bare legs, wearing knicker- 
 bockers, an official necklace and cane, filed in, 
 calling for vendetta or a valuable considera- 
 tion as a salve for their wounded feelings and 
 honor. Their chief, who had the head of a 
 Roman senator and the demeanor of Regulus 
 addressing the Carthagenians, spoke for about 
 an hour, while his delegation sat comfortably 
 down on the grass in the shade by the banks 
 of the beautiful stream and imbibed warm 
 bottled pop. Soda water is never iced in New 
 Zealand. Then a tall, handsome old Maori 
 took up the reply on behalf of the residents. 
 Sometimes his antics approached near to a 
 war dance. Thereupon the villagers began 
 bringing guns, cooking utensils, articles of
 
 172 NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 clothing, blankets, etc., and throwing them in 
 a pile on the ground before the delegation, ac- 
 companying the act with some expression of 
 opinion. One old woman carrying an old 
 blanket worth perhaps a dollar, before throw- 
 ing it down gave utterance to a speech that 
 was almost a song or chant, accompanying it 
 with the prettiest piece of pantomine I had 
 ever witnessed. Madame Pilar-Morin was not 
 even a good second to her. Plainer than words 
 she expressed her opinion of the general 
 worthlessness of women in general and the 
 absolute, ultimate and complete worthlessness 
 of the woman in question. As she deposited 
 the blanket on the pile she unquestionably 
 said: "I give this blanket rather than have 
 trouble, but she is not worth it, the brazen 
 hussy." I left before the matter terminated, 
 but when I left the villagers were still hopping 
 around like toads under a harrow, while the 
 delegation sat silent and composed, still drink- 
 ing warm pop. An Englishman there said the 
 delegation would undoubtedly take the goods, 
 as they did not want the woman back at any 
 price. 
 
 I will now take up the more serious ques- 
 tions that concern the country.
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 173 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 State Socialism In New Zealand. 
 
 Ten years ago one of the foremost socialists 
 in the United States visited New Zealand, and 
 afterwards published a work about the coun- 
 try. His work is quoted by all the newspapers 
 of both this and that country as authoritative, 
 and I will so consider it. I read it only since 
 my return. A great deal of the matter con- 
 tained therein I learned in the field, but in 
 such a way that it is hard to quote authority, 
 which to an old lawyer is a second nature. The 
 writer of that book I knew personally and he 
 is now dead, otherwise I might handle him and 
 his book differently. I give him credit for be- 
 ing sincere and earnest, and believe his book 
 to be a truthful statement of affairs in that 
 country. I, of course, do not agree with him 
 in his conclusions, and think ten years of ex-
 
 174 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 perimentation have not carried out his roseate 
 predictions. I did not meet the official classes 
 as he did, nor did I desire to do so. I met 
 mostly the business men and men of science. 
 Forty years contact with professional poli- 
 ticians have taught me to believe very little in 
 what they say, and nothing at all in what they 
 do, as the practice of ' ' queering ' ' among them 
 is almost universal, that is ostensibly speaking 
 and working in favor of a measure while 
 secretly murdering it. I expected that if I 
 called upon one of them the prosperity of New 
 Zealand would be painted in the most vivid 
 and alluring colors. Their year book did not 
 show it, my eyes did not show it, and their 
 business men did not show it, and so far as I 
 could learn their artisans did not show it. A 
 business man will not willingly run down his 
 own business world nor the place he lives in. 
 As he supports not only himself and his family 
 but the politician and his family, his word is 
 entitled to the more credit of the two. 
 
 New Zealand is unquestionably the most ad- 
 vanced socialistic country in the world, far 
 more so than even Australia. It is the fol- 
 lowing things: 
 
 Banker.
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 175 
 
 Broker. 
 
 Bull Owner. 
 
 Coal Dealer. 
 
 Clothing Maker. 
 
 Competitor in many lines. 
 
 Sugar Manufacturer. 
 
 Exporter. 
 
 Farmer. 
 
 Butcher. 
 
 Fire Insurer. 
 
 Life Insurer. 
 
 Intelligence Office. 
 
 Hotel Keeper. 
 
 Guide. 
 
 Landlord. 
 
 Land Monopolist. 
 
 Lawyer. 
 
 News Distributor. 
 
 Partner in Business. 
 
 Railway Owner. 
 
 Street Car Owner. 
 
 Railway Manufacturer. 
 
 Sugar Refiner. 
 
 Real Estate Dealer. 
 
 Electric Light Manufacturer. 
 
 Savings Bank. 
 
 Annuity Insurer.
 
 176 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 Telegraph Owner. 
 
 Telephone Owner. 
 
 Restaurateur. 
 
 These in addition to our familiar ones of 
 conducting the post offices, making the roads, 
 educating the children, protecting the public 
 and preserving the peace. 
 
 All the above is only a beginning. Below 
 come what they are still after. The leaders of 
 the so-called progressive party pledge them- 
 selves to attain them, and they are rapidly ac- 
 complishing it. 
 
 State Fire Insurance. 
 
 Further democratization of transportation 
 of the steamship lines, the ocean to be no 
 longer free. 
 
 Nationalization of the coal mines. 
 
 Complete nationalization of the land. 
 
 Assumption by the government of the busi- 
 ness of mining and selling coal. 
 
 Increase of the land and income taxes for 
 the further equalization of rich and poor. 
 
 Removal of tariff taxation on the necessaries 
 of life. 
 
 Establishment of government offices where 
 cheap law can be served out to the people.
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 177 
 
 Regulation of rents for the protection of 
 tenants from political pressure by landlords. 
 
 Extension of the purchase and subdivision 
 of the large estates so that all the people may 
 have land. 
 
 State banking to give the people the owner- 
 ship and administration of the machinery of 
 commercial and financial credit, doing for the 
 business class what the state with its advances 
 to settlers does for the farmers, tradesmen and 
 working men. 
 
 The nationalization of the news service, 
 government to own all newspapers. 
 
 The above list is from my socialistic 
 authority, and was made ten years ago; much 
 of it has been realized; great strides have been 
 made towards all of them. While I was there 
 the great agitation was for state payment of 
 wages to men out of work ; it was not included 
 in the list. When I asked what would be done 
 to have the unpleasant work accomplished 
 when no man had to work unless he felt in- 
 clined, I was told it would be done by forced 
 corvees, of all the men in portions. Now let 
 me say that I extend my hearty sympathies 
 to the progressive party in New Zealand, and 
 express my wishes and desires that all their
 
 178 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 program will be carried out to the utmost ex- 
 tent of their desires. I want to see it all tried 
 and am satisfied to see New Zealand try it. So 
 far as they have already gone satisfies me, but 
 I want the rest of the world to ascertain by 
 their example how far a community may 
 safely go in that direction. I think it lies some 
 distance this side of New Zealand. 
 
 I will not assert that all those measures are 
 unwise and destructive. That capacity is not 
 given to me, and I will not grant that it has 
 been given to any other man of the human race. 
 So long as the race is made up of the idle and 
 the industrious, the vicious and the reason- 
 able, the spendthrift and the provident man, 
 the thief and the honest man, the drunken and 
 the temperate, the sharper and the imbecile, 
 the farmer and the city man, the professional 
 tax eater and the unwilling tax payer, I pre- 
 sume the science of government will be purely 
 experimental, a game of give and take. My 
 authority arrogates to himself that wisdom all 
 through his book ; he lays it down as a princi- 
 ple that everything taken from the individual 
 and given to the state is a benefit, and that 
 everything taken from a man who has any-
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 179 
 
 thing and given to a man who has nothing is a 
 benefit. 
 
 With my limited understanding, however, 
 I think I may lay down the following incontro- 
 verted principles : 
 
 That protection is a government function, 
 as no man could protect himself against either 
 a gang of bandits or a foreign invasion. 
 
 That regulation of the currency is also a 
 governmental matter, otherwise every man 
 could issue his more or less worthless money. 
 
 That education should be made a matter of 
 sublime importance, as the state is another 
 parent to each individual, which includes posts 
 and other dissemination of intelligence, as it is 
 mostly done without any prospect of or hope 
 of profit except in general welfare. They are 
 a matter of expense to the community and will 
 probably always be so, and we are satisfied to 
 pay for them sensibly administered, as we are 
 satisfied to pay for the lighting of our houses 
 during the long winter nights. It is my firm 
 conviction, however, that beyond these every 
 step is the step of a blind man over a danger- 
 ous, rocky, precipitous path. Every advance 
 should be slow, timid and hesitating, only 
 taken after carefully feeling the way with the
 
 180 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 knowledge of the precipice lying on the left 
 hand. Under this head we may say that liberty 
 is the most precious heritage of man, bought 
 by the struggles of centuries and the blood and 
 sacrifices of the best, and that ought to be 
 jealously guarded. Every individual right 
 surrendered to the state makes one less a free 
 man; the total surrender of everything to the 
 state, under whatever name it may be called, 
 makes one a slave beyond even the domestic 
 slavery of ancient times where they all consti- 
 tuted a sort of great family, or the yoke of 
 more recent African slavery. Short of that 
 and not within the domain of speculative soci- 
 ology is the fact that everything done by the 
 state is more expensively done than if done by 
 private enterprise, spurred on by the hope of 
 profit and the fear of competition. In my talk 
 with the Canadian socialist I asserted that 
 everything our state did cost money to be paid 
 by taxation; that our schools, our army, our 
 navy, our various legislative bodies, our 
 courts, foreign representatives, executives, 
 geological and coast surveys, were so paid for 
 arid that even our post office costs us sixteen 
 millions a year over receipts. Thereupon I 
 laid it down as a fact that where an individual
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 181 
 
 or a private corporation paid three dollars for 
 a service the state paid four or five dollars. He 
 admitted this and said it was right, that every 
 man ought to have good wages, etc., disregard- 
 ing my claim that the difference consisted 
 more in the amount of service given than in 
 the wages, which also differed. When I stated 
 that taking over the telegraph and telephone 
 would cost ten or sixteen millions more above 
 receipts he admitted and justified that. When 
 I stated that taking over the railroads, the coal 
 mines, etc,, etc., would each cost many millions 
 more above receipts, he admitted and justified 
 all that. So does my authority in his book on 
 New Zealand. Therein lies the first and most 
 patent danger from state socialism. The 
 socialist thinks the purse of the public is as 
 abundant and inexhaustible as the waters of 
 the ocean; that there can be no limit to the 
 demands upon it. This the conscientious ones 
 like my author. Then there are the others, 
 thieves by instinct, who ardently desire to 
 drain every man who has one of his last dollar. 
 The man in the press being squeezed out of his 
 life blood, drop by drop, like the victim in the 
 embrace of the iron woman during the middle 
 ages, knows there is a limit and with the
 
 182 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 escape of every drop of blood feels weaker and 
 weaker. On my farm is a very fine spring of 
 water, fully adequate to supply all the stock 
 that will ever be on the farm. What would 
 that do towards supplying Joliet, our county 
 seat, with its 40,000 people, or Chicago? 
 
