LITERATURE, SCIENCE AND ART.
MARCUS CLARKE, AUSTRALIA'S PREMIER NOVELIST EDWARD WHITTY DANIEL HENRY DENIEHY DR. HEARN-PROFESSOR McCOY-EDMUND HAYES HIS COLLECTION OF IRISH BALLAD POETRY "THE DREAM OF DAMPIER " WILLIAM CARLETON, JUN.-JOHN FINNAMORE RODERICK FLANAGAN WILLIAM VINCENT WALLACE-COMPOSITION OF " MARITANA " -CHEQUERED CAREER OF A MUSICAL GENIUS.
Colonel Sir Andrew Clarke, the son of the first Irish governor of Western Australia, was a man who rendered very efficient service to the young colony of Victoria as its first Surveyor General and Chief Commissioner of Crown Lands. To him was delegated the Herculean task of organizing municipal government throughout the country amongst a promiscuous population drawn by the golden magnet from, all points of the compass. How well he succeeded is shown by the host of cities, towns, boroughs and shires, that are spread over the face of the land, each locally self-governed, each raising its own revenue, and controlling the expenditure of its own funds. Science also owes him a debt of gratitude, for he was the founder of the Philosophical Society of Victoria-the earliest organization for the collection of scientific data on all matters connected with the colonies. Under the title of the Royal Society of Victoria, the institution continues to flourish and to publish a yearly volume of its " Transactions." Sir Andrew's near relative, Marcus Clarke, is the only novelist of the first rank that Australia has yet produced, and it will be many years before the colonies
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cease to mourn the early death of that gifted son of genius. Though born in a London suburb, Marcus Clarke was always proud of his Irish lineage, and, at the outset of his literary career, he had the good fortune to secure the friendship and patronage of Sir Redmond Barry and Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who were instrumental in procuring for him a congenial appointment in the Melbourne Public Library.
It was to Sir Charles Gavan Duffy that he dedicated his most powerful and thrilling work of fiction " His Natural Life " a book familiar as a household word throughout Australia, and almost as widely known in America, where it was republished by the Harpers. Three editions were issued in London, and the story was also translated into several European languages. It is a tale told with a purpose, and that purpose was to unveil before the eyes of the world the horrors of the English transportation system. Seeing that Marcus Clarke had not been born into the world when these horrors were in full blast, and that he had to search through a multiplicity of old newspapers, prison records, and blue-books, for the facts that formed the groundwork of his story, the realism of the narrative and the enthralling interest it excites in the mind of every reader, are calculated to excite a feeling of wonder at such a brilliant performance on the part of a young man of five-and-twenty, coupled with a feeling of deep sorrow that a life so rich in promise and possibilities, should have been extinguished so soon after the threshold of fame was passed. But, if it was impossible for him to witness the fiendish cruelties, by which the hapless convicts were in bygone days systematically goaded to madness or murder by inhuman military tyrants, he could at least visit the scenes of those dismal tragedies of a terrible past, and this he did by
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spending some time on the sites-physically beautiful but morally detestable-once occupied by two of the most infamous of the " convict hells" of Van Diemen's Land, viz., Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbor. He thus acquired valuable local knowledge, and assimilated all the local traditions, besides ensuring that topographical accuracy of description, which characterizes the premier novel of Australia. All who have read " His Natural Life " will have no difficulty in agreeing with the dictum of Lord Rosebery that: " There can indeed be no two opinions as to the horrible fascination of the book. The reader who takes it up and gets beyond the prologue, though he cannot but be harrowed by the long agony of the story and the human anguish of every page, is unable to lay it down: almost in spite of himself, he has to read and to suffer to the bitter end. To me, I confess, it is the most terrible of all novels, more terrible than 'Oliver Twist' or Victor Hugo's most startling effects, for the simple reason that it is more real. It has all the solemn ghastliness of truth." And Mrs. Cashel Hoey, than whom there is no more competent judge, published this high estimate of the deceased young author in her " Lady's Letter from London," which has for years formed one of the most attractive features of a leading weekly journal of Melbourne: * " His tales of the early days of the colonies, and his very striking novel, * His Natural Life,' made a deep impression here. We were always expecting another powerful fiction from his pen. I fear he has not left any finished work, and I regret the fact all the more deeply that I have been allowed the privilege of reading a few chapters of a novel begun by Mr. Marcus Clarke, under the title of
* The Australasian
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'Felix and Felicitas.' The promise of those chapters is quite exceptional; they equal in brilliancy and vivacity the best writing of Edward Whitty, and they surpass that vivid writer in construction. It is difficult to believe, while reading the opening chapters of this, I fear, unfinished work, that the author lived at the other side of the world from the scenes and the society which he depicts with such accuracy, lightness, grace and humor." Though it is on " His Natural Life " that the literary reputation of Marcus Clarke will permanently rest, he is perhaps seen at his best in those thirty shorter tales and sketches, which he wrote during his brief but industrious lifetime. In these minor efforts, the versatility of his genius is strikingly displayed. Some of them are tenderly pathetic, whilst others are grotesquely humorous, and several may be described as wildly imaginative, but all are essentially Australian in their character, and each of them happily illustrates some particular type or phase of colonial life. They afford abundant evidence that if the life of their talented author had been prolonged, he would, with matured powers of study and observation, have diligently explored the virgin fields of fiction at the antipodes, and enriched Australian literature with more than one book racy of the soil.
