great liners, coasting schooners, ships of all sorts.' Port Adelaide is not accessible by large vessels. The ocean steamers lie many miles off. He says he saw in the porta frigate newly painted,' and

a port official growled out there is our harbour defence ship, which the English Government insists on our maintaining; it is worth nothing and never will be. Our naval defences cost us 25,000l. a year. We should pay the 25,000l. a year to the Admiralty and let them do the defence for us. They can manage such things better than we can.'

Now, either Mr. Froude dreamt all this, or else he was blind and the port official was poking fun at him. There is not and never was a frigate at Port Adelaide. At the Semaphore, in the outer harbour, there is a gun-vessel called the Protector,' which the South Australian Government maintain entirely of their own free will, at a cost, not of 25,000l. a year, but of about 10,000l., the latter amount being the whole charge for naval defence.

Of Adelaide itself he says:

We rose slightly from the sea, and at the end of the seven miles we saw below us in a basin, with a river winding through it, a city of a hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, not one of whom has ever known, or will know, a moment's anxiety as to the recurring regularity of his three meals a day.

Adelaide is not in a basin, but on the highest land in the neighbourhood. There is no river winding through it, for the little Torrens has long since been dammed up and converted into a lake in the park lands. The population of Adelaide with all its suburbs never exceeded seventy-five thousand, and when Mr. Froude was there great numbers of them were leaving daily, starved out by the failure. of the harvest, the drought, and the commercial depression. I also was there in January 1885, and I saw more poverty and worse poverty than I ever saw before in twenty-five years' life in the Colonies. I purposely attended a sitting of the Benevolent Relief Committee, and learnt something about the anxiety of some of the inhabitants of Adelaide as to the recurring regularity of their three meals a day. Since then Government House has been mobbed by multitudes of people clamouring for the means of subsistence. Mr. Froude had a grand chance when he was at Adelaide to study a wealthy colony in a state of profound, if temporary, distress; and that is the use he made of it.

He cannot be reasonably accurate even about the most striking peculiarities of the country. He says, 'The laughing jackass is the size of a crow, with the shape of a jay.' The laughing jackass is no more like a jay than it is like an owl. It is neither more nor less than a gigantic kingfisher. He says, 'In the woods its chief amusement is to seize hold of snakes and bite their heads off.' This is a habit which the most vigilant naturalist has not yet observed. There is a popular tradition in Australia that the laughing jackass kills snakes by carrying them up in the air and letting them drop; but I

never saw it done, and I never met anybody who had. The bird is no match for a snake in the woods' or anywhere else.

But I need not dwell longer on Mr. Froude's inaccuracy. He admits that he has a bad memory, and that he does not hear very well, and he says the flies affected his eyes. To these causes I am quite willing to attribute his having recorded, on every other page of his book, sights or sayings which nobody else ever saw or heard in Australasia. But if he is lacking in memory and in some of the external senses, he has a vigour of imagination which more than compensates those defects. Amongst other things he imagined that the public mind throughout the Colonies, and even the private and personal mind of individual colonists, is mainly occupied and powerfully excited by the problem of Federation; and accordingly he gives us whole chapters on that subject, from which it might be supposed that the colonists are in a brooding state of melancholy, bordering on despair, and that it is touch and go whether they may not separate from the Empire any day. On that point I can only say that I was in Australia during the whole time of Mr. Froude's visit, and two months longer; that I went there as a public man and a public writer to meet public men and study public questions; and that I never met anybody, except two or three politicians at Melbourne, who took more than a languid, theoretical interest in the subject of Federation.

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As for Mr. Froude's notion that the colonists-' our poor kindred' as he arrogantly and absurdly calls us-are suffering under a deep and burning sense of wrong on account of the slights of the Imperial Government, it is such utter moonshine that colonists are positively at a loss to know what he is driving at. For example, he will have it that the colonists are not allowed to fly the British flag, but are compelled to use some rag of their own, and he declares that they feel this as a bar sinister over their scutcheon, as if they were bastards, and not legitimate,' and he goes on to talk about 'treacherous designs to break the Empire into fragments.' He even affirms that Mr. Dalley, the able Attorney-General and acting Premier of New South Wales, spoke strongly to him about this, and exclaimed, 'We must have the English flag again!' Now, I am a born colonist. From my boyhood I have been either in the public service or in Parliament. Yet I never knew that we colonists were forbidden to fly the British flag until I read Oceana. I do not believe it yet. I have abundant evidence to the contrary, for I see the British flag flying all round me every day.