 Let us see how it works so far as it has gone 
 in New Zealand. Ten years are a very short 
 period in the life of a man. In the life of a 
 people infinitesimally small, but in this case 
 ten years are enough. We will first take the 
 railroads, the nationalization of which has 
 been pushed further there than anywhere else 
 in the world. New Zealand owns all its rail- 
 roads. I paid four cents a mile to ride first- 
 class from Wellington to Taumarinui on the 
 Wanganui River. They called it the " train 
 de luxe ' ' the luxurious train. It was hardly 
 equal to our freight trains with cushion seats. 
 The train left a little after daylight and 
 reached my destination, a little over two hun- 
 dred miles, at midnight. I will not compare 
 it with any trains in the United States or 
 Mexico, because neither country has trains so 
 poor. It was very much poorer than the 
 Yankee-owned railroads in Central America. 
 It bumped along about like a stage coach over
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 183 
 
 a corduroy road. A few days before a train 
 for Napier from Wellington stuck right in the 
 middle of a long tunnel. It could neither go 
 forward nor back out. When it was extricated 
 it was found that several people had been 
 smothered to death; I escaped that fate. There 
 were no air brakes, no vestibules, no electric 
 lights, no double windows, no toilet appliances, 
 There was a dining car. I washed for lunch 
 by pouring a glass of drinking water on my 
 handkerchief and passing it over my hands 
 and face. The service and food in the dining 
 car was hardly so good as in a Halsted Street 
 beanery during the rush hour. The lunch 
 costing 62 cents was not nearly so good as a 
 twenty-five cent lunch at Child's. If you had 
 asked for ice water they would have confined 
 you as a crazy man. On the coaches one in 
 half an hour would become white from dust 
 which lay thick over seats, clothing, baggage 
 and window sills. From the Wanganui River 
 on, the ordinary mail train was taken^ It 
 carried freight cars and stopped at every sta- 
 tion from five to twenty minutes. Starting 
 right after breakfast Rotorua, a distance of 
 less than two hundred miles, was reached as 
 the long summer day was merging into night,
 
 184 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 at a rate of about twelve miles an hour. Tak- 
 ing the express train de luxe from there run- 
 ning right through to Auckland, this swift 
 train took from morning to night, a distance of 
 170 miles. The ride tired me more than the 
 four days journey from Chicago to San Fran- 
 cisco for purpose of taking the boat to go to 
 that country. 
 
 We will now call upon the New Zealanders 
 themselves as witnesses. The communication 
 referred to in the first I did not see. Both are 
 taken from the New Zealand herald. 
 
 HOW OUR RAILWAYS ARE RUN. 
 
 Sir, I am able to practically sympathize with your 
 correspondent "Visitor," for some two months ago my 
 wife and I underwent similar experiences. We were 
 staying with friends at Waihi, and noting in the time 
 table that if we left Waihi by the 6.5 p. m. train we 
 should catch the 7.35 at Paeroa, and arrive at Te 
 Aroha at 8.25, we arranged accordingly. We did not 
 then know that this official time table was a hoax. 
 We sat on the Paeroa platform, waiting from seven 
 o'clock until nine, when the train dragged itself along- 
 side it. In our simplicity we walked to the passenger 
 cars at the end, and on boarding one of them a porter 
 came and peremptorily told us to get out, for the 
 train would not go on for half an hour, when we should 
 have to board it "in the yard." Asking where the 
 "yard" was, he pointed in the darkness towards Te 
 Aroha, so I pulled our luggage on to the platform
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 185 
 
 again, but afterwards seeing that the guard's van was 
 open, and to save carrying it to the "yard" by and 
 by, I placed it in the van, only to have it again 
 thrown out, because it was not labelled. Ignoring 
 rules and regulations I replaced the luggage on the 
 passenger coach. We then spent another half-hour 
 on the platform, when we groped our way through 
 the darkness to the "yard", having a well founded be- 
 lief, that the officials would not trouble to warn us 
 before the train started. After walking along the track 
 a short distance we came to a lighted carriage, which 
 we identified by finding our luggage where we had 
 left it. There was not a sign of life about the place, 
 and we realized our wisdom in acting on our own 
 initiative, for we immediately afterwards moved away. 
 The train stopping, eventually, within a few hundred 
 yards of Te Aroha, we were asked to get down, which 
 we did, burdened with our heavy luggage, stumbling 
 over sleepers and other obstructions, which, in the 
 darkness, we could not see. At 10 :30 (two hours late) 
 we found ourselves on the station platform, which 
 was in total darkness, the only living person being the 
 guard of the train. There being nobody to take the 
 luggage, and no way of leaving it at the station, which 
 was locked up, we "humped" it through deserted 
 streets, arriving at the hotel at 10 :45, almost exhausted. 
 Thus ended one of the most primitive and provoking 
 railway trips it was ever my misfortune to take, and I 
 am told that it is the usual thing. 
 
 Between the populous centre of Waihi and the well- 
 known neighboring resort, Te Aroha, a distance of 
 only 26 miles, there is practically no connection after 
 the 9 :40 train in the morning. Excepting the Rotorua, 
 the Auckland-Wellington and Christchurch-Dunedin 
 express trains, we really have no passenger trains 
 worthy of the name in New Zealand. Our railways 
 are, generally speaking, simply a good and live stock
 
 186 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 service, passengers being only an incidental considera- 
 tion. And can we expect it to be otherwise? Each 
 Minister who takes charge of our railways, knows no 
 more about practically working them, than he does of 
 the solar system. Thus, instead of supervising, he be- 
 comes subservient to our permanent officials, who, 
 being "in the rut" themselves, drag him in too every 
 time. Taking our New Zealand railway service alto- 
 gether, I honestly believe it to be the most unsatis- 
 factory railway service in the world. Again and again, 
 in the pursuit of my business, I have traveled on the 
 railroads of nearly every new country, and thus I can 
 speak from experience. The people of New Zealand 
 do not know how much theirs are behind the average 
 railways of the world, and how little accommodation 
 they really get for their money. H. H. 
 
 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 
 
 North Auckland Main Trunk Trains. 
 
 Sir: On the 29th ult. the usual evening Helensville 
 to Wellsford train was detained in the interest of the 
 passengers from Helensville Show a train arrange- 
 ment termed a "special," for which its patrons are 
 expected to be grateful. The public patronized it well, 
 five or six carriages being filled to overflowing, and, in 
 addition, there were several cattle and horse trucks. 
 The men in charge took extra trouble, both at the 
 engine and in looking to the comfort of passengers, 
 the train being opened throughout and well lighted. 
 But the engine ! As soon as we began to climb the 
 slope above Kanohi the dragging pace promised 
 trouble, and half-way up to the tunnel the skidding 
 of the wheels and a few snorts and grunts brought us 
 to a standstill. Then we had to retrograde into Kanohi. 
 A fresh head of steam was developed, one of the car-
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 187 
 
 riages shunted, the passengers being distributed 
 through the other cars, and again the driver put his 
 little iron horse at the incline. Half-way up the brakes 
 were applied, and the passenger train left standing 
 while the cattle trucks were hauled into Makarau sta- 
 tion, I understand. Then the engine came back for us 
 and hauled us successfully into the Makarau tunnel. 
 Here for some minutes the engine lay down to rest 
 apparently, while the carriages slowly filled with sul- 
 phurous smoke. Strong lungs half-chocked and strong 
 stomachs retched violently, while weaker passengers 
 almost fainted with the intolerable stench. Slowly 
 and at last the engine prevailed. We drew clear, and 
 open doors and windows soon restored the comfort of 
 passengers. Each station lightened the load, and at 
 Te Akaroa the majority of the stock trucks were left. 
 After this the engine was fairly up to its work and 
 made satisfactory progress. But from Helensville to 
 Hotea, a distance of 27 miles, the time taken was three 
 hours at the rate of nine miles per hour. And why? 
 The time-table? Fault of the men? Certainly not! 
 The cause of delay is the ridiculous little toy engine 
 employed on the line, an engine which is utterly in- 
 adequate to the work required of it. On no other line 
 in the world, with our traffic, would such a Puffing- 
 Billy be tolerated, and it should long since have been 
 relegated to working in a quarry or on a timber tram, 
 if indeed its vagaries do not entitle it to a place on the 
 scrap-heap. But our long suffering Northern public 
 seem never to learn the lesson of the unjust judge: 
 'Because this woman troubleth me will I arise and 
 avenge her of her enemies." 
 
 " Roy d worth, " J. H. Hudson, Hoteo. 
 
 If I wanted to take up the space with per- 
 sonal matters I could parallel either of the 
 above letters with my experiences with their
 
 188 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 national tourist agency and my reception at 
 the station at midnight on their famous river. 
 
 But now we will fall back on their most en- 
 thusiastic advocate, my authority, as to the 
 success of their state owned and conducted 
 railroads: "An average of two millions of dol- 
 lars a year of the general revenue is appropri- 
 ated to railroads." 
 
 "When I was there (my authority) the de- 
 partment had just bought twelve thirty-eight- 
 ton American locomotives for 1,650 pounds 
 delivered at Wellington, and ten sixty-ton 
 engines for 2,000 pounds; the same locomo- 
 tives bought in England cost 3,150 pounds, and 
 built in New Zealand (state work shops) just 
 twice as much as the American article 4,000 
 pounds." 
 
 "None of the Australasian governments 
 (Australasia includes New Zealand) make 
 both ends meet in their railroads. None of 
 them are able to pay out of the receipts of the 
 railroads the full interest on the money bor- 
 rowed to build them. The tax payers have to 
 go down into their pockets every year to make 
 the deficit good. In New Zealand in 1898 the 
 roads earned three per cent over anything but 
 the interest charge; and if the railroad bonds
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 189 
 
 were bearing only three per cent interest the 
 receipts would show a profit over interest too 
 of .029, but the fact that some of the bonds 
 carry four per cent and more prevents this 
 showing of profit." 
 
 Query by Diven: What would be the deficit 
 if the roads were run with the accommodations 
 they are in the United States'? 
 
 Much is made by him in several pages of 
 printed matter on the absence of discrimina- 
 tion between shippers. Let us see : 
 
 " Rates favoring producers shipping for ex- 
 port are an acknowledged feature of the rail- 
 road management all through Australasia." 
 
 "On the other hand freight from America, 
 France or Germany pays a higher rate than 
 their own produce. This in addition to a high 
 tariff." 
 
 "We can afford to help the men who are 
 producers if we make it up on the men who 
 drink the tea and buy the dry goods. So we 
 make the merchandise pay and favor the pro- 
 ducers." 
 
 "The commissioner of railroads has power 
 to make special rates for persons and places 
 he thinks it desirable to foster, as in the case 
 of new districts or enterprises operated under
 
 190 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 certain disadvantages, such as a great distance 
 from market." 
 
 "The New Zealand railroad tariff is literally 
 a protective tariff. The protective freight 
 rate against imported paper bags and in favor 
 of the domestic article is almost double, and so 
 on with other things." 
 
 "Materials for making roads pay only half 
 the regular rates, because roads are feeders 
 for the railroads." And then a page of other 
 differentials. 
 
 "Towns with water facilities get freights 
 and fares at competitive rates. Those depend- 
 ent upon the railroads alone receive no such 
 
 concessions. ' 
 
 If all the above do not constitute discrimina- 
 tion I do not understand the English language 
 
 "New Zealand freight rates are of course 
 high in comparison with ours." 
 
 "The New Zealand railways are in some 
 respects almost primitive. They can be shown 
 to be inferior to the roads of Europe and 
 America in speed and comfort." 
 
 "The scientific traveler could fill a volume 
 with the complaints which he could gather 
 from the remonstrances of railway reform 
 leagues, deputations to the premier and minis-
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 191 
 
 ter for railways, from the debates in parlia- 
 ment and from individuals with private 
 grievances." 
 
 "None of the traveling accommodations of 
 New Zealand are what could be described as 
 luxurious, and those that have been provided 
 for the second class are primitive in the ex- 
 treme. Narrow, uncushioned seats, bare floors, 
 draughty doors and windows, make the cars 
 cheerless and uncomfortable, though in New 
 Zealand as elsewhere the majority of the 
 travelers are second class." 
 
 Justice compels the writer of this book to 
 state that those narrow, hard seats have been 
 covered with pieces of carpet. Otherwise 
 there has been no change since authority 
 wrote. 
 