Edward Whitty, the "vivid writer" with whom Mrs. Cashel Hoey compares Marcus Clarke in the foregoing extract, also lies in a Melbourne cemetery, where his last resting-place is pointed out by a column of white marble that was placed over his grave by the well-known, warmhearted, sympathetic Irish actor, Barry Sullivan. Like Marcus Clarke, Edward Whitty was born of Irish parents in London, and, by a strange coincidence, both died in Melbourne at precisely the same premature age of thirty-four. Whitty's
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father was a journalist who did good service in the cause of Catholic emancipation, and Whitty the younger adopted the paternal profession at an early age. When he was nineteen, he joined the staff of the Times, "the youngest man that the Thunderer ever entrusted with literary functions of any kind." He was successively editor of that most outspoken of journals, the Leader, and the radical Irish organ known as the Northern Whig. A sad domestic calamity, the death of his wife and two children within a short period of each other, made the old scenes unbearable to his sight, and he wandered away to the antipodes, only to find an early grave awaiting him. The book by which Whitty is best known is his " Friends of Bohemia," a series of powerful and graphic sketches of adventurers in politics and. literature. " The Governing Classes" is another work of his that attracted some notice. Montalembert speaks of it in the highest terms in his " Constitutional Government in England," and describes its author as " the most original and accomplished journalist of the day." Just as in the case of Marcus Clarke, poor Whitty's fruitful mind was full of ambitious literary undertakings in the new land of his adoption, when he was suddenly struck down in the flower of early manhood. A brilliant Irish-Australian friend and contemporary has placed on record this by no means exaggerated estimate of his abilities: "There is no story in the whole melancholy chronicle of misfortunes of men of genius so sad as this of Edward Whitty. That he was something more and something higher than a man of genius, that his nature was molded of the profoundest sensibilities, and that he altogether lived upon deep and passionate affections, is evinced by the utter shattering and subversion of health, hopes, and interests in the world, which followed the loss of his dear
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ones. Others, and men of fine mind and fine feeling too, would perhaps have come out of the typhoon dismasted and with broken timbers, but eventually to regain and to ride quietly for years on the world's waters. So young, too--so gifted-so abounding and ebullient with the life-blood of intellectual power, not the mere faculty of writing graceful. verses or beautiful trifles of any kind, but with that power, disciplined by learned experiences of the ways of life," to deal with men and things, hard and cold and clear, and bright, warm and joyous, just as they are. His creation of Nea in ' Friends of Bohemia'-the poor girl-wife that her father, a selfish peer, deeply in debt to an old commercial speculator, had given to the latter's Bohemian son-though but a sketch, is a creation of the very highest beauty and a positive contribution to imaginative English literature."
