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in its aims and predilections. I have only to add that Sir Henry Parkes has been three times Prime Minister of ​New South Wales, and that now, in his seventy-fourth year, he again grasps in his capable hands the helm of public affairs in that great dependency.

      Let us turn now to the old files of the Sydney newspaper, and see what picture this even then distinguished Australian formed of the England of twenty-five years ago, when Lord Palmerston, in his eightieth year, was jauntily governing the country, with Mr. Gladstone as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Mr. Disraeli as leader of the Opposition; when the Prince Consort's sudden death left the Queen a bereaved woman, and removed from the conduct of England's complex affairs a most clear, searching, and unbiassed intellect; when the grand vitality of Lord Brougham was fast flickering out like a spent flame, while Bright and Cobden were in the zenith of their political activity; when Carlyle and Tennyson were on the rising tide of literary pre-eminence—and when our kinsmen of America were rent asunder by the most Titanic Civil War in the annals of mankind.

      The English reader will be good enough to bear in mind that the mission of Messrs. Parkes and ​Dalley to England in 1861–62 was to induce emigrants to select Australia as their future home. Sir Henry's series of letters open with a suggestive reference to the re-awakened antagonism throughout England to democratic institutions, which he regards as a result of the American Civil War.

      "The civil discord in America," he observes, "to an extent unjust to the Americans, has repelled and partly terrified the public mind; and anything that was felt to savour of American democracy, would, I verily believe, be ill-received in any great gathering of the people. The other day I heard a popular lecturer, Mr. George Dawson, discoursing to an audience of at least a thousand persons on the American troubles, and he indulged in some sharp ridicule of universal suffrage, which was received with loud cheers and merriment. The same indifference to what would have elicited a tempest of cheering from any meeting a few years ago, was manifested a night or two back at a great meeting assembled to hear an address from one of your Colonial Commissioners, Mr. Parkes."

      "I suppose," he continues, with the charming insouciance of newspaper anonymity, "Mr. Parkes considered it part of his duty to describe the ​political institutions of the colony, and though his address was well received and frequently applauded, when he explained that the Legislative Assembly was elected by manhood suffrage and the ballot, not a single cheer was heard. Mr. Parkes was addressing at least 5000 people, chiefly Birmingham artisans, who, twenty-two years ago, waged civil war for the five points of the People's Charter."

      Such an experience was well calculated to make the Australian orator, who has always been a Liberal of what Mr. Chamberlain would call "the older and the nobler type," pause and ruminate as to whether there was a widespread Conservative reaction in England. He noted with a politician's eye the currents and variations of public opinion. He observed, for instance, notwithstanding the matchless platform oratory of John Bright, that he received "no such ovation as Russell, Palmerston, Carlisle, Stanley, Lytton, Pakington, who seemed the ascendant stars." Cobden he heard bitterly reviled at a table-d'hôte, and no indignant voice raised in his defence.

      "To my mind," remarks the sturdy Australian, "there is something of glaring injustice towards the men who have sprung from the people's own ranks, ​and of degrading fickleness of opinion in the people themselves in this apparent mistrust and neglect of their old friends." He tries to console himself with the somewhat bitter reflection that "it is not conservative reaction in the old party sense of the term, but the action of a shopocratic conservatism of modern growth, combined with a sprinkling of flunkeyism and a larger leaven of political infidelity." The writer explains that by this last phrase he means that the intelligent English artisans had come to see that "political agitation very inadequately supplies the daily wants of a family, and ministers but little to the enjoyment of life."

      But over and above all these reasons for this strange condition of English public opinion, the Australian shrewdly detected the rooted dislike of Republican America, heightened into hysteria by the spectacle of the terrible internecine conflict. It is certainly a singular illustration of the law of reflex action that, owing to the American Civil War, the two Australian Emigration Commissioners should have been so completely baffled in England. The most influential English journals pointed to the struggle across the Atlantic as the inevitable outcome of a state of things where one man was, at ​least in theory, as good as another. What America to-day is, argued these wiseacres, Australia will become to-morrow.

      Clearly, this pair of Commissioners from a far-off democratic colony had come to England—"Home," as they affectionately termed it—at a very untoward time. Famine stalked abroad in the land, yet the people turned a deaf ear to the eloquent pair who would fain have charmed them away to the antipodean land of plenty. But the Emigration Commissioners though baffled were not beaten, and the readers of the Sydney journal were assured, by its energetic correspondent, that Mr. Dalley, all undaunted, was "agitating the home counties"; while "Mr. Parkes was moving about in the manufacturing districts."

      Perhaps History presents no other record of a mission, undertaken by men of such peculiar fitness for it, that ever failed so utterly. It has been asserted, probably with some slight exaggeration, that Messrs. Parkes and Dalley did not induce a single English family to emigrate to Australia. A friend of Mr. Dalley used to repeat a story which that admirable raconteur was fond of relating on his return to Sydney. He had been dining at a pleasant ​parsonage in Kent—for though of an alien faith, the brilliant Australian-Irishman was partial to the society of that all but extinct type of English cleric who knew his Aristophanes better than his Chrysostom, and who was in reality the clean and decorous Anglican analogue of that historic clerical worldling, the "French Abbé" of the last century. The evening wore merrily on without so much as an allusion to the great emigration question. Suddenly, prompted by a sense of duty, or perhaps by a vision of his colleague's greater success as a fisher of men in the crowded streets of Birmingham and Manchester, Mr. Dalley said:—

      "Cannot you help me in selecting some really deserving fellows in your parish who would be likely to make good colonists?"

      The jovial parson paused, to give the subject thought, toying lightly with his glass of port.

      "I know no one," said he, after a while, "except old Briggs; he is getting on in years, and is very asthmatic, and too fond of malt liquor. I think, perhaps, we could spare him."

      After this Mr. Dalley gave over haunting parsonages as a means of finding "hardy pioneers to people the waste places of his great colony.

​Reverting to Sir Henry Parkes' letters, there seems to me a real historic interest in his conviction that his want of success was the result of the American Civil War. Sir Henry himself held very strong opinions concerning that awful fratricidal quarrel. He took his stand beside John Bright, who, on the question of the dismemberment of the United States, as on that of the separation of Great Britain and Ireland, may be regarded as the true representative of the English-speaking world. Hardly a letter that Sir Henry sent off to Sydney but was filled with expressions of profound sympathy for the North. As we know there was a very large number of high-minded and intelligent Englishmen whose sympathies were just as strong on the other side; the late Mr. A. Beresford Hope,^[2] for instance. We know that after his own country and his Church, the warmest sympathies of that generous, high-minded English gentleman were given to the Southerners, who, in his eyes, were the Transatlantic Cavaliers fighting ​for their rights against the aggressive, narrow-minded, shop-keeping Puritans of New England. Sir Henry Parkes, however, like the rest of us who are at all in earnest, could only see his own side of the question. But his letters throw a vivid sidelight on public opinion in England a quarter of a century ago, which, I think, is not without interest to Englishmen, Americans, and Australians of to-day.

      "It is curious to note," he writes, "the ill-informed and ill-natured remarks on the Civil War in America which are made among the trading classes. If you meet with a manufacturer or a travelling factor in a hotel or railway carriage, he is sure to amuse you with some clumsy and ignorant attempt to ridicule the Americans, and it always turns out that their greatest blunder and greatest crime consists in not sending their cotton to England and in not taking England's manufactures. Until of late I had lived

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