 "There are no air brakes even on the ex- 
 press trains in New Zealand. There is no cord 
 between the passenger cars and the conductor 
 and engineer. There were no dining cars when 
 I was there, though they have since been put 
 on. The rates are high, but what the traveler 
 or the shipper pays the treasury gets." 
 
 "One of the commissioners whose power is 
 of the greatest since he has the power to make 
 new rates, to arrange methods of appointment
 
 192 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 to places, and must be consulted on new lines, 
 confessed that his life was made a burden by 
 the politicians. The politicians are all on the 
 job. The members of parliament are simply 
 commission agents for their constituents." 
 
 "Libraries of criticism and of statistical 
 comparisons to prove that freight rates are 
 much higher and accommodations poorer than 
 those of countries which enjoy the blessing of 
 private ownership do not touch one point at 
 least, and that is that the system suits the New 
 Zealander better than any other." 
 
 "The New Zealander thinks the inconveni- 
 ences he suffers are part of the education of 
 the democracy, teaching it to consider the 
 common good instead of individual and local 
 self interest, and he thinks this lesson worth 
 all it has cost and is still to cost." 
 
 A drunken man fell down stairs bumpty- 
 bump, heels over head, landing at the bottom 
 a collapsed heap. A lady comes up to him with 
 expressions of sympathy. He looks up with 
 surprise and replies: "I allus comes down 
 stairs this way." 
 
 Do the New Zealanders really own their 
 rickety travesty of a railroad? I think not. 
 If so why do their laborers, for whose sole
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 193 
 
 benefit the whole country is run, leave her 
 shores by thousands? They do not own their 
 railroads, nor their lands, nor their telegraphs, 
 nor their so-called co-operative industries. All 
 these and they to boot, body and soul are 
 owned by the bond holder in Frankfort and 
 London. When he cracks the whip they must 
 dance. With the largest debt per capita of any 
 people in the world hanging over his head, 
 never to be reduced, without the hope of 
 amassing a competence for his old age or to 
 leave to his children, he is a slave without even 
 the slave 's certainty of bread and butter until 
 he sees the snows of sixty-five winters on his 
 head. 
 
 A man there who had lived in the United 
 States said to me: "Your country gives a live 
 man a chance. New Zealand gives no live man 
 a chance. Every step a ma^n makes upwards 
 the harder they make it for him." 
 
 The land in New Zealand does not yet all 
 belong to the state, but it is working as rapidly 
 towards that end as they can possibly accom- 
 plish it. 
 
 "The minister of lands has declared in a 
 public speech that he would like to see the time
 
 194 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 when all the lands of New Zealand were 
 nationalized." 
 
 "Mr. William Rollstone, the most authori- 
 tative figure certainly as regards the lands 
 question, said during the last campaign: 'We 
 shall never have national prosperity in New 
 Zealand until we nationalize every foot of its 
 land.' " 
 
 "Both in the land and fiscal policy of New 
 Zealand since 1891 this has been the ruling 
 purpose, to put an end to private ownership 
 of land. ' ' 
 
 "One of the leading officials in the Land 
 Department, whose special work is the pur- 
 chase of the resumed estates, said to me: 'We 
 have the choice of all the large estates of New 
 Zealand. All are at the call of the government. 
 No man now dreams of buying an estate or 
 seeking to build .one up to leave to his family. 
 All that is a thing of the past. ' 
 
 "In consequence of the laws we have re- 
 ferred to and public opinion, speculation in 
 land in New Zealand is dead. ' ' 
 
 "Land monopoly was the first to be at- 
 tacked, and the first means of attacking it was 
 that ancient constitutional weapon, the tax."
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 195 
 
 ' ' The premier was explicit. The graduation 
 of the taxes is to check monopoly. He did not 
 shrink from raising the issue between the rich 
 and the poor." 
 
 "It is our intention gradually to lead up to 
 the pure land tax." 
 
 "I found it universally avowed in New Zea- 
 land that the present taxes are only the begin- 
 ning. There is no point of policy for the future 
 more firmly fixed in the popular mind than 
 that these taxes shall be increased until they 
 have done the work for which the reform was 
 begun." 
 
 " The progressive tax encourages the land 
 owner to sell." 
 
 "The ultimate ideal of the New Zealand 
 system is that the state shall be the only land 
 owner, the only free holder." 
 
 "As to the means by which the funds will be 
 provided for the growing pension list, he said 
 if hereafter the burden exceeds our resources 
 we will tax land more, and I have already so 
 intimated." 
 
 The above quotations, all from my authority, 
 I believe to correctly set forth the position of 
 the government of New Zealand on the ques- 
 tion. But even at the time ten years ago
 
 196 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 penalties were laid on the self reliant, enter- 
 prising pioneer. To quote again from author- 
 ity: "In the new laws the hated freehold is 
 continued, and yet it is not continued. It is 
 practically discontinued in the disposition of 
 the private estates taken back to be made into 
 farms for the people, but is still given in the 
 sale of public lands. But new conditions as to 
 use and improvement and area are imposed 
 which take away from the new freeholds the 
 anarchistic right beloved of the would-be New 
 England squire as of all squires to do what I 
 will with my own and besides these new re- 
 strictions progressing upon him from the rear 
 come the never resting progressive taxes." 
 
 The above means simply that if you are will- 
 ing to go away back in the mountains where 
 there are no other settlers, no proximity to 
 towns, schools, transportation, churches, no 
 society for your wife and children, you may 
 imagine yourself to be the owner of your own 
 home until you have gotten it nicely improved, 
 then regardless of necessary public expenses 
 your -taxes will be increased until crushed by 
 the burden you are glad to turn it over to the 
 public at a nominal price, and that is just what 
 New Zealand has been doing as I shall show
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 197 
 
 later on. I was told there, however, that now 
 no public land is sold, only leased, but as I can 
 quote no recognized authority I only venture 
 the statement, leaving it to be either true or 
 not true, as it makes no present difference with 
 the tenor of this chapter. To return to our 
 authority : 
 
 "No one is allowed to buy or lease more, 
 either of the resumed lands or the public lands, 
 than 640 acres of first class or 2,000 acres of 
 second class land, nor more pastural land than 
 enough for 2,000 or 4,000 sheep. If he already 
 holds that amount of land he can get no more. 
 Mineral and oil lands are reserved. The 
 government offers its public lands by lease or 
 sale. But it offers the lands it has had to buy 
 compulsorily or amicably on lease only. But 
 on those who buy and on those who lease re- 
 strictions are imposed to prevent monopoly 
 and insure use, restrictions of area and im- 
 provements. No one can attain the dignity of 
 state tenant who cannot pass a satisfactory 
 examination showing that he has the money, 
 knowledge and character necessary for suc- 
 cess. No one can retain his farm, whether 
 bought or leased, unless he is found to be faith- 
 fully complying with all the requirements."
 
 198 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 ''Leasehold and freehold alike are taxable on 
 the prairie value. If the land tax is increased 
 so as to soak up all the unearned increment of 
 the freehold it will also soak up all the un- 
 earned increment of the leasehold. ' ' 
 
 "It is equally determined never to part 
 again with its ownership of the lands which 
 it is buying back." "No one has the right to 
 purchase, and therefore there can be no specu- 
 lation." 
 
 "It might seem at a first glance that the fact 
 that the state had millions of acres of public 
 lands which it was opening to settlement was 
 a good reason for not buying more land by re- 
 suming the great estates. But the public lands 
 were in the North Island in vast forest wastes, 
 far from roads, markets or society. It would 
 take a long while to supply this territory with 
 the accessories of trade and intercourse." 
 
 That was the land they were satisfied to 
 turn over to an enterprising man until they 
 were ready to confiscate it by excessive taxa- 
 tion, as above openly stated. Now as to some 
 of the conditions of leasehold tenure. 
 
 "The lease holder cannot borrow on the se- 
 curity of his lease, either from a private 
 banker or from the government."
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 199 
 
 "Owners sell because they are afraid of the 
 graduated tax." 
 
 "This gentleman did not conceal the fact 
 that the progressive land tax was one of his 
 reasons for selling. ' ' 
 
 "He (Mr. Seddon, the premier) declared 
 himself willing to have the process called con- 
 fiscation, bursting up, anything." 
 
 "We propose," said Wm. P. Reeves, "to 
 take off taxation from the small land pro- 
 prietors and put it on the large land owners. ' ' 
 Said Mr. Seddon, the premier: "I care very 
 little for the capitalist. I care not if dozens 
 of large land owners leave the country. ' ' 
 
 "The state sometimes puts its rents too 
 high. The procedure for reduction is cumber- 
 some, and there is an agitation for A Fair 
 Rent Bill. Revaluation is possible under the 
 present system only upon the tenant's aban- 
 doning his land." 
 
 "The conditions as to residence and im- 
 provement are very strict. The successful 
 applicant, to hold his property, must begin 
 residence within a year, and within a year 
 must put on improvements equal to two and 
 one-half per cent of the value of the land, and 
 within another year two and one-half per cent
 
 200 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 more, and within the next four years another 
 two and one-half per cent. He must have his 
 fields fenced in accordance with stipulations 
 of the law within two years. He must once a 
 year cut and trim all the hedges on his land, 
 and must keep it clear of all koom, sweet brier 
 and other noxious plants. He must not take 
 more than three crops from the same land in 
 succession, and one of these crops must be a 
 root crop. After the third crop he must put 
 the land down in grass and let it remain in 
 pasture for at least three years before begin- 
 ning to crop it again. If his farm is more than 
 twenty acres he must keep not less than one- 
 half of it in permanent pasture. He is not 
 allowed at any time to remove from the land 
 or burn any straw which is grown upon it. If 
 the tenant neglects these and some other less 
 important conditions the land commissioner 
 will have the work done for him and the cost 
 of it is made recoverable in the same way as 
 the rent. Some of the old-fashioned people 
 used to the immunities of the freehold resent 
 the inspections of their premises necessary to 
 insure their compliance with the terms of the 
 leases. 'It is a good deal like being at school 
 again,' one of them complained. The Ranger
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 201 
 
 is the title of the inspector of leasehold pro- 
 perties. 'If you find the ranger in your gar- 
 den', a leasehold said sarcastically, 'counting 
 the gooseberries you mustn't mind it. It's 
 part of the system.' 
 
 "In this district the farmer makes the road 
 to his farm with an American pick and shovel, 
 he puts in his wheat with an American drill, 
 he reaps it with an American reaper and 
 binder, he pumps the water for his harvest 
 hands through an American pump, he takes 
 his wheat to a mill where the intricate ma- 
 chinery is American, he drives around town in 
 a buggy that is mostly American, his timber is 
 cut with an American ax, the hammer that 
 drove the nails in his house was an American 
 hammer, his saw was American, and finally his 
 wheat rolls into Wellington behind an Amer- 
 ican locomotive." 
 
 Now let us see what will be the inevitable 
 result of all this. I believe that I can lay it 
 down as an uncontroverted principle of eco- 
 nomics that where a man is not reasonably 
 sure of the reward of his labor he will not 
 work. The only exceptions to this are the 
 head tax and forced labor under the overseer's 
 whip, the instruments of the autocrat through
 
 202 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 all time. The pioneer going into the back- 
 woods of New Zealand can not look forward 
 to retiring in his old age and living upon the 
 rental of his land, his reward for many years 
 of labor constantly returned to the soil to en- 
 hance its value, nor can he hope to turn it over 
 to his children that they may find life easier 
 on account of his labors. Knowing that he is 
 to be expelled from the ground he cultivates 
 no affection for it. He will neither plant 
 orchards, fine trees, build good houses or 
 barns. He will become a herdsman like a 
 Navajo Indian or a Sahara Bedouin on com- 
 munal property, as only his herds will be his 
 own. He will be a tenant at the will of the 
 landlord the state and will give it only a 
 tenant's care. Nor will he have more love for 
 the country which only insures him his grave, 
 and not even that beside his loved ones, as they 
 will be expelled and be wanderers. 
 
