"Professor Gilbert Murray."
"Well, he is an Australian."
It was a specious argument, for one swallow does not make a summer. But the truth—that Australasia produces at a high rate mental as well as physical energy—could have been proved categorically.
The Australian is not only a pioneer wrestling with the wilderness. He is a creature of restless mental energy, keenly (perhaps with something of a spirit of vanity) eager to keep in the current of world-thought, following closely not only his own politics but also British and international politics; a good patron of the arts; a fertile producer and exporter of poetasters, minor philosophers, scientists, writers, and artists. There is nothing that the Anzac, nationally, resents more than to be regarded as a mere grower of wool and wheat, a hewer of wood and digger of minerals. He aspires to share in all the things of life, to have ranches and cathedrals, books and sheep. Above all, perhaps, he has a passion for la haute politique.
All this was in the blood. The "wild strain" was not only of men who found in the old country a physical environment too narrow. It was partly of men who desired a wider mental horizon. Some very strange minor elements would show out in a detailed analysis of early Australasian immigration—disciples of Fourier who gave up great possessions in England to seek an idealistic Communism in the Antipodes: recluse bookworms who thought they could coil closer to their volumes in primitive solitudes. But one element was strong—the political and economic doctrinaire; and the conditions of the new country encouraged the growth of this element particularly, so that Australia soon won quite a fame for political inventions (e.g., the "Australian Ballot" and the "Torrens Land Title"). But the general growth of what may be termed a "thinking" class was encouraged by the very isolation which, it would seem at first thought, should have an opposite effect. Whilst other young countries lost to older and greater centres of population their young ambitious men, Australasia's antipodean position preserved her from the full extent of the drain of that mental law of gravity which makes the big populations attract the men who aspire to work with their brains more than with their hands. Australasia will always be claiming attention not only as a producer of wheat, wool and well-knit men, but also of ideas.
The ideas of this young nation of the British, nurtured in the Australasian environment, would strike the pre-war England of five years ago as naively reactionary. The Anzac, faced by natural elements which are inexorably stern to folly, to weakness, to indecision, but which are generously responsive to capable and dominating energy, had become more resourceful, more resolute, more cruel, more impatient than his British cousin. The men who followed the drum of Drake were much akin to the Australasian of to-day.
Australian Imperialism, in truth, must have had for some years past a fussy air to the cooler and calmer minds of England; though the good sense and good humour of the Mother Country rarely allowed this to be seen. When New South Wales insisted on lending a hand in the little Soudan War she was not snubbed. Nor was Victoria, pressing at the same time a still more unnecessary naval contingent. In the South African War Australian eagerness to take a part was more than generously recognised, and when Australia next insisted on giving help also in the suppression of the Boxer Rising, room was patiently found for her naval contingent.
About this here is an illustrative story, which is welcomed as "quite Australian." When the Australian Gunboat "Protector" arrived in Chinese waters the British admiral went on board to pay his compliments and was not stinting in praise of Australian military and naval prowess. Thereupon the Australian band is said to have struck up with a tune from "The Belle of New York:" "Of course you can never be quite like us."
It is perhaps a true story; certainly possible. There is a touch of gay impudence in the Australian character which an ex-Governor confessed he loved "because it was so young."