Pisistratus.—"And this land has become the heritage of our people! Methinks I see, as I gaze around, the scheme of the All-beneficent Father disentangling itself clear through the troubled history of mankind. How mysteriously, while Europe rears its populations and fulfils its civilizing mission, these realms have been concealed from its eyes,—divulged to us just as civilization needs the solution to its problems; a vent for feverish energies, baffled in the crowd; offering bread to the famished, hope to the desperate; in very truth enabling the 'New World to redress the balance of the Old.' Here, what a Latium for the wandering spirits,—
"'On various seas by various tempests tossed.'
"Here, the actual AEneid passes before our eyes. From the huts of the exiles scattered over this hardier Italy, who cannot see in the future
"'A race from whence new Alban sires shall come,
And the long glories of a future Rome'?"
Vivian (mournfully).—"Is it from the outcasts of the work-house, the prison, and the transport-ship that a second Rome is to arise?"
Pisistratus.—"There is something in this new soil—in the labor it calls forth, in the hope it inspires, in the sense of property, which I take to be the core of social morals—that expedites the work of redemption with marvellous rapidity. Take them altogether, whatever their origin, or whatever brought them hither, they are a fine, manly, frank-hearted race, these colonists now!—rude, not mean, especially in the Bush; and, I suspect, will ultimately become as gallant and honest a population as that now springing up in South Australia, from which convicts are excluded,—and happily excluded,—for the distinction will sharpen emulation. As to the rest, and in direct answer to your question, I fancy even the emancipist part of our population every whit as respectable as the mongrel robbers under Romulus."
Vivian.—"But were they not soldiers,—I mean the first Romans?"
Pisistratus.—"My dear cousin, we are in advance of those grim outcasts if we can get lands, houses, and wives (though the last is difficult, and it is well that we have no white Sabines in the neighborhood) without that same soldiering which was the necessity of their existence."
Vivian (after a pause).—"I have written to my father, and to yours more fully,—stating in the one letter my wish, in the other trying to explain the feelings from which it springs."
Pisistratus.—"Are the letters gone?"