 In Illinois a very large tract of land at one 
 time was owned by a rich Londoner of Irish 
 name. The ground of wonderful fertility was 
 leased to tenants for cultivation. He was a 
 good landlord as landlords go. His ground 
 was well tiled, his rents reasonable, and his 
 tenants were assured of holding their places as
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 203 
 
 long as they lived and paid rent. His tenants 
 prospered and saved money. Yet, as was com- 
 monly remarked, one could tell his territory as 
 soon as the boundary was passed in the poor 
 improvements, shabby cultivation and gener- 
 ally discouraging air of the neighborhood. His 
 tenants openly asserted that they would not 
 try to add to the value of another man's 
 ground. As a rule they only farmed long 
 enough to save some money to buy their own 
 ground, even if it lay in far-off Kansas, Ne- 
 braska or Dakota. 
 
 This is just what is happening in New Zea- 
 land. Nobody is planting orchards or building 
 up fine farms. Except for a small tract just 
 south of Auckland, probably an old freehold 
 settlement, everything throughout the coun- 
 try has a hopeless abandoned look; you feel 
 that it is incurable. These lines are written 
 at Brownsville, Texas, the most southern town 
 on the mainland of the United States, a region 
 which has had a railroad less than five years. 
 It is now in the midst of a boom. Thousands 
 of families are living in tents and shacks, 
 while interspersed are the beautiful homes of 
 those who can start that way. The climate is 
 worse, the scenery not so beautiful nor the soil
 
 204 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 so good as in New Zealand. Everything must 
 be irrigated to produce at all, and yet hun- 
 dreds of acres are being planted to oranges, 
 figs, grapes and pecans. Every step is quick, 
 every eye ardent, every jesture buoyant. The 
 whole atmosphere is full of enterprise and 
 hopefulness. Not a croak nor a discordant 
 note is heard. What do these Texas planters 
 look forward to that those of New Zealand do 
 not? Why this greater courage? The Texas 
 farmer faces an arid soil, an unkind sky. He 
 must struggle with the wolf, the coyote, the 
 fox, skunk, opossum, mink, eagle, hawk and 
 rattle snake. The malaria he may expect al- 
 most as a matter of course ; the yellow fever is 
 a possibility any summer. The New Zealand 
 farmer has no evil to fear but that of fatigue 
 from work. 
 
 The Texas farmer, like every other Amer- 
 ican farmer, expects his reward. He is not 
 only building his fortune but his home. Every 
 shade tree he plants, every rose bush he sets 
 out, becomes a part of himself. Every nail he 
 drives, every stone he sets is like the gold the 
 dentist puts into his teeth. His hands grow 
 large and caloused, his shoulders bent with 
 approaching years. It was his own burden he
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 205 
 
 has been carrying. Like labor and self deny- 
 ing for sake of children he has not considered 
 his efforts. He sees and feels the results. 
 There are only two places in all the world 
 his home and the rest of the world. He feels 
 his place to cover him like his clothes. Even 
 in his sleep he feels the protecting influence 
 of his soil. His animals are his relatives, every 
 twig on the place a fibre of his body. He may 
 sell the place. He realizes the fruits of his 
 labors, but his feelings towards the old farm 
 are those of a farmer who has seen his daugh- 
 ter marry and go out among strangers, or a son 
 who has left the homestead to engage in busi- 
 ness elsewhere. Out of his possession it is still 
 a part of his body. Sickness or disability may 
 come ; he may go blind, he may lose an arm or 
 a leg, his wife may break down, his farm is 
 still his livelihood. He rents it to another and 
 still gets a share of its products. Age may 
 come and feeling that he can no longer stand 
 the labor as once he did, he may desire to go to 
 some town and pass the remainder of his life 
 free from those eternal cares. Again he rents 
 the place, and with its rental feels as secure of 
 honorable bread as a man can feel in this life. 
 He has justly earned his leisure, and no one
 
 206 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 should begrudge him in it. His savings are in 
 his farm, the best place they can possibly be. 
 In spite of all the swindling schemes adver- 
 tised for the public's amelioration the best 
 possible place for a man's dollar is in his own 
 pocket. 
 
 In this little Brownsville hotel where I am 
 stopping is an old retired farmer accompanied 
 by his wife. He is seventy-three years old. 
 His wife, with whom he has shared the storms 
 and sunshine of forty-seven years, has borne 
 him fourteen children. His father was a 
 pioneer in Kentucky, he a pioneer in the 
 southern part of Missouri, from there moving 
 and becoming a pioneer in the Panhandle of 
 Texas, taking there four sections of land 
 which he built up for seventeen }^ears and then 
 sold, investing the proceeds in the town of 
 Amarillo, where he built both business and 
 residence houses, whose rental now enables 
 him to rest and once a year see a little of the 
 rest of the world. For eighteen years after the 
 Civil war he was totally blind. He is now 
 almost wholly deaf, but can see enough out of 
 one eye to read and observe things in the 
 world. In intellect keen and bright, enjoying 
 life to the utmost. A Confederate soldier of
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 207 
 
 the slave-holding class, he was considered by 
 the abolitionists as deserving hanging in this 
 world and eternal damnation in the next. Now 
 as a capitalist and landlord he deserves confis- 
 caton and pauperism in the eyes of our social- 
 ists and the New Zealand politicians. His 
 Confederate badge says "God Judges". I 
 will judge him this far as to say that he de- 
 serves every cent he has gotten, and I hope 
 that both he and his noble wife will long live to 
 enjoy their trips to the winter resorts of the 
 Mexican Gulf. 
 
 The New Zealand farmer when he gets old 
 or breaks down must turn his leasehold back 
 to the state, step out without anything, and 
 wait until he gets to be sixty-five years old to 
 get his dollar and a half per week as a pauper. 
 He may sell his sheep for a large sum in ready 
 money when he parts with his land, but what 
 will he do with his money in a country where a 
 capitalist is a malefactor? The best place for 
 a man's savings is in his own land. He may 
 either spend his money and join the universal 
 army of paupers, or he may emigrate to Eng- 
 land, Canada or the United States, where he 
 may still live on the proceeds of his youthful 
 industry and providence, and that is what he
 
 208 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 is doing. On our boat returning was a New 
 Zealand farmer going to Canada to live. He 
 stated that farm lands had depreciated over 
 one-half in value, that the man who purchased 
 his farm two years previous could not now 
 sell it for over two-thrids as much as he paid 
 for it. He claimed the same to be true of all 
 town and city property as well. 
 
 The writer, who was taught in his boyhood 
 to bear hardships in youth that one may live 
 at ease in his old age, believes such to be the 
 immutable law of nature. The children of 
 New Zealand are taught the blessings of pau- 
 perization as they are taught religion, and that 
 is what they will get. It is now and will for- 
 ever remain the paradise of paupers and fat 
 office holders. 
 
 Much has been made by the New Zealanders 
 and by authority over the forced sale and sub- 
 division into small tracts of several large land 
 holdings. We hear at great length of the 
 greater advantage of a thousand small lease- 
 holders where wandered the sheep of a single 
 master. Granted. It is what has been done 
 in the United States ever since the revolution, 
 is what is now being done all over the United 
 States, and what will be done all over the
 
 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 209 
 
 United States while our present form of gov- 
 ernment lasts; only we make one hundred 
 owners instead of one without legislative en- 
 actment, and by the natural laws of supply 
 and demand. Life is very short. The owner 
 dies, his heirs are away in other business, and 
 the old farm is sold and divided to be sold 
 again to small farmers. Or the owner, too old 
 to work longer, performs that act himself, ex- 
 pecting and getting no praise therefor. In- 
 stead of one careful owner in New Zealand 
 there becomes no owner at all, but a crowd of 
 careless pauper tenants, while they shout and 
 adA T ertise the transaction to the entire world. 
 This seems too trivial even to refer to, and I 
 would not do so but for the thousands of pages 
 that have been printed on that subject con- 
 cerning New Zealand. Instead of putting a 
 halo around the head of the man who accom- 
 plishes that in the United States he is uni- 
 versally dubbed a shark. 
 
 As to all the minor matters, such as state 
 life insurance, old-age pension, state banking, 
 etc., etc., I did not sufficiently investigate to 
 pass an opinion upon. I am not prepared to 
 say they are all good or that they are all bad, 
 nor to say which ones are good or bad. Enough
 
 210 STATE SOCIALISM IN NEW ZEALAND. 
 
 was learned to ascertain that the state was 
 grasping into its own hand one enterprise 
 after another, with the determination to ulti- 
 mately be doing everything by what is called 
 state co-operation. Authority, however, quotes 
 without dissent the opinion of a leading digni- 
 tary of the church of New Zealand that the 
 co-operative works are more costly than the old 
 system. Taken collectively, however, I will 
 assert that they are strangling in its infancy 
 the prospects of the fairest country now 
 known.
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 211 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 "Look To Home". 
 
 Our country has a New Zealand, perhaps 
 more than one; I will only refer to the place 
 with which I have been identified for thirty- 
 nine years, and in a measure ever since I was 
 born Chicago. 
 
 Twenty-five years ago the British consul 
 officially reported to his government that Chi- 
 cago was destined to become the largest city 
 in the world. Every writer or speaker who 
 ever referred to the matter spoke of its situa- 
 tion unparalleled in either the ancient or 
 modern world. Rockefeller, desiring to be 
 identified with the greatest, chose it as the seat 
 of his university, which was to eclipse in 
 wealth and equipment anything in the line the 
 world had ever seen or ever would see. The 
 growth of its population was marvelous It
 
 212 "LOOK TO HOME." 
 
 was commonly referred to as the large city of 
 the entire world where the workingman was 
 best clothed, best fed, best housed and best 
 paid. A prominent New Yorker talking with 
 me about the matter referred to the airy, 
 sunny little cottages owned by the laborer in 
 Chicago and his cheaper food, and said: "In 
 time that is going to make itself felt. The 
 laborer is going to live where his welfare is 
 greatest. New York cannot and never will 
 equal Chicago in that respect. I consider our 
 town out of the race." The workman himself 
 was imbued with that spirit. First he desired 
 to get his own home. That made secure he 
 looked around for vacant property upon which 
 to build some houses to rent. He knew of 
 many cases where the artisan without leaving 
 his bench had accumulated an income of from 
 three to six thousand dollars a year by his 
 judicious investment in houses and lots and 
 business property. It was the common expres- 
 sion: "You cannot lie about Chicago; she out- 
 does the wildest statement you can make." 
 The term "Windy City" was not given to it on 
 account of the movement of the air at that 
 place. It is no more windy in Chicago than 
 elsewhere. It was given on account of the pro-
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 213 
 
 pensity of its men to blow about its greatness. 
 When away from home every citizen or sub- 
 urbanite was proud to register from and claim 
 to belong to Chicago. 
 
 And now? 
 