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I remember some years ago, fifteen or twenty perhaps, an order was made that Colonial Government vessels should not fly the white ensign or the blue ensign without a difference,' for the obvious reason that it might cause confusion through their being mistaken for men-of-war or ships of the Naval Reserve. Each Colony, I fancy, was allowed to select its own 'difference,' and we in New Zealand

chose a suggestive and tasty design, the four stars of the Southern Cross in white on the fly of the blue ensign. As I write our yacht, the Hinemoa,' is coming up the harbour with our star-spangled banner floating astern, and an enormous Union Jack at the masthead. We have hitherto been rather proud of our Southern Cross than otherwise, when we thought anything about it; and it was reserved for Mr. Froude to tell us it was a grievance and a brand of bastardy. It is the old story of the needy knife-grinder over again. When I was at Sydney last year, just about the time when Mr. Froude was there, I went to Manly with my friend Mr. Reid, formerly Minister of Education in the Stuart-Dalley Government, and he pointed out to me Mr. Dalley's castellated mansion-which Mr. Froude describes-surmounted by a wonderful sort of white ensign with a blue cross. I said, 'What is that extraordinary flag he has flying from his tower?' That,' replied Mr. Reid, laughing, 'is the Australian standard.' It was the first time I had ever seen it or heard of it; and I supposed it was a whim of Mr. Dalley's, knowing him to be the most intensely patriotic of born Australians. I was indeed surprised to learn from Oceana that Mr. Dalley is yearning to 'get the English flag back.' There is nothing to prevent him from hoisting three English flags, one above the other, if he chooses.

Apart from these depressing discourses on the prospects or possibilities of Federation, and on the imaginary wrongs or sentimental grievances of the colonists-speculations which are wholly based on misconception-Mr. Froude's narrative of his travels and experiences in Victoria and New South Wales is very pleasant reading, though curiously superficial, and unquestionably calculated to mislead readers not acquainted with the Colonies. He everywhere mistakes the individual for the general, and often enough adopts as types what are but rare exceptions. Mr. Froude seems altogether to have forgotten, or not to have understood, that he was a very distinguished visitor, who naturally found himself sought after, and perhaps a little bit flattered, by the leading personages in the Colonies. He goes into superlatives over every Governor or LieutenantGovernor or Premier or high official or wealthy settler who showed him any attention. Each one in turn is described as 'a most remarkable man,' a statesman of the first order, an Admirable Crichton, an incomparable genius, quite equal to the leading European statesmen or literati. Yet, singularly enough, Mr. Froude thinks very poorly of the political system which has produced so many great men in so short a time, and has the gravest misgivings as to the future of a society whose particular members he so much admires. The plain truth is, he saw nothing of the Colonies or the colonists, but was contented to spend the five weeks of his visit exclusively among the chosen few, the crême de la crême, who had the gratification of entertaining him. These, of course, did their

utmost to make themselves agreeable to him; but they were no doubt less anxious that he should obtain correct impressions of the Colonies than that he should retain pleasant impressions of themselves. What should we think of a writer who should spend a week with the Queen at Osborne, a week with the Prince of Wales at Sandringham, a fortnight among the Dukeries, and a week in being fêted by two or three Mayors and Corporations, and should then go away, and from the experience and information thus gained write a pretentious and professedly authoritative book about England, her people, her institutions, her characteristics, her aspirations, her destiny? Could anything be more laughable? Yet that is, by analogy, precisely what Mr. Froude did with respect to Australia.