The hand that penned this fraternal criticism belonged to Daniel Henry Deniehy, and the mention of that honored name, in conjunction with those of Marcus Clarke and Edward Whitty, completes an ill-fated trinity of Irish-Australian genius. Born in the capital of the parent Australian colony, he mastered several European languages at an early age, and, in his twenty-fifth year, gave his countrymen the first glimpse of his oratorical powers in a striking course of lectures on " Modern Literature." His fresh and vigorous eloquence made him, at the outset of his career, the idol of the people, and, unfortunately for himself, he was triumphantly elected to a seat in the first representative assembly of New South Wales. Mr. Frank Fowler, in his " Southern Lights and Shadows," passes in review the leading-politicians of New South Wales, and describes Deniehy as the "most accomplished man in the popular chamber. Brought up under the care of the best of guides, philo-
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sophers and friends, his sweet home, overlooking the waters of Port Jackson, is the happy refuge of all poor workers in the field of art or letters. Mr. Deniehy has attained the subtle critical faculty of a De Quincey, with conversational powers as brilliant as they are profound. His grasp of subjects is wonderfully extensive, while his rare and highly cultured intellectual faculties dart into every nook and cranny of a topic, convex-ing its hidden recesses into sharp and vivid relief." His future would perhaps have been far brighter and happier, had he eschewed politics and devoted his splendid abilities to his practice at the bar. Retiring after a few years from public life, he took up his versatile pen, established the Southern Cross, and in its pages, and those of other Sydney journals, poured forth that graceful, scholarly series of critical, historical, descriptive, and satirical papers, the perusal of which induced an English author-statesman* to exclaim: " Had Deniehy lived, he would have become the Macaulay of Australia, the first of critics and essayists." But fate had willed it otherwise; the once bright and powerful intellect went out in deepest gloom, and the once favorite pet of the populace was found one morning in the streets of an inland city, and carried, like another Edgar Allan Poe, to a public hospital to die, in his thirty-fifth year. Truly a sad ending to a career that opened with such exceptional sunshine and promise."
Deniehy, then a young man of twenty, spent the opening months of 1848 in the land of his forefathers, and became acquainted with the leaders of the Young Ireland party, with whose views he was in enthusiastic sympathy. In one of his most interesting sketches, he describes John Mitchel as le
* The late Lord Lytton.
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beau sabreur-the Murat of the movement; Charles Gavan. Duffy as showing a literary character, broad, abundant, luminous as a river, and yet checkered with soft, sad autumnal hues; and Thomas Davis as the archetype of Young Ireland culture, and of the masculine purity of genius hallowed to lofty purposes-the scholar and the poet of his party. He thus admirably hits off the leading characteristics of John Mitchel's energetic journalism in 1848: " Splendid sarcasm, vitriolic in its specific quality as a destructive; argument close and conclusive, couched in eloquent execration, taunt and curse and defiance, jest and jeer, as grim in their way as attainders or excommunications; but above all, history -Irish history-pointed out week after week in such a light as, from the flames of a burning church, one might see the inscriptions on mural tablets a minute ere the slabs crack, and drop into the blazing chaos. Compared to them, the thunderers of the Times were weak rum-and-water to Russian quass or the Tartar distillation from equine milk. The denunciations of Junius, whose flimsy pretensions to power as political literature De Quincey has, among a host of similar services, shown the world, were as lemonade, and inferior lemonade, too, beside the arrack of the Mitchellian diatribes."
And in his elaborate review of the journal kept by John Mitchel during his detention as a prisoner of state, he soliloquizes:
" Even to me, an Australian, who spent but a swallow's season in Ireland, there are passages in Mitchel's' Jail Journal ' that set my memory retouching Irish landscapes. They conjure up the places I know best in Erin-the brimming Lee with a midnight flash of the mill-wheels at Dripsey; Gougane Barra, with its 'pomp of waters unwithstood,* sung by Callanan in strains where, as often in martial music,
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the victorious mingles with the plaintive ; the black waters shimmering by the home of Raleigh, and those sacred shades, the wizard woods of Kilcolman, that, with useful and shadowed beauty, closed in about the visions of the dying Spenser."
Contemplating in another essay the extent of the unexplored regions of Irish literature, he exclaims:
" What a tract of imaginative grandeur, lying away dim, sublime and gloomy, like the isle O' Brazil of popular legend, Irish writers of poetry have left untouched in portions of the early religious history of Ireland! Lough Dearg, with so much of what is mightiest and most lasting in relation to the heart and soul floating dimly about it, is an instance. Calderon, the Catholic, soars into this region for the poetic; but the Purgatorio del San Patricia, though Shelley dug the finest image in the 'Cenci' from it, is only a scratch on the surface of an auriferous soil."