 From 1880 to 1890 Chicago increased at the 
 rate of 60,000 per year. From 1890 to 1900 it 
 increased at the same rate, 60,000 per year. 
 The government census has just been taken 
 for the year 1910. The growth of Chicago has 
 dropped from 60,000 per year to 45,000 per 
 year. Leaving out all questions of percentage 
 the normal increase of population should have 
 been 65,000 each year. Civic pride has dropped 
 out of sight. To register now from Chicago is 
 to stamp one as being a commercial traveler or 
 a workman hunting a job. It is now Oak Park, 
 Evanston, Lake Forest, etc., etc. If one now 
 has a city residence and a country place he 
 registers from the latter. He may be a promi- 
 nent Chicago merchant, but your chance 
 traveling acquaintance takes pride in telling 
 you he does not live in Chicago. At home 
 almost every man who wants to live sensibly 
 and wisely is getting out of the city into the 
 surrounding country. It amounts almost to an 
 exodus; it would be an exodus if the men had
 
 214 "LOOK TO HOME." 
 
 their way. Thousands of families are kept in 
 the city by the women's overwhelming fond- 
 ness for the dissipations of city life. The men 
 say a butcher shop is a necessary place, but it 
 does not necessarily follow that a man should 
 live in a butcher shop. 
 
 Another result has followed. The workman 
 has lost all ambition, even all desire to buy 
 property, to own a home or any property in 
 Chicago. Although values on vacant lots have 
 fallen from one-half to two-thirds, the lower 
 it gets the less he or any other person is in- 
 clined to buy. Offer a lot to a workman so low 
 that the taxes upon it amount to six per cent 
 of its selling price he will tell you: "I figure it 
 out that if you were to give me the lot I would 
 be making a bad bargain." Property has got- 
 ten so low in price that many persons have told 
 the writer that after selling their vacant lots 
 they went to pay accrued taxes and found the 
 taxes were fully six per cent of the price they 
 had received therefor. The usual rate upon 
 improved property is two per cent of selling 
 price, on vacant from three per cent to four 
 per cent, that is upon the more favorable 
 assessment. It amounts to this, that the city 
 has confiscated all the real property within its
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 215 
 
 limits. Owners are paying full interest upon 
 the value thereof, although it may be wholly 
 non-income producing. But the nominal holder 
 of the fee must still pay all assessments for 
 improvements spread in the neighborhood. 
 These have been so numerous and so great that 
 it is an exceptional lot in Chicago that will 
 now sell for the amount paid upon it in taxes 
 and assessments during the past sixteen years. 
 In improved property nothing is left for the 
 owner. A friend of mine about five years ago 
 built within a block of one of the great parks 
 five cottages containing bath and sanitary 
 plumbing, hot and cold water, gas for cooking 
 and lighting, hard wood floors, picture frame 
 mouldings, drawers in closets and pantry, etc., 
 etc. He borrowed one-half the cost of the 
 buildings only to assist him in building. When 
 the houses had been finished three years he 
 struck a balance. The rents he had recevied 
 did not by a great deal equal what he had paid 
 out in interest, taxes, insurance, and repairs. 
 He is now controlling them solely for the bene- 
 fit of the tenants and the tax eaters. His 
 houses are a wreck. The writer has talked 
 with many owners of large apartment build- 
 ings, and except in the most fashionable neigh-
 
 216 "LOOK TO HOME." 
 
 borhoods the story is the same. As a result, 
 the apartment buildings are usually being sold 
 to rich innocents living away from the city, 
 who will find the honor of owning Chicago 
 realty their only reward. Among the men who 
 were building up the city wide-spread bank- 
 ruptcy has resulted. Many were killed under 
 the burden. Building has ceased to be a busi- 
 ness. One man who used to build from forty 
 to sixty buildings a year tells me he would not 
 even contemplate the possibility of ever erect- 
 ing another structure in Chicago. Only the 
 most profound philosophy and economy in liv- 
 ing enables a man to hold on to any rented 
 property in the city at all. Chicago landlords, 
 as a rule, are living in the country where the 
 greater part of their cost of living is taken 
 from their gardens and their domestic ani- 
 mals. They do not dine at Rector's or the Con- 
 gress Hotel. 
 
 In manufacturing, no other story can be 
 told. No one now starts a large factory in the 
 city. He chooses some place in the country 
 within easy reach. Many of the large facto- 
 ries which could be named have forsaken the 
 city for some village. Others could be named 
 that would gladly go but for the expensive
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 217 
 
 plant already existing that would be an almost 
 total loss. Only a few days before writing this, 
 going to the City of Mexico on a train, I en- 
 tered into conversation with a gentleman who 
 proved to be a large and successful manufac- 
 turer. Learning I was from Chicago, without 
 my mentioning the subject, he plunged head- 
 long into the matter. He ventured the state- 
 ment that Chicago was throttled and crippled 
 for all time. To draw him out I disagreed with 
 him. He told me that contemplating the estab- 
 lishment there of a branch factory to avail 
 himself of the name and prestige, he had taken 
 his wife and spent four months of the last 
 summer (1910) in Chicago, living as though it 
 were to be his home. As the result of his 
 thorough investigation he concluded that he 
 would not start such a branch there, that 
 under no consideration would he invest a dol- 
 lar in the place. In his own language: "I 
 could have bought fine residences all over the 
 South Side with their lots for one-half what 
 it cost to build the house." Rockefeller has 
 ceased interest in his university and closed his 
 account. It must sink or swim now without 
 his further help. 
 
 To what mav we attribute this tremendous
 
 218 "LOOK TO HOME." 
 
 revolution 1 ? There has been no change in the 
 map since Mr. Sadler reported to his govern- 
 ment that Chicago would become the greatest 
 city the world ever saw. The tariff walls have 
 not been moved nearer; no great convulsion of 
 nature has put an impassable gulf between it 
 and the great West; no pestilence, no great 
 flood or earthquake has occurred to destroy 
 life or property. The oldest man born in the 
 Mississippi Valley has never seen a failure of 
 the crops. The only war, the one with decrepit 
 Spain, merely brought increased prestige and 
 trade. Neither in thought nor habit have the 
 sons born in that vast interior empire become 
 degenerate. While Chicago real property has 
 fallen from fifty to seventy-five per cent the 
 lands around it have trebled and quadrupled 
 in values. 
 
 By all the rules Chicago ought still to be the 
 Mecca of all the hopeful in the United States. 
 No other city has advanced further in Henry 
 Georgeism. Nowhere is socialism more 
 strongly founded. The whole city is a seeth- 
 ing, boiling pot of altruistic ideas. The 
 preachers have quit preaching Christianity 
 and preach only socialistic ideas. The clergy- 
 man who is most radical in that direction is
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 219 
 
 the one most popular and who gets his name 
 most often in the daily papers. Those papers 
 themselves, with possibly a single exception, 
 have swallowed socialism whole, and each 
 tries to outdo the other in its advocacy of con- 
 fiscation. To one great paper a correspondent 
 wrote advocating raising the taxes so high 
 that no one could afford to pay taxes on real 
 property, and that it all, without new laws or 
 legal proceedings, would revert to the state. 
 The paper published the letter, and others of 
 similar tenor since. Another, a property 
 owner, called attention in a letter that on some 
 of his unimproved property his tax receipts 
 showed that he was paying two and one-half 
 times as much as twenty years before, while 
 he could not sell the same for one-half as much 
 as then. The same paper refused to publish 
 this letter. According to published list there 
 are twenty-seven social centers supported in 
 the town, practically all teaching insurrection 
 against wealth and landlordism. Some of them 
 are hotbeds of unrest, sedition and lawbreak- 
 ing. Millions upon millions are being spent to 
 provide club houses, play grounds and other 
 public entertainments for the laboring classes. 
 A member of the South Park Board said thev
 
 220 "LOOK TO HOME." 
 
 had in a few years spent ten millions of dollars 
 upon cement play houses that were already 
 falling to pieces. Since beginning this book an 
 outer-park system has been voted that will 
 cost twenty millions of dollars or more. The tax 
 payer has become a negligible quantity. The 
 worst argument you can urge against any 
 measure is that it will place new burdens on 
 the property holders. 
 
 Henry Georgeism is a doctrine that pecu- 
 liarly appeals to the office holders. There is 
 a fascination in spending other people's 
 money, and it is so much nicer when you can 
 feel that the more taxes you impose on the 
 people the more you are benefiting them. It 
 is a poor political job where the rakeoff is not 
 half the amount spent. Of course the writer 
 will not say that everything promoted by the 
 office holders is inadvisable. "Vixi fortes ante 
 Agamemnon". Before excessive taxation on 
 lands was taught as a religious duty we laid 
 out and paid for a magnificent park system 
 and boulevard system; afterwards we had the 
 public library and a better school system than 
 now. Only the property owner was not then 
 considered a robber and an oppressor, a new
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 221 
 
 slave holder to be deprived of his holdings re- 
 gardless of all laws, human or divine. 
 
 This theory has now been in practice for 
 eighteen years. We will SSLJ nothing here 
 about the confiscation of vacant lands, the 
 bankruptcy of its owners and the enforced 
 exile of so many citizens. We will take note, 
 however, that while so much was formerly 
 heard about taking the unearned increment, 
 not a word has been uttered favoring restor- 
 ing the one-half value lost in depreciation; 
 that while the vacant land was confiscated 
 they never confiscated the mortgages that 
 covered so much of it. We will consider the 
 laborer, for whose sole benefit the whole city 
 of Chicago has been conducted for nearly two 
 decades, what Henry Georgeism, the twenty- 
 seven social centers, the socialistic preachers 
 and the high-taxing politicians have done for 
 him. All authorities unite in stating that the 
 people of Chicago as a whole are now living in 
 a state of congestion and degradation not sur- 
 passed in any city on earth. Said Dr. Gun- 
 saulus in a sermon recently: "In Chicago the 
 poverty is more dire and the indigence more 
 foul than anywhere else in the world." The 
 Chicago Tribune about the same time pub-
 
 222 "LOOK TO HOME." 
 
 lished an interview with a number of the pro- 
 prietors of storage houses. It was the reyala- 
 tion by all of them that every year the first of 
 May saw more and more families store their 
 furniture and take to rooms. In their words: 
 "They say they intend to get the furniture 
 again and go to house keeping, but they sel- 
 dom or never do." Last year the United States 
 government took the census in Chicago. The 
 same daily paper published an article derived 
 from the united impressions of the census 
 takers that Chicago had become a city of fami- 
 lies living in one room. Strange tales of the 
 present condition of affairs keep breaking out ; 
 of the single rooms holding three and four 
 families; of forty men and women sleeping in 
 one room; of the wet, dark cellars occupied as 
 living places by widows and children ; of fami- 
 lies occupying rooms so dark that on the 
 brightest day in summer lights must be 
 burned from morning until night; of habits 
 resulting therefrom that place its participants 
 on the level of beasts. I know personally of 
 eight or ten men sleeping on the bare floors of 
 small rooms, not lodging houses but rented 
 property ; of families who formerly lived in six 
 rooms occupying only one; of American fami-
 
 "LooK TO HOME." 223 
 
 lies of apparent refinement, consisting of 
 father, mother, grown daughter and son, all 
 living together within the same four \valls. 
 Intelligent American women, the mothers of 
 several children, upon whom we would at once 
 say the future of the country rests, have come 
 to me crying, telling me that they could find 
 nothing within their means fit for animals to 
 live in, let alone rearing American children. 
 All this in the chief city on the boundless 
 plains of Illinois, still a pioneer state of the 
 great new republic. And with all this there 
 comes a feeling expressed in the everyday 
 phrase: " Nothing matters much." To one 
 who knows Chicago these words mean vol- 
 umes. In addition to this they have rendered 
 the city impossible of habitation for 200,000 
 people. 
 
 I am not sufficiently acquainted with the 
 settlement question in Chicago to thoroughly 
 discuss their influence. Aside from their chari- 
 table works, if they do really perform chari- 
 table works, I believe their teachings to be 
 pernicious. Backed as they are by a swarm of 
 cheap magazines and socialistic newspapers, 
 their influence is subversive rather than up- 
 building. I am corroborated in this by the
 
 224 "LOOK TO HOME." 
 
 opinions of many men of real worth and of 
 numerous clergymen, although I pay little 
 attention to the opinions of the latter. As to 
 their charitable works, I am told by persons 
 better informed that they themselves are 
 objects of charity, affording sustenance to 
 non-producers; that like the brotherhoods of 
 the middle ages, with the same objects, they 
 give an easy living to their promoters; that 
 anyone has only to start a social settlement 
 and then start out begging. 
 