But if he has treated the continental Colonies lightly, he has treated New Zealand positively scurvily. Of all the Colonies New Zealand takes the longest to see, and is the hardest to understand; for the reasons that, stretching from north to south a thousand miles, it displays an unique variety of climate and formation; and that it is divided into two totally different islands and into nine separate settlements having little more in common with one another than the states of the Union have. It is a country nearly as large as Great Britain and Ireland, with a population of 600,000 souls, about oneseventh of the population of London, scattered about it pretty evenly in little cities, towns, villages, and sparse rural communities. The people of the north scarcely know the people of the south, while the inhabitants of Westland, half Irish, half Cornish, half Catholic, half Protestant, have actually a closer connection with Victoria, 1,200 miles over sea to the westward, than with their fellow-colonists only a hundred miles to the eastward of them, across the Southern Alps. It will readily be understood that this is a country which demands a good deal of studying, if any knowledge is to be gained of it at all. Let us see how Mr. Froude studied it. In his preface he says: 'The object of my voyage was not only to see the Colonies themselves, but to hear the views of all classes of people there. Very well. How did he set about attaining that object in New Zealand? arrived at Auckland on the 4th of March, 1886. He made himself comfortable at the Northern Club for two days, during which time, as he says, he did Auckland,' a town of fifty thousand people and one of the most beautiful and curious in the world. He then made the regular humdrum, cut-and-dried tour of the hot lakes, in the regular humdrum, cut-and-dried way, just as more than two thousand other tourists did last summer; and noted down the most shallow remarks, probably of what he saw or did not see, of any that were made by those two thousand casual sightseers. That took a week. He then went to Kawau, a secluded island off the coast of Auckland, where Sir George Grey lives in solitary state, and he stayed a week there, speaking to nobody except Sir George Grey, his visitors and servants, and a family in a farmhouse on the

mainland, whither he was blown whilst on a boating excursion. He then returned to Auckland, slept at the club, caught the steamer for Honolulu and San Francisco-and so ended his visit to and his study of New Zealand.

If he had candidly admitted that he saw nothing and learnt nothing of New Zealand, that he was tired and bored when he got there, and instead of making himself acquainted with the Colony, went for a holiday at the lakes with Lord Elphinstone and enjoyed an intellectual lounge with Sir George Grey, and then was glad to get home, it would have been easy to enter into his feelings, and to respect his straightforwardness. But he does nothing of the sort. Having deliberately shirked the duty of seeing the Colony and meeting its people, he, nevertheless, presumes to give an elaborate account of it, and to pass a critical judgment upon them. He not only draws a picture of New Zealand which is equally offensive and preposterous, but he publishes statements about its inhabitants, so injurious that it was seriously considered whether some public means of refuting them should not be taken. Where did he get his information from? Did he 'see the Colony and hear the views of all classes of people there?' No, he saw the Northern Club and Kawau, and he heard the views of Sir George Grey and his servants, a Mr. Aldis, and some man whose name he did not catch, or forgot, in the smoking-room at the club. But mainly, and for all practical purposes solely, he heard and adopted the views of Sir George Grey. Mr. Froude lost his head completely about Sir George Grey, and the things he says of him, while they make all sensible colonists chuckle with satiric glee, or burn with prosaic indignation, must even have made Sir George himself blush, if he have not lost the faculty of blushing by long disuse. Mr. Froude, on the strength of a week's acquaintance, pronounces Sir George Grey the greatest, ablest, noblest, wisest, most pious, and beneficent man who ever deigned to waste his God-given qualities on a wretched colony.

Now, Sir George Grey is a perfectly well-known personage. Mr. Froude did not discover him. When I first saw Sir George Grey I was eight years old, and I have known him ever since, quite intimately enough to form as good a judgment as anybody of his public character, at all events; and of his private character I am quite sure Mr. Froude can know absolutely nothing, for he is the most inscrutable of men. He is an exceedingly polished man and is an incomparable host in his paradise of an island home, especially when he has his own reasons for wishing to make himself agreeable to a guest. His venerable bearing, the prestige of his early career, his grace and dignity of manner, his impressiveness of silence when he is silent, his golden-mouthed eloquence when he speaks, his haughty seclusion contrasted by his affability when he appears in public, have given him a great measure of personal popularity. He is acknowledged