In the ranks of Australian scholarship no name stands higher than that of Dr. W. E. Hearn, a county Cavan man, and a distinguished alumnus of Trinity College, Dublin. Selected at the age of twenty-eight, by a committee presided over by Sir John Herschel, to fill the chair of history and political economy in the newly-founded University of Melbourne, Dr. Hearn has for more than thirty years been one of the chief bulwarks of that institution, and one of the great intellectual forces of the southern continent. " The Government of England," " Plutology," and " The Aryan Household," are three works from his pen, displaying an erudition which has won for them a recognized position as text-books on the subjects of which they treat, in European seats of learning. His colleague, Professor McCoy, is a Dublin man, and was chosen at the same time by Sir John Herschel to occupy the
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chair of natural science. The scientific attainments of Professor McCoy are widely known, and the splendid Aus tralasian museum, which has been established in Melbourne under his fostering care, whilst being a source of delight and instruction to thousands, is a standing monument to his painstaking industry and his scientific enthusiasm. It is to a Victorian citizen that the Irish race is indebted for the best and most complete collection of national poetry in exis tence, viz., " The Ballad Poetry of Ireland," in two volumes, compiled by Edmund Hayes, a long-time resident of Mel bourne. Conversely, the native-born Australian race is under an obligation to an Irishman resident in their midst-Gerald Henry Supple-for the only national poem of the first order of merit they possess. " The Dream of Dampier " is styled by its author " An Australasian Foreshadowing," and, in its full and flowing verse, there seems to throb the ardent life- blood of the youngest of the nations; the vision of the future rises before the dreamy gaze of the hardy buccaneer as he skirts the shores of Australia, and he sees in wondrous anticipation the golden glories that were destined to remain hidden for two centuries before being revealed to mortal eyes.
William Carleton, jun., and John Finnamore are two Irish-Australians who have also attained distinction in the field of colonial poetry. The former is the son of the great Irish novelist of the same name. His chief work is entitled " The Warden of Galway." , It is a metrical romance founded on a remarkable incident in Irish history-the execution of his own son by an inexorable father, who sacrifices all the feelings of nature in order to vindicate the law. Mr. Finnarnore's two well-constructed tragedies," Francesca Vasari" and " Carpio," have a circle of admirers that increases in circumference with
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the progress of the colonies, and the extension of the higher education. In the realm of Australian history, " there is no more reliable chronicler," to quote the words of a literary critic in the Argus newspaper, " than Roderick Flanagan, whose two well packed volumes," he adds, " will always be treated with respect by reason of their honesty, their modesty, and their simple dignity." Flanagan's " History " is, in fact, a mine of information on colonial subjects, from which many valuable pieces of rough gold have been extracted, and briskly polished, and brightened up by a later generation of literary artists, and made to appear as much as possible like original discoveries.