 As to the politicians and office holders I can 
 speak with more assurance. All their expendi- 
 tures have been prefaced with the arguments 
 that they were made for the benefit of the 
 laboring classes. That this talk always goes 
 down shows the inherent gullibility of human 
 nature. Every bit of local legislation in Chi- 
 cago during the past twenty years has directly 
 tended to increase the burdens of the man of 
 moderate means. Then the cost of a permit 
 for a one-story cottage was from one to three 
 dollars; now it is six dollars and upwards. 
 Then it cost three dollars to tap the water 
 pipe; now it costs five. Then it cost three dol- 
 lars to connect with the sewer; now it costs 
 five. For nearly forty years outlying districts
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 225 
 
 contributed their taxes towards paying the en- 
 tire cost of putting in the sewers of the most 
 expensive parts of the North and South Sides. 
 This being done, the common council decided 
 to put them all in by special assessments levied 
 only upon the lots draining into same, the city 
 not even bearing cost of street intersections or 
 to carry off flood waters. The much talked of 
 laborer living in his little cottage, or with his 
 vacant lot, was paying special assessments for 
 three sewers at the same time; one a half a 
 mile away, another a quarter of a mile away, 
 and the one in front of his own lot. When the 
 ordinance was first passed experts estimated 
 that it would cost each lot owner about fifteen 
 dollars, and that even that amount was three- 
 fourths unjust. It cost, on an average, every 
 lot owner from $60 to $70. The $5,000 lot was 
 sewered at the expense of the whole city; the 
 $200 lot had to pay over $60 for same service, 
 and of that unjust levy over half was literally 
 stolen. A friend of mine had several times ad- 
 vanced under the old law money to put sewers 
 in streets where he owned most of the pro- 
 perty. All asked of him for the twelve-inch 
 street sewers was one dollar per foot, that 
 covering expense of putting in pipe and the
 
 226 "LOOK TO HOME.'* 
 
 catch basins for flood waters. Under the new 
 law he was called upon for from $3.00 to $3.50 
 per lineal foot. Being justly indignant he did 
 a little detective work. On some streets, 
 notably those from West Indiana Street to 
 Kinzie on the West Side, he learned that the 
 contractor got $600, while the cost of levying 
 the assessment and inspecting the job was over 
 $800. On some of the jobs the inspectors were 
 more numerous than the laborers engaged on 
 the contract. On his complaining at the City 
 Hall he was laughed at, called a land baron, 
 and told they were going to make it as hot as 
 possible for the land owner, that he either had 
 to build or sell. But calling him a land baron 
 did not exempt the poor laborer from paying 
 the same assessment. 
 
 Chicago is the only city in the United States 
 known to the writer where the entire cost of 
 sewers, water pipes, catch basins, filling curb- 
 ing and paving the streets and the cement side 
 walks are laid upon the adjoining property, 
 and even the cost of levying those assessments. 
 He calls to mind a certain lot in the city, one 
 of a numerous class. The owner first paid 
 about $40 for a cement side walk; then about 
 $60 for a sewer; then about $150 for curbing,
 
 "LooK TO HOME." 227 
 
 filling and paving the street in front of that 
 lot. Then within sixteen years the sewer was 
 taken up, another one laid at a cost of $55 or 
 more ; then it was repaved at the cost again of 
 $150; then $13 a year taxes for twenty years; 
 then water connections and sewer drains to lot 
 line about $40, making nearly $800 paid out on 
 that lot within twenty years, not counting 
 interest on those payments. He cannot now 
 sell it for over $500. 
 
 It will not do to call this an exceptional in- 
 stance. The writer can give full particulars 
 and figures of a^ hundred similar cases. He has 
 been given facts by poor working men in 
 many, many, such cases until his heart grew 
 sick. Merely to refer to the matter causes him 
 pain. Not the cub reporter or the professional 
 office holder, but from the tax payer himself 
 must it be ascertained whether these state- 
 ments are exaggerated or not. 
 
 Except on the theory that it is a crime to 
 own real property, not a word can be urged in 
 justification of all this. 
 
 It may be noticed that the benevolence of 
 the office holders and their efforts in behalf of 
 the poor laborer has been confined to lavishly 
 expending the tax payers' money. It has
 
 228 "LOOK TO HOME." 
 
 never extended to decreasing their own wages. 
 On the contrary, salaries every year have been 
 raised until now they are out of all proportion 
 to benefits conferred. Men who could never 
 earn in private life over ten or twelve hundred 
 dollars per year think when working for the 
 public that they are justly entitled to $5,000, 
 $7,000 or $10,000. Seven thousand dollars is 
 a good income on a quarter of a million dollars. 
 The writer could add a great deal to above sub- 
 ject, but as life is sweet to him at even his ad- 
 vanced age, he refrains. In all their benevo- 
 lence has increased the city expenditures, not 
 counting special assessments, during the last 
 five years from eleven millions to twenty -four 
 millions of dollars. 
 
 What solution do these pseudo philanthro- 
 pists offer for the evils they themselves have 
 created? You may confiscate a man's property 
 under guise of law, but you cannot compel him 
 to build more houses when you are going to 
 also rob him of the rentals therefrom. The 
 office holders ' solution is to lay on more taxes. 
 A woman settlement worker's solution, quoted 
 by the newspapers approvingly, is to pour 
 gasoline on the congested tenements and set
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 229 
 
 them on fire. It is the old matter of hanging 
 the bakers during a famine. 
 
 I append two clippings on this subject taken 
 from the Chicago Tribune of recent date. I 
 thought I had preserved the date, but find I 
 did not. They speak for themselves : 
 
 HOUSES FOR POOR A HUGE PROBLEM. 
 
 Should the housing of the poor be overlooked in the 
 plans for the beautification of Chicago? 
 
 A formal protest against any such omission has 
 been made to the city plan commission by the trustees 
 of the University of Chicago settlement, and a plea is 
 made for a comprehensive method for the housing of 
 the working people who now reside in tenements. An 
 ordinance which will prevent the erection of cheap 
 tenements and bring about the abolition of present un- 
 sightly and insanitary buildings is suggested. 
 
 "Under the direction of public spirited members of 
 the Commercial club, excellent plans for a greater Chi- 
 cago have been prepared," declares the latter. "These 
 plans make wise and ample provisions for the future 
 growth of our city as regards traffic and transportation 
 facilities, public buildings, parks and boulevards. But 
 there is an important factor of a better Chicago which 
 was not included within the field of last year's report 
 on the city plan. That factor is the housing of our 
 working people. 
 
 Families in Cellars. 
 
 "We cannot have a really 'great' Chicago unless 
 there are habitable and comfortable dwellings for its 
 wage earners. In the Twenty-ninth ward, for ex- 
 ample, hundreds of families are existing in dark, un-
 
 230 "LOOK TO HOME." 
 
 ventilated rooms, sometimes in cellars. Two, three, 
 and four families are crowded together in frame cot- 
 tages originally built for one family. In the long two 
 and three story frame tenements six to twenty families 
 may be found, besides dozens of lodgers. 
 
 "Many of the long tenements cover the entire lot, 
 and where there are cottages there is often one in the 
 front and one in the rear leaving insufficient space 
 for a playground or yard. The structures are often 
 old, moldy, unpainted, and set in jagged lines, and 
 few trees or gardens break the bleakness and ugliness 
 of parts of the district. 
 
 "In the northern part of the ward it is almost im- 
 possible for people earning limited wages to secure 
 any dwellings in which they can take pride and com- 
 fort. Unsightly and undesirable buildings are now 
 being erected, and the city is paying the bill in the loss 
 of vigor and efficiency for its wage working population 
 and in additional expense of maintaining public health. 
 For instance, in the Twenty-ninth ward (where 
 housing is poor) during the month of July, 1910, the 
 death rate of infants was more than ten times that of 
 the Sixth ward, a well housed district fronting the lake. 
 
 Building Law Not Enough. 
 
 "To meet problems relating to sanitation and build- 
 ing structure a new building code was introduced into 
 the city council last year. It contains many excellent 
 regulations with respect to safety and health. If pro- 
 perly enforced, if a generous appropriation for an ade- 
 quate building and sanitary inspection force is made, 
 decided improvement will unquestionably follow. 
 
 "Still, it cannot be expected that the passage of a 
 building ordinance will meet the situation, for such a 
 law merely prohibits contractors from erecting danger- 
 ous and unsanitary structures, and only to a limited 
 extent lessens the evils of existing housing. Even if
 
 "LooK TO HOME." 231 
 
 properly enforced it would leave unsightly dwellings 
 which would provide adequate living space neither in- 
 side nor outside the houses. It would not meet the 
 profound moral disintegration which, we know too 
 well, always follows upon overcrowding in family life. 
 
 Little Time to Hunt Houses. 
 
 "The reason for this need of supervision by the 
 community through its representatives is to be found 
 in the fact that the pressure of making a living leaves 
 a considerable number of our wage earners little time, 
 money, or energy to determine how they and their 
 neighbors are to live. And because they are forced to 
 live in cramped rooms, at a low rent, under conditions 
 which make privacy and cleanliness almost impossible, 
 we sometimes judge that they do not want to live 
 cleanly and decently. In the majority of cases this 
 judgment is unjust and untrue. 
 
 "The present moment is favorable for attacking the 
 problem here, because from the forthcoming investiga- 
 tions of selected parts of Chicago made through the 
 Russell Sage foundation and other sources there is a 
 wealth of information which bears directly on this 
 question. 
 
 "The housing problem is of central importance in 
 any scheme of the city planning. It requires com- 
 petent, impartial control, and immediate action must 
 be taken." 
 
 Sociologists O. K. the Plan. 
 
 The proposal to have the city plan commission take 
 up the question of housing was indorsed by a number 
 of Chicago sociologists. 
 
 "The other tenement districts of Chicago are about 
 the same as in the Twenty-ninth ward," declared Miss 
 Mary McDowell. "Wherever there are large numbers 
 of industrial workers there is overcrowding. These
 
 232 "LooK TO HOME." 
 
 workers can't build cottage homes, and are forced to 
 reside in the tenements. 
 
 "As rents go, tenement rentals are exorbitant, and 
 these poor people are forced to pay a higher rate than 
 in other parts of the city. I know families that pay 
 $10 and $12 for rooms on the ground,' with no heat or 
 light and almost no air and sunshine. The little cot- 
 tage isn't ideal when built on the ground, and these 
 tenement cottages rent so high that the tenants sub- 
 rent every inch of space. 
 
 Would Reserve Districts. 
 
 "Under our city ordinances a factory can be put up 
 almost anywhere in the city," declared George Hooker 
 who studied housing problems in a number of Eur- 
 opean cities last summer. "Factories have been erected 
 in residence districts and have changed the neigh- 
 borhood, for property owners will not make improve- 
 ments in such sections. We have not had proper in- 
 spection of tenements. We need to have them in- 
 spected and to have a census of the dwellers taken, in- 
 cluding conditions of living, rents, and so forth. Cer- 
 tain districts should be reserved for residence, and no 
 other use made of them." 
 
 "The general question of housing is quite as im- 
 portant as any feature of the city plan," declared Wal- 
 ter L. Fisher, special traction counsel "But it is a 
 serious question whether the city has the authority to 
 declare just what sort of buildings may be erected in 
 certain districts or to lay out zones in which buildings 
 must conform to a certain type and standard, as some 
 European cities have done. We have no statute along 
 this line in Illinois, and even if the legislature passed 
 such a statute, it would be a nice legal question 
 whether it would be constitutional."
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 233 
 
 THE WORKERS HOME. 
 
