LITMIR.BIZ

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      CHAPTER II.

      SIR HENRY PARKES IN ENGLAND.

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      If, as I venture to think, an Imperial lesson may be learned from the Colonial public career of Lord Sherbrooke, so too may we perhaps learn something from the "impressions of England" formed during a prolonged visit by the present Prime Minister of New South Wales.

      It is always good "to see ourselves as others see us"; but this is especially the case, it seems to me, with the members of so vast and so widely divided an Empire as ours.

      There was never a time when a certain class of successful colonist did not come "Home"—as he fondly calls the mother-country—to fashionably flicker out his latter days. "A good deal of London flesh," once said Sir Archibald Michie, "is Australian grass." But a very different type of colonist, especially within the last few years, has been in the habit of coming to England, as a bird of passage ​merely, always regarding his particular Colony as his real "home." The recent Colonial Exhibition at South Kensington brought a good number of such visitors to England. Still more important from a political point of view was the subsequent assembling of the Colonial Conference under Sir Henry Holland, now Lord Knutsford. Then we had in London a number of prominent Colonial public men, each of whom regarded his individual colony as his true sphere of public labour, and none of whom desired to be merged in the ordinary ruck of the purely British population. From an Imperial point of view, the opinions that these men brought to Downing Street, and still more those that they carried back from that arcanum, must be regarded as of the very first importance. Still, after mature consideration, I have chosen rather to take my sketch of the "Australian in England" from a period sufficiently remote to give the effect of perspective.

      Over a quarter of a century ago a pair of very remarkable Australian colonists visited England in the capacity of Emigration Commissioners. Had they been ordinary individuals they would doubtless have been styled Emigration agents, but they were prominent politicians; and prominent politicians, ​even in the most democratic communities, are wont to bestow upon themselves high-sounding titles, just as in England they raise one another to the Peerage. These two gentlemen were Mr.—now Sir—Henry Parkes, G.C.M.G., the present veteran Prime Minister of New South Wales, and the late Right Hon. William Bede Dalley—then plain Mr. Dalley, but who was to become the first Australian Member of the Privy Council—an unique distinction bestowed upon him for sending a Colonial contingent to the support of the British troops in the Soudan.

During the visit of Mr. Parkes and Mr. Dalley to England, from the autumn of 1861 to the summer of 1862, the former, it seems, contributed a slender series of monthly letters to the columns of the Sydney Morning Herald,^[1] Quite apart from any mere literary merit, these letters have a distinct sociological value as a record of the fresh impressions made on the mind of a colonial politician of exceptional ability, on his return, after an absence of twenty years, to his native land. It is perhaps due to the English reader that a few preliminary remarks should be made concerning the ​personality of their Australian visitor and critic. I believe that Sir Henry Parkes is one of that small band of public men at the Antipodes who would have made not merely an evanescent mark in the House of Commons, but who, in time of trial or at a national crisis, might have left a name in the history of his country. I would here remark that Mr. Froude's brilliantly written and otherwise deservedly popular Oceana, to my mind, conveys a very false impression as to the worth and relative importance of Colonial public men. Mr. Froude professes to write merely of the men with whom he actually came in contact, and as he was only some six weeks all told on the vast Island-Continent, he seems to have decided, not without wisdom, to glean his information from the Viceroys, and the one or two chief politicians in office. Mr. Dalley, who at this time was in the throes of sending the Soudan contingent, naturally appeared a much more important figure to Mr. Froude than Sir Henry Parkes, who was in the cold shade of unpopular opposition. Similarly in Victoria, Mr. Froude has much to say about the mere passing politicians of the hour, but did not, I believe, meet such a quite exceptional public man as the Hon. ​George Higinbotham, the present Chief-Justice, who is about the last person in the world to offer himself as a subject even to the most celebrated of literary limners. To revert to Sir Henry Parkes, who, I must say, does not receive justice at the hands of Mr. Froude, I repeat that he is, and has been for many years, the most remarkable public figure in New South Wales.

      Born over seventy years ago, of humble parents, under the shadow of Stoneleigh Abbey, Sir Henry Parkes received the rudiments of his education at the village school in the beautiful county of Shakespeare and George Eliot. Like almost all those adventurous spirits who have left their mark in the annals of Australia, he migrated thither in his early manhood. His long public career in New South Wales has been one of ceaseless strife and frequent vicissitude, and it is no secret that as in the case of greater statesmen he has shown himself more capable of controlling the affairs of the community than of managing his own. Quickly emerging from obscurity in the then rising city of Sydney, Parkes proved his strength when there were at least two giants in the land—Robert Lowe, then in the early vigour ​of his splendid intellect, with fame and fortune to achieve, and William Charles Wentworth, whose genius was quite as commanding, and perhaps more statesmanlike. After the return of Lowe to England and the retirement of Wentworth, it was inevitable that a man with the political instincts and combative attributes of Parkes should quickly come to the fore under the free constitution which Wentworth had devised for the colony.

      Standing well over six feet in height, with his large leonine head, and huge shaggy locks now whitened by half a century of strenuous public life. Sir Henry Parkes presents a striking and commanding figure. Far from the fashion-plate type, either in face or form, this Australian, even when seen in the most aristocratic of London drawing-rooms, commands the glances of admiration; for his appearance is neither commonplace nor conventional, and in his manner there is no vestige of vulgarity. The man's mind too, distorted as it has often shown itself by the born politician's insatiable love of power and popularity, is in many

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