I have a certain reason for using that phrase. I had just come from a French colony which, in the national sense, could only be described as a house divided against itself. There was the conflict between bond and free, between French and English, Australians, Germans, Jews, naturalised foreigners, and those who were still wondering which side of the international fence it would pay them best to sit on, but in the pleasant country about Seppeltsfield I found all the elements of international unity and none of discord.
Within that eight-mile radius there was an epitome of Europe. In one township you might have closed your eyes for a moment of forgetfulness, opened them again and seen yourself in a German town not very far from the banks of the Rhine. Having a little German at my disposal, I accepted the illusion and found myself drinking good lager beer out of the same old glasses that I had drunk it ten years before in the Fatherland, and listening to just the same quaintly turned conversation that I had listened to and joined in during a walking tour down the Valley of the Weser and over the Hartz Mountains. The houses were built in the same way, the same beer was drunk to the same toasts and with the same old-world choruses, and I and the Accidental American played a game for the championship of England and America on just such a kegel-bahn as you could find behind any country hotel in Germany. I won because I didn’t laugh quite as much as my opponent did.
At the end of another drive I found myself in France listening to the soft speech of the Côte d’Or and drinking the wine of the country which might have been sent that day by telegraph. A few miles farther on we were in Ireland. I am not prepared to say that the mountain dew was actually distilled on Irish hillsides, but it was very like the original brew, and the brogue was as rich and pure as any that you would hear between Dublin and Dingle Bay.
Men and women of many nationalities were there, founding their own fortunes and helping to found those of an Empire of To-morrow, but everywhere you heard the English speech, and recognised the self-restraint and the quiet orderly manners of the Anglo-Saxon, for though these colonists had come from many lands and had known many different governments they had all come under the influence of that magical power which the Anglo-Saxon alone seems to possess, the power of making all men his fellow-citizens and friends if he can once get them on his own land and under his own flag. In Europe these people would have been enemies, actual or potential; in their own colonies they would have been discontented and home-sick, longing only for the day of their return with a trifling competence; here they were just neighbours working out their destinies side by side on a soil that was common to all, and under a rule which is perhaps the most perfect that the wit of man has yet devised for the welding together of conflicting human interests. If I could only have brought my good friend the Director of the Administration of New Caledonia to Seppeltsfield, and taken him for a six days’ driving tour through that cosmopolitan collection of townships, I think he would have understood more completely than he did what I meant when I said to him on the verandah of his house in Noumea the day before I sailed:
“The Latin nations have colonies, but they have not yet learnt how to colonise.”
A Vineyard at Seppeltsfield, South Australia.
I left South Australia with a regret that was fully equalled by the pleasure with which I had taken leave of Noumea, and that is saying a good deal. From Port Adelaide we trundled round the coast in an exaggerated edition of the old steam-roller that had brought us across the Pacific. The only interesting event on the six days’ passage was a scare which the Accidental American innocently raised by developing a sore throat and a little swelling of the glands of the neck. Of course the rumour that he had brought the plague from Sydney went like wildfire through the ship, and I, as his nurse, was looked upon with undisguised suspicion. When I brought him up for a stroll on deck just before we reached Albany our fellow-passengers very kindly gave us half the deck to ourselves. I had tried to explain that the period of incubation was twelve days at the outside, and that hence, as we were nearly a month out from Sydney, we could no more have brought the plague from Port Jackson than we could have done from San Francisco; but it was no good, and when the sanitary officers came on board at Freemantle with the news that the dreaded visitor had got there before us, I think nine-tenths of the passengers would have been well content to see us walked off to quarantine.
In the end the doctor passed us without a stain upon our sanitary character, and our baggage was put into a lighter, tightly sealed up and battened down, and then fumigated. One of our lady-passengers had a pet canary in a cage and there was much discussion as to what should be done with it. Its constitution would not stand fumigation, and yet the law said that nothing was to go into the colony without either medical examination or disinfection. I presume the Doctor must have compromised either with his conscience or with the lady, for the last I saw of the suspected bird was on the quay, where it was chirping a merry defiance of sanitary regulations, on the top of a truck load of baggage which had neither been inspected nor disinfected.