 Every man and woman in the city of Chicago ought 
 to read a communication published in The Tribune of 
 this issue. 
 
 It is a letter of the board of the University settle- 
 ment addressed to the city plan commission, and it 
 touches upon one of the most important questions 
 affecting the people of this community. 
 
 That question is better housing for the wage earner. 
 
 As the letter points out, Chicago already has, 
 through the generosity of the Commercial club, a plan 
 for the beautification of the city. This plan provides 
 for splendid boulevards and open places, and for the 
 orderly and convenient arrangement of streets. The 
 plan is now in the hands of a public commission ap- 
 pointed by the mayor. It includes public officials, al- 
 dermen, and men from all walks of life. Therefore it 
 is appropriate that in such hands the Chicago plan 
 should be extended to include the subject proposed by 
 the board of the University settlement. 
 
 In the board's letter reference is made to certain 
 conditions in the Twenty-ninth ward. It is said that 
 there are "hundreds of families existing in dark, un- 
 ventilated rooms in cellars." It is said that "two, 
 three, and four families are living in cottages built 
 for one. It is said that "in long two or three story 
 frame tenements from six to twenty families live, be- 
 sides dozens of lodgers." 
 
 These conditions are not found only in the district 
 named in this letter. They are found in other parts of 
 the city, and, taken all together, they constitute a large 
 area which calls for enlightened attention. The letter 
 very truly declares that Chicago cannot be a "great" 
 city in the sense in which we all wish to make her 
 great if she neglects the needs and interests of the 
 wage workers, the men and women upon whose labor
 
 234 "LOOK TO HOME." 
 
 all her material prosperity is founded. The wage earner 
 has little time, money, or energy to spare for the solu- 
 tion of this problem. And even if he did, he would 
 not be able to accomplish satisfactory results individ- 
 ually. It is work which must be done along broad 
 lines by public or collective agencies. Other great 
 cities of the world, especially those of Europe, have 
 been forced to adopt measures of reform. Chicago 
 ought to be far sighted enough to meet the evil before 
 it grows worse and to make provision for not only a 
 present improvement but also for a sound growth. 
 
 Yesterday The Tribune spoke of the great move- 
 ment for conservation, and especially of the conser- 
 vation of human life and health. Here in this pro- 
 posal of the board of the University settlement is the 
 way pointed to a great act of human conservation. 
 Let Chicago put her hand now to the task of wiping 
 out these crowded districts and providing by wise 
 means that the wage earner and his family shall find 
 homes that are healthy and convenient, homes where 
 children may grow up happily to be prosperous and 
 useful citizens. 
 
 The same Chicago Tribune, a few weeks 
 after publishing those articles, editorially re- 
 ferring to the news that Milwaukee was going 
 to embark in the business of building munici- 
 pal-owned tenements, said that the more 
 socialism of that kind we had in Chicago the 
 better. When a young man I officed seven 
 years with the man who, until he went on the 
 bench, was the lawyer for Joseph Medill and 
 the Tribune. Naturally I became as familiar
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 235 
 
 with him and his private opinions as an un- 
 known young man could with an old man in 
 the full blaze of glory. When I read that edi- 
 torial I thought: "The brains of old Joe Medill 
 have run out in the third generation." 
 
 This book is not intended as a primer of 
 political economy, much as Chicago may need 
 such a primer, but let us consider this question 
 a minute. It would take a hundred millions of 
 dollars expended on tenements to make any 
 impression upon present congested state of 
 Chicago, every dollar of which would have to 
 be borrowed from the much-hated capitalist. 
 With those hundred millions of dollars they 
 might build fifty million dollars worth of tene- 
 ments, as, whether in Chicago, New Zealand 
 or Australia, public works cost double what 
 private works cost. The politician, as a rule, 
 is hardly satisfied with a rakeoff of one-half. 
 The city would collect very little in rent, and 
 at the end of fifteen years the houses would be 
 uninhabitable wrecks. This process would 
 have to be repeated so long as the capitalist 
 could be found to keep up the game. I saw the 
 four million dollar post office go up, stone by 
 stone, and fall down again in fifteen years. I 
 saw the six million dollar city hall and court
 
 236 "LooK TO HOME." 
 
 house go up, stone by stone, and fall down 
 again in fifteen years. I am stretching my 
 imagination to the utmost in giving fifteen 
 years to jerry-built public tenements filled 
 with destructive tenants. 
 
 Perhaps I am old fashioned and deserving 
 of hanging, but I still think that the best citi- 
 zen is the man who lives with his family 
 in his own bright, sunny, roomy house; such 
 a man stands the best chance of rearing his 
 children in the right way ; that a city should be 
 a great corporation, economically run for the 
 best interests of the stock holders its tax 
 payers; that if you legislate for home owners 
 you get home owners ; that if you legislate for 
 paupers you get paupers; that if you deliber- 
 ately rob every man of the fruits of his indus- 
 try he will purposely try to have nothing that 
 may be taken. This was true in Persia three 
 thousands of years ago. It is true in Chicago 
 today. 
 
 On searching for the compensation, as 
 Emerson advises, perhaps we may conclude it 
 is all for the best. Great cities are the sink 
 holes of the human race, the places where the 
 blood deteriorates, sterilizes and runs out. 
 Anything that tends to overcome the centripe-
 
 "LOOK TO HOME." 237 
 
 tal propensity of the people to crowd together 
 may not be an unmixed evil. Whether they 
 desire it or not, to drive them out is a benefit. 
 Anything that induces the manufacturer to 
 locate his industry in a village instead of Chi- 
 cago is a work of philanthropy. Any family 
 that takes an acre or more out of the conges- 
 tion, out on the electric interurbans may easily 
 avoid all the evils we hear so much about. 
 The only cure for a socialist is to starve him. 
 But our loud-mouthed, much-writing social- 
 istic friends do not intend it that way. "If 
 John D. Rockefeller drinks champagne we 
 want champagne" is their cry. But the John 
 D. Rockefellers of the industrial world do not 
 drink champagne. My critics will indignantly 
 resent the idea that they are making Chicago 
 less habitable. The boy who fouled the bed 
 occupied by himself alone still denied that he 
 had done it. 
 
 Much is being said about making Chicago 
 another Paris. It is considered a justification 
 for any and every expense. We are told in 
 French literature of a man who had a very 
 beautiful wife. He went up to court with her 
 where the king, seeing and admiring her, made 
 her his favorite, bestowing upon her husband
 
 238 "LooK TO HOME." 
 
 and all their relatives honorable and lucrative 
 positions. Thereupon all the men in France 
 who had beautiful wives went up to Paris and 
 paraded them before the king, to the effect 
 that they, not finding the king easy, bank- 
 ruped themselves and, disappointed, went 
 back to their mortgaged estates. Phryne, the 
 courtesan, we are told in Greek history, offered 
 to rebuild the walls of Thebes at her own ex- 
 pense, but that has not deterred millions of 
 Phrynes since then dying of hunger and desti- 
 tution. The world needs but one Paris at a 
 time. As Venice preceded her, so she will 
 reign until dethroned by another. When that 
 occurs it will not be Chicago to take her place. 
 To bankrupt all her citizens to make a courte- 
 san out of ugly, dirty, slatternly Chicago. 
 Es ist zu lachen.
 
 OUR LESSON. 239 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 Our Lesson. 
 
 This book was not written with intention or 
 expectation of halting the course of socialism 
 in Chicago. With practically all its newspa- 
 pers, aided by innumerable cheap magazines, 
 each trying to outdo the other, not to mention 
 the hundreds of speakers and writers working 
 for the advancement of those ideas, call them 
 what you may, one might as well stand on the 
 brink of Niagara and try to arrest the down- 
 fall of its waters. Chicago is a hopeless case. 
 It is pledged to socialism, so far as the legis- 
 lation already accomplished or to be obtained 
 at Springfield, will permit. If I were not a 
 Chicago tax payer I would be glad to see the 
 question pushed to the utmost. After being 
 robbed of $100,000 worth of unproductive real 
 property by confiscation no element of sympa- 
 thy in my mind is involved. If it were not
 
 240 OUR LESSON. 
 
 that I am still a large stockholder in the enter- 
 prise I think I could view the throttling pro- 
 cess with the utmost complacency. 
 
 Then why this book? 
 
 It certainly is not a bid for popularity. I am 
 fully aware of the storm of opprobrium that 
 will burst upon my head when these lines face 
 the light. No association will ever invite me 
 to address its meetings. No Chicago school 
 house will ever be named after the writer of 
 this volume. I have probably given of my own 
 money to churches, reading rooms and colleges 
 ten dollars where Authority ever gave one. 
 Where he was a saint I can only be a sinner. I 
 am also well aware that the only really benevo- 
 lent men are the men who make their living by 
 their benevolence. Talk is so cheap. I expect, 
 as the result of all this labor, unpopularity 
 during this life and oblivion thereafter, so far 
 as the Chicago newspapers can give it to me. 
 The men of intelligence and integrity, both 
 North and South, whose wise counsel, if fol- 
 lowed, would have stayed the senseless four 
 years' struggle between brothers in our Civil 
 war, are now lying forgotten in unknown 
 graves. The men on both sides who, for their 
 political aggrandizement, plunged the country
 
 OUR LESSON. 241 
 
 into that awful struggle are now the heroes of 
 their respective sections, their statues stand- 
 ing high above the market places in marble, 
 their features perpetuated in bronze tablets or 
 stamped on the coins. I do not expect human 
 nature to change in my day. I am also fully 
 aware that it is not the man who produces a 
 disastrous condition of affairs that achieves 
 the hatred of the people, but the man who 
 makes it known to the world. So they wanted 
 to lynch the health officer who reported the 
 existence of the bubonic fever in San Fran- 
 cisco, but not the men who allowed it to in- 
 crease. 
 
 Nor am I a student of, or writer upon, socio- 
 logical conditions. Carlyle says that no man 
 need go out hunting for things to reform. To 
 perform the duty that lies nearest is sufficient 
 for any man and will keep him fully occupied. 
 I did not go to Australia and New Zealand to 
 arrest their course in socialism, nor did I in- 
 tend to write a book about them. This labor 
 was, in a great measure, forced upon me. I 
 have a message to the people of Illinois and I 
 give it. What the result may be I do not know. 
 I should feel craven and recreant to the last 
 day of my life if I withheld it. I will feel
 
 242 OUR LESSON. 
 
 infinitely relieved when the task is accom- 
 plished. 
 
 Said my Vancouver friend, the big North of 
 Ireland lumber man ,(not the socialist) on the 
 Marama coming home: "I predict that social- 
 ism will continue to grow all over the world 
 until it extinguishes all known governments, 
 Christianity and our present civilization start- 
 ing the world anew on the basis of the ancient 
 Persian monarchy the boss owning every- 
 thing. ' ' 
 
 Who will assert that he is not telling the 
 truth? 
 
 Judging from its growth during the last 
 thirty years, I would say his statement 
 merited serious consideration. When a city 
 hall tax eater twenty-five years ago said to me 
 that it was their intention to so burden vacant 
 real property that the owner would be com- 
 pelled to build or part with it for anything he 
 could get, I considered it merely the irrespons- 
 ible utterance of a flannel mouth. I afterwards 
 learned to my sorrow that he was telling the 
 absolute truth. So that now when a clamor is 
 arising ostensibly to compel the farmers, as 
 they say, to bear a greater share of the public 
 burden, but in reality to tax farm lands up to
 
 OUR LESSON. 243 
 
 its rental value, I think it time to open my 
 mouth. I am in the position of a burnt child. 
 Having lost, say an arm, by fire I now know 
 that fire will burn. I do not propose to let 
 either myself or my neighbor inconsiderately 
 be consumed. 
 