It is something to be proud of that the two most popular English operas of the century-" The Bohemian Girl," by Michael William Balfe, and " Maritana," by William Vincent Wallace-are the products of Irish musical genius ; and it is a fact not generally known that it was in an Australian city, Sydney, that the delightful music of " Maritana " was mainly composed. Wallace seems to have caught a happy inspiration from the serene and sunny skies of Australia, and the lovely surroundings of Sydney, which are reflected in the airiness, the brightness, and the vivacity that distinguish his magnum opus. Though he achieved distinction as a young violinist in Dublin, Wallace seems to have immigrated to Australia in 1835, with the fixed determination of abandoning a musical career, and turning himself into a hard-working pioneer colonist. Anyhow, it is certain that he buried himself for some time in the bush country to the west of Sydney, and it was whilst paying a brief visit to this metropolis that a lucky accident revealed his secret, and opened the eyes of his fellow-colonists to the fact that they had a musical genius of the first order in their midst. The discovery was the
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turning-point of his life. Tinder the patronage of Sir Richard Bourke, the reigning governor and an admiring compatriot, he gave a concert in Sydney that was so successful from every point of view, as to convince the young Irish emigrant that he had been allowing a God-given talent to lie unproductive. As if to make up for lost time, Wallace now applied himself with much industry to the work of composition in private and violin playing in public. He traveled professionally through the Australian colonies, and he more than once placed his life in jeopardy by a reckless disregard of necessary precautions, when passing through districts where the natives happened to be in a belligerent humor at the time. On one of those occasions, he was on the point of being sacrificed by a party of Maories who had made him prisoner, and it was only the opportune intercession of the chief's daughter that saved him from a horrible death. After this, his Bohemian temperament prompted him into the eccentricity of embarking on a whaling voyage, and this also was very nearly ending fatally for him. The native crew mutinied in mid-ocean and seized the vessel, and Wallace was one of the four white men who barely escaped with their lives. We next have a glimpse of the wandering minstrel crossing the Andes on the back of a mule, and traversing the whole distance from Valparaiso to Buenos Ayres in this primitive fashion. Other romantic episodes in the checkered career of this erratic genius might be narrated, but, to turn from the man to the music, it is a safe prophecy to assert that many a year will elapse before the works that he has given to the modern lyric stage will cease to charm the popular ear. Such widely known and such favorite airs as "Let me like a soldier fall," "There is a flower that bloometh," " In happy moments, day by day," " Alas, those
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chimes," " No, my courage," and " Sainted mother, guide his footsteps," throb with the life-blood of humanity, and will long perpetuate the name and fame of William Vincent Wallace.
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the evidences of such, prosperity-such level prosperity, such level comfort; no great heapings of wealth, but then no great poverty-I asked what share Irishmen could fairly claim in the development of this great continent, in the discovery of its hidden wealth, in the enterprises of commerce, and in maintaining its peace and prosperity; and I found on inquiry that foremost amongst the explorers who opened up the central regions of Australia were Irishmen- I found that many of the wisest heads and most respected members of the legislative assemblies were Irishmen, that they were luminaries on the bench and leaders at the bar, and that men for places of trust and positions of responsibility were chosen from the ranks of the Irish. These Irishmen- why do they come here? They come from our native country. And in what spirit do they leave it ? They leave it because they have no home in the land of their birth, because they have no scope for the exercise of their mental and physical energies. And it is for a home and a livelihood that they cross the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, and enter the Heads of Sydney, where they see, as though inscribed above their rocky portals, the words, 'Ye who enter leave despair behind.' They were poor and unappreciated at home; but they come here, and what is the result ? They prove themselves to be most valuable citizens-good, loyal, hard-working members of your great progressive communities."
These reflections of a shrewd and much traveled observer received ample corroboration at the recent Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London, in which Irish art and industry in the colonies formed no inconsiderable portion of a brilliant and effective display, and at which representative Irishmen from the various divisions of the colonial empire
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attended officially on behalf of their respective states. In welcoming to Ireland a large contingent of these colonial visitors, Mr. T. D. Sullivan, M.P., Lord Mayor of Dublin, referred to the many reasons that actuated the Irish race at home in giving the heartiest of greetings to their colonial guests. " We know," he said, " that crowds of our expatriated countrymen have found freedom and happiness in these distant lands. Our exiled people have been kindly and well received in these countries, and I am proud tonight to hear it said that they have given good and honorable services in the lands where they have made their homes. Yes, gentlemen, they form a large portion of the working population of these countries, and have formed no inconsiderable portion of the brain and intellect that have helped to make these countries free and great and prosperous. We have here tonight amongst our visitors Irishmen who have rendered good service in these countries, and who have won distinction there. We are glad to know and to hear from themselves that they do not forget, and that they do not ignore, the little island of their birth. Gentlemen, it befits a man, whatever his nationality, to remember his own country, and to call it by its own name, not to ignore it, not to seem to think that no such geographical entity exists on the face of the earth. You are citizens of the British Empire, subjects of the British Crown, but, I ask you, are you not proud to be self-governing communities? Gentlemen, your connection with the British Empire is a link of love and affection; that is the bond which unites yon to the Crown, and to the Empire of which you form a part. The bond is not one of force, not one of compulsion, but it is one of good will, and the good-will is there because you get fair-play, fair treatment, and freedom to develop the resources of
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your own country according to the power within yourselves. May such be the lot of every portion of the British Empire. May we see the day when it can truly be said that no portion of the Empire is held within its bounds by any other tie but the tie of good will and affection. (Cheers.) Gentlemen, in many of the dark and troubled periods through which we have passed in Ireland, our sufferings would have been far harder, were it not for the large and abundant gifts that were poured in upon us in our day of distress with generous hands, by our kindred and sympathizers, and friends abroad. From Australia, from New Zealand, from Canada, and from the great free republic of America, have come to this country generous gifts, and largely have they come from our own people-from the sons and daughters of exiled Irishmen."
