How ‘An Australian Cynic’ can say that there is ‘not a tittle of evidence that a single colonist of New South Wales, native or immigrant, has ever harboured a thought of treason’ I am at a loss to conceive. I know little or nothing of what has been going on lately in New South Wales. But it is not a year since a Roman Catholic chaplain of one of the convict establishments had to be dismissed for preaching Fenianism to the prisoners; to say nothing of the original statement made by O’Farrell himself, which it is as difficult to disprove as to prove. I doubt if the absurdities and extravagances of the Treason-Felony Act are worth the pains ‘An Australian Cynic’ has taken to criticize them. The Judges are not likely to allow the Act to be enforced in an improper manner. Its intention is obvious enough, and the blunders will probably prove to be harmless surplusage. Nobody expects much legislative wisdom from a House constituted as the Lower House of New South Wales is. Nor is the Upper House likely to be much better, since it consists, not of members chosen by a superior constituency, like the Victorian Upper House, but of nominees ostensibly of the Governor, but in reality of successive administrations. Nor ought we at home to be too ready to ridicule their legislation, when we recollect that it is we who are responsible for their Constitution. It was we who at a time of transition and excitement in Australia allowed our Parliament and Ministers to pitchfork out to New South Wales a rash, ill-considered scheme, from which, in the opinion of many, the colony has been suffering ever since.
‘An Australian Cynic’ complains of the newspapers and the public at Sydney for not being more interested about a murder of five people which has been committed in the interior. Does he mean to imply that the police are supine in the matter, and need stimulus, or that the existing law is inadequate to meet the case? If not, why ought such a topic to be enlarged upon? Ought all bloodshed to provoke an amount of discussion exactly in proportion to the number of lives lost? Murder, unfortunately, is too old and too common a crime not to have been provided against as far as it is possible to do so. Fenianism, when it assumes the form of a conspiracy for the wholesale assassination of the most prominent persons in the State, is a new crime and requires new precautions. I suppose there must be a sense (since so many hold to the dogma) in which all men may be said to be equal, though I must confess I never could discover any—never yet having seen such a phenomenon as even two men who could in any sense of the word be called equal. But the common sense of all communities acknowledges that the lives of some persons are (to take the lowest ground) infinitely more valuable to the State than those of others, and when for this reason exposed to special danger they require to be specially protected.
Political assassination is a new crime in England in our days. But if we go back to the days of Queen Elizabeth, we may be reminded of conspiracies not unlike the worst manifestations of Fenianism, which were met by our ancestors in a spirit not altogether unlike that which has just been shown by their descendants in Australia.
XVII.
LOYALTY AND CYNICISM.
Personally I do plead guilty to holding the belief or doctrine to hold which you call ‘veiled cynicism.’ But I beg you will not suppose that I am asserting that the late demonstration of the Australians necessarily implied that they hold it, or that their loyalty as a people was not wider and more comprehensive than any particular phase of it which may specially present itself to me or to any one person. In the following remarks I shall speak only in my own defence, and try to lift my ‘veil,’ so that it may be seen whether what is behind is, or is not, cynicism.
I accept the definition of cynicism which you give in your first paragraph. But I will add another, and a strictly etymological one. A cynic is a man who treats a deep-seated reasonable belief, or a fair argument, in a dog-like manner, as if it were a mere dog’s howl; one who vouchsafes only a kick or an imprecation to what he ought to listen to with patience, and answer (if he disagrees) with argument. A sham belief and an utterly worthless argument ought to get only kicks and imprecations; to treat them otherwise would be priggishness. It is a critic’s business and difficulty to discover the right path between these two pitfalls. With all respect to the Spectator, I venture to express my opinion that not only in its recent article on the New South Wales Treason-Felony Act, but again and again in speaking of matters pertaining to the Crown and its relation to the people, it has fallen into the pitfall of cynicism, and (unwittingly, of course) written what has jarred painfully on the convictions of not a few amongst its readers.
To define these convictions adequately in general terms is almost impossible. I do not know how to do so without entering upon theological questions too deep for me, and which I would rather have avoided. I do not know how better to express my own conviction than by saying that I do in a very real sense believe in the ‘divine right of kings;’ not of course in the sense of the High Church party of the seventeenth century; more nearly, perhaps, in that of the eminently national and protestant party, which in the latter part of the sixteenth century relied upon the doctrine as the truest and strongest bulwark against Rome and Spain. I believe in the institution of hereditary monarchy as a divine idea, imparted to mankind, and answering to true and healthy instincts implanted in them—like in kind, if differing in degree, to the institution of a priesthood or clergy. Nations may reject it if they please. In so doing they are simply rejecting a proffered blessing, just as all of us are rejecting blessings every day. The non-juring Bishops and their followers brought discredit on the doctrine by their unphilosophical perversion of it. They forgot that a dynasty, like an individual Church, may become so degraded by the unworthiness of its members as to receive its condemnation, as did the dynasties of Saul and of Ahab.
The history of Europe from the middle ages to the present time teems with instances of intense attachment to hereditary, or quasi-hereditary, monarchy, often breaking out in the strangest and most unaccountable way, and in the teeth of the bitterest tyranny. For instance, it would be hard, even in the thirteenth century, to find a monarch who had inflicted more suffering and bloodshed on his subjects than Frederick Barbarossa inflicted on the Lombards. He was of a different race, too, and spoke a different language. Yet when his power had been broken under the walls of Alessandria, and he found himself face to face with a mass of enemies from whom escape was impossible, and whom to attack was certain defeat, he could calmly