 Are these the fears of an alarmist 1 ? The 
 Chicago Tribune has of recent years repeat- 
 edly in its editorial columns called for the crea- 
 tion of a tax commission, having for its object 
 the equalization of taxes all over the state, 
 that the farm should bear a greater share of the 
 public taxes. I will not say that this is the 
 only newspaper favoring this step, but as it is 
 the only daily that I read consecutively, its 
 handling of this and similar questions is more 
 familiar to me. 
 
 A few months ago a cheap magazine of sup- 
 posedly tremendous circulation published an 
 article written by a professor of economics in 
 Harvard College. In that article he favored as 
 the easiest solution for the evils under which 
 the community is supposed to be suffering, 
 high cost of living, congestion in cities, etc., 
 the placing of higher taxes on the farms ; that 
 as the community is one, and one limb of the 
 body cannot suffer without the entire cor-
 
 244 OUR LESSON. 
 
 porate system suffering, it is the duty of the 
 farmers to contribute to the uplift of the cities, 
 etc., etc. About fifteen years ago the president 
 of a great western university gave utterance 
 to nearly similar views in a lecture. He was at 
 once put out. That no notice whatever was 
 taken of the article referred to shows how far 
 socialistic ideas have progressed in the mean- 
 time. 
 
 Mr. , a Chicago lawyer who has made 
 
 fame and fortune as a tax fighter, only a few 
 days previous to writing this chapter, as 
 quoted in the Chicago Tribune, stated in an 
 address that the farmers in Illinois did not pay 
 half enough taxes, and favored the establish- 
 ment of a central assessing body which shall 
 levy the taxes for the whole community, how- 
 ever distant the land may lie. De Tocqueville, 
 in his ''Democracy in America", asserts that 
 the only real liberty enjoyed in the United 
 States not shared elsewhere is the township 
 government, and particularly in the levying 
 and collecting of taxes by those bodies, and not 
 by a central body. Township self government 
 he considers the foundation stone of our 
 liberty. Take that away and the whole super- 
 structure is imperiled. We have had a taste
 
 OUR LESSON. 245 
 
 of that in the Board of Review in Chicago, the 
 most corrupt organization ever holding sway 
 in Cook County. When that central tax assess- 
 ing body called for by Mr. is estab- 
 lished I hope there will also be established an 
 autocrat at Springfield with power to shoot or 
 behead grafting politicians and jury bribing, 
 perjury inciting and tax fighting lawyers 
 without judge or jury. 
 
 Ever since the world began, and all over the 
 world wherever organized society existed, the 
 man who tilled the soil has been compelled to 
 bear the burden of the social structure, the 
 cost of its gorgeous courts, its highly deco- 
 rated military organizations, and its mass of 
 idle vicious hangers-on and around those royal 
 courts, and everywhere the tiller of the soil has 
 purposely tried to keep himself poor to avoid 
 the pressure. France and the United States 
 have been the only exceptions, and now they 
 are starting a propaganda to remove the latter 
 country from that exception. If the farmers of 
 Illinois permit it to be carried out, I can only 
 say they will deserve their fate. For my part 
 I would say sooner insurrection than New Zea- 
 land socialism. For my part I would rather 
 see Chicago level with the prairie and sown
 
 246 OUR LESSON. 
 
 with salt than pay its full rental value as tax 
 on my farm to the public. A deaf old man, I 
 could neither work it myself or make my liv- 
 ing without it. I do not view either the poor 
 house or $1.50 per week as a pauper pensioner 
 with equanimity. And there are thousands in 
 Illinois in precisely my circumstances. It 
 would have been greatly to my financial ad- 
 vantage if eighteen years ago I had stopped 
 paying taxes on my vacant lots in Chicago and 
 let the state take them all. When the crushing 
 machine gets fully into motion I expect to sell 
 my farm lands for whatever I can get and 
 emigrate to Central America or the Cannibal 
 islands of the Pacific where there is still some 
 regard for property rights. Still I expect it to 
 be done, and that within fifty years we will see 
 every foot of farm land in Illinois be paying 
 full rental value as a tax. Then the only 
 future for the old or broken-down farmer will 
 be the poor house or the pauper's pension. I 
 only hope it will not come until after I am 
 dead. 
 
 Why this crusade against the farmer? It is 
 only a short time that he has been enjoying his 
 prosperity. It is only about twelve or fifteen 
 years ago that I was getting eight cents a
 
 OUR LESSON. 247 
 
 dozen for eggs, three dollars a hundred for my 
 hogs, and seventeen cents a bushel for my 
 corn, while anybody who bought farm ground 
 was considered as big a fool as the man who 
 now buys Chicago real property.. The farmer 
 has always borne more than his share of the 
 public burden. He pays his share of the 
 national, state, county and township tax.. 
 Enough is raised for all needful purposes, and 
 to that no objection is urged. As a railroad 
 conductor once said to me, the farmer is the 
 only man who paid three cents a mile. Every 
 faker, every chevalier d 'Industrie who lives by 
 his wits in promoting schemes in the cities, 
 looks to the farmer for his prey. The import 
 duties have always pressed most heavily upon 
 him to build up the colossal fortunes of the 
 Carnegies et al. For what reason this cry for 
 taxing the farmers up to their rental value? 
 Formerly the talk was taxation for the legiti- 
 mate expenses of government economically 
 administered. It is no longer that. He must 
 be taxed as a principle. If its advocate be 
 asked for what purpose so much money be 
 raised beyond all reasonable demands of gov- 
 ernment, the answer, the only one, could easily 
 be: "Let not that concern you; you furnish the
 
 248 OUR LESSON. 
 
 money, we will attend to the spending". It is 
 as easy now for the city government of Chi- 
 cago to spend twenty-four millions of dollars 
 a year as it was to spend eleven millions five 
 years ago. 
 
 I will answer that question in a way he 
 would not. It is to provide for great hordes of 
 highly-paid, useless, idle officials who will 
 form a great machine to aggrandize them- 
 selves and add to their number, as in New 
 Zealand. It is to pour from the utmost ex- 
 tremities of the state great sums of money to 
 support a numerous army of bums in the city 
 who will further the lust for power and ambi- 
 tions of those office holders. It is to reduce to 
 serfdom the tiller of the soil and inevitably 
 bring in the all-owning autocrat. Rome drew 
 upon every acre of its vast empire for grain to 
 feed its worthless idle masses, but those 
 distant regions could not help themselves, be- 
 ing under military domination. Like Gibbon, 
 one can only think that they got what they 
 deserved when the barbarians came in and 
 exterminated the whole crowd. I know it is 
 dreadfully sophomorical to refer to Rome after 
 these forty years, but I couldn 't help it. 
 
 To make even a pretense of justification for
 
 OUR LESSON. 249 
 
 this, they make much of the " uplift" as they 
 term the regeneration of the city masses 
 through the robbing of the country man. It is 
 a pretty difficult matter to uplift the people 
 who will not make an effort to uplift them- 
 selves and do not want to be uplifted, and who, 
 on the contrary, will stubbornly resist any 
 effort to uplift them. However, it gives noto- 
 riety and an easy life to those who make that 
 an excuse for their existence. Some years ago 
 the Chicago Tribune published a synopsis of the 
 report of the New York Tenement Commis- 
 sion. As the result of their investigations they 
 reported that if the families were taken out of 
 the New York slums and put in the finest 
 mansions of Fifth Avenue, within six months 
 those mansions would be the slums of New 
 York. I clipped that article out and mailed it 
 to a lady well known for her benevolent incli- 
 nations. No reply to it was ever received by 
 me. Let any family in Chicago express even a 
 desire for better conditions and see how many 
 practical men will spring to their aid, but 
 those practical men require that that family 
 co-operate in their efforts, which usually is the 
 last thing it desires to do. Pouring water into 
 a rat hole has generally been considered the
 
 250 OUR LESSON. 
 
 height of wasteful and useless expenditure. It 
 is nothing compared with'.the task of impover- 
 ishing a whole stateful of industrious provi- 
 dent farmers to coddle a mass of vicious idle 
 city dwellers who want "money not advice". 
 It is paying too dear for it. Summed up, all 
 this talk of the uplift amounts to the fact that 
 while they cannot stop the poverty they can 
 stop the wealth. It is the old primitive desire 
 for loot. It is strongest where the loot has 
 accumulated. In the country where possession 
 of property means back-breaking toil, it is 
 practically non-existent. Father Heckewelder, 
 the Moravian missionary, says after the wild 
 Indians had compelled his thrifty Christian- 
 ized Indians to accompany them inlbol^he^ 
 woods of western Ohio: " Every day brought 
 us new troubles. The cattle finding no good 
 pasture were constantly attempting to return, 
 and therefore had to be watched. The milch 
 cows failed for want of proper feed, and owing 
 to this many families, and especially those who 
 had small children, suffered. Provisions of all 
 kinds were wanting, and when the women 
 went into the woods or on the river banks to 
 look for and dig roots as a substitute, they 
 either could not find what they were in search
 
 OUR LESSON. 261 
 
 of or the ground was too hard frozen to get 
 them. Corn was very scarce throughout the 
 country, and those who had the article asked 
 a dollar for three or four quarts. Even the /< ' 
 timber for building was far off. for all the I 
 
 ^ B toHta ^ HM g aa MaM**'***'*Miif>i iimr in-irniniiiin i | j. 
 
 "country, to a great distance was a barren 
 
 ^^^^ l ^q&*^**m~*~~***~&'ii*'* l '**^*'**''**''* m ' f ** l * f ^ JraaifcataHmfaasmg**'* 11 *'' 1 *''* 
 
 prairie, with the exception of here and there 
 a few^ scattered 4 treeji. The pinching rold was 
 severely felt by all those who were in want of 
 clothes and bedding, and this was particularly 
 the case with us. 
 
 Under the pressure of sufferings we were 
 ridiculed and laughed at. 'Look', said the 
 Monesey chief to a Wyandot, 'look at these 
 praying (Christian) Indians, who but the 
 other day were living in affluence, how they 
 now creep about in the bushes looking for 
 roots and berries to keep themselves from 
 starving. Well, they are served right, for why 
 should some live better than others'? We have 
 now brought them on a level with us.' Yet 
 such sayings were not the worst, but both Pipe 
 and the half king boasted that they now had it 
 in their power to compel the Christian Indians 
 to go to war with them whenever they choose 
 to command them."
 
 252 OUR LESSON. 
 
 So they as much as say in Australia and New 
 Zealand: "We may pauperize the whole com- 
 munity, but it must be a community of equals. 
 There shall not be a rich man and a poor man. " 
 
 The human race has always been trying to 
 abrogate the laws of nature by statute laws, 
 the law of the political bum for the law of the 
 Creator, to its own loss. Homer makes Jove 
 say: "Mankind brings a flood of evils on its 
 head by its own follies, and lays the blame 
 upon me." A more modern writer hits it off 
 neatly when he makes Jove say: "What, I 
 damn such fools'?" 
 
 It is the law of nature that the idle, the 
 vicious and the drunken suffer therefor. Few 
 of the human race are guided by reason, or by 
 any other law than that of necessity. If you 
 rob a man of the rewards of his industry, or 
 if you make it hard for individuals to accumu- 
 late wealth, you increase the poverty of all. 
 Among the rich you get rich; among the poor 
 you get poor. New Zealand and Australia are 
 condemned to an eternity of mediocrity. We 
 are trying to follow their example. 
 
 The End.
 
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