One of the chief characteristics of the Irish in Australia is felicitously indicated in the foregoing remarks by the Lord Mayor of Dublin-the remarkable manner in which they have succeeded in rendering full and satisfactory allegiance to the land of their adoption and all its local institutions, whilst never forgetting the filial loyalty they owed to the land of their fathers and all its cherished traditions. Whilst bravely doing their part in building up new states in faraway lands, founding fresh cities, taming the wild bush, and developing all the natural resources of the fifth division of the globe, they have at the same time religiously preserved a deep and abiding interest in all that pertained to the old land of their affections, in every national movement, in every patriotic undertaking, in every successive advance towards. the goal of legislative freedom. If any proof of this assertion were wanting, it is abundantly supplied by the active and continuous interest that has been manifested by the Irish race throughout the colonies in the present national move-
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ment ever since the first day of its inception, and by the thousands of pounds that have been remitted from time to time in support of that movement to the parent National League in Dublin by its scores of colonial children. When Mr. J. E. Redmond, M.P. and Mr. W. H. K. Redmond, M.P., visited the colonies a few years ago, as the delegated representatives of the Irish National League, they were everywhere received with a generous welcome and a rousing enthusiasm, that were the most eloquent of testimonies to the depth and the strength of the sympathy and the affection, subsisting between the Irish in Australia and their brethren in the old land. The recent intercolonial tour of the Earl and the Countess of Aberdeen affords another evidence of the solidarity of the race. The knowledge that Lord Aberdeen was the first Irish Viceroy, for many long years, who had honestly striven to rule Ireland in accordance with Irish ideas, secured him a princely reception at the hands of grateful Irish-Australians in all the colonial cities that were visited by the Countess and himself. The moment a patriotic note is sounded in the home country, it immediately finds a responsive echo in the hearts and deeds of the Irish in Australia showing how thorough is the sympathy, and how magnetic the influence, that bind together the " sea-divided Gael." The same fraternal feeling finds expression in the loving conservatism which has led to so many distinctively Irish customs and festivals being transplanted to the antipodes, and taking deep and lasting root in the soil. This striking characteristic of colonial Irishmen- this measure of equal justice meted out to the land of their birth and the land of their adoption-did not escape the notice of Smith O'Brien during his tour in Victoria after his recall from a five years' exile. "It has caused me intense
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satisfaction," said the leader of '48, " to find that in this colony the Irish have distinguished themselves by their industry, intelligence, enterprise, and good conduct, as well as that their exertions have for the most part been rewarded with success; but the satisfaction is greatly enhanced when I perceive that they retain in this hemisphere those features of the national character-those noble impulses, those generous emotions, those genial susceptibilities-which I have been elsewhere accustomed with loving pride to extol as the attributes of our race."
A second conspicuous feature in the character of the typical Irish-Australian is the remarkable facility, and the pronounced success, with which he has adapted himself to the administration of municipal and parliamentary forms of government in these newly created states. Coming from a country in which the fewest possible governing privileges are grudgingly granted to the people, the signal all-round ability displayed by the Irish settlers in Australasian, in the work of both local and general government, is little less than marvelous, considering the previous absence of any adequate training for such positions of authority and responsibility. They seem to possess an intuitive acquaintance with the rules and forms of popular government, and a ready tact by which this invaluable knowledge becomes easily translated into action for the benefit of their fellow citizens. Special references have been made in preceding pages to the number of Irish-Australians who have distinguished themselves in the parliamentary arena, but it must not be forgotten that there are hundreds of their brother Celts all over the colonies doing equally good and useful work on a less lofty platform as mayors, presidents and councilors of cities, towns and shires. Many a business Irishman in Australian
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centres works hard all day for himself and his family, and gives his evenings to the service of the community that has called him to a foremost place in its Town Hall; and many an Irish farmer in thinly-settled districts travels twelve or fifteen miles at periodical intervals to take his seat in the shire council, of which he is an elected member. Facts like these are the strongest possible condemnation of the traditional policy, which has so long and so unwisely refused to Irishmen in their own native land, those legislative and municipal rights, which they have proved themselves fully competent to exercise in all other English-speaking dominions. As Sir Charles Gavan Duffy once told a Melbourne audience, " the history of the Irish race in Australia was one they might fairly be proud of. They exercised a large influence in public affairs, and he challenged any man to say it was not a beneficial and a salutary one. Every enlargement of Australian liberty had them for zealous friends; every enemy of Australian rights had t hem for uncompromising antagonists."
One further characteristic of the Irish in Australia must not be overlooked, and that is the general good will, the prevailing amity of their social relations with their fellow-citizens of other nationalities. It is unfortunately true that, in times of exceptional political excitement, it is possible for unscrupulous agitators to raise and profit by an anti-Irish or anti-Catholic cry, but, viewing the colonies in their normal condition, the harmony that subsists between the inhabitants of Irish birth or parentage and the other component parts of the population, is one of the most noticeable and gratifying features of Australian life. In every colonial centre, Irishmen are found associated on the most amicable terms with their fellow-citizens of other nationalities in the management of public and charitable institutions, and in
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every movement devised for the furtherance of the common weal. Not a few Irish-Catholic charities in the principal Australasian cities number Protestant ladies and gentlemen amongst their most generous patrons and subscribers. This well-known and pleasing fact was once felicitously referred to by Mr. Dalley, in addressing a Sydney audience, as '' a proof of their enjoyment of a civilization which made the efforts of the intolerant and the fanatical mere exhibitions of impotent malignity, which could have no effect whatever upon the actions of the good and the gentle."
Lady Wilde (" Speranza "), writing a few years ago in a London magazine, prophesied that "the Australian Irish will in time be as powerful a people as their American kindred," and expressed her conviction that " the chances of wealth are even greater in Australia " than in the republic of the west. The famed poetess of the Young Ireland era went further, and anticipated a day when the Australian Irish would " return to green Erin and buy up the estates of the pauperised landlords." This would certainly be a, sensational dramatic revenge-the evicted coming back with well-filled purses to enter into possession of the properties of the once harsh but now humble evictors-but it is by no means beyond the range of probability, in view of the remarkable rapidity with which large fortunes have been accumulated in Australia by Irishmen who landed there with nothing to bless themselves with, save the clothes on their backs and the few shillings in their dilapidated pockets.
When it is remembered that the marvelous progress detailed in the foregoing pages, to which Irish brains, courage, and enterprise contributed so much, has taken place within the lifetime of a single generation, no one will be surprised at the glowing anticipations in which many writers
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have indulged, regarding what the future has in store for these great southern lands. There is, it must needs be admitted, a substantial foundation on which the prophet is at liberty to build. Abounding in vast and still undeveloped resources, possessing large areas of unoccupied territory, blessed with many safe and commodious harbours, and enjoying the freest of free constitutions, there is nothing to prevent the Australian colonies becoming, at no distant date, a second America, a national safety-valve, a home for millions. Manhood suffrage is the almost universal law, and no restriction whatever is placed, nor would it be tolerated for an instant, on the free and untrammelled exercise of the franchise. Practically, every man who can sign his name, and is not suffering under any legal disability, has a potential voice in the making of the laws by which he is governed. It is to the operation of this grand principle, that the Irishmen of the antipodes have been enabled to exert their due influence on the conduct of public affairs; to send, as representatives to their local parliaments, men of ability chosen from their own ranks; and, on occasions, by the weight of their united sentiment and generous indignation, have succeeded in keeping off the colonial statute-book some of those legislative enactments that have been productive of lamentable evils in the land of their birth. The Celtic element of the Australian population has, in fine, proved a valuable factor in the work of building up new states, and founding free, intelligent and enlightened communities beneath the Southern Cross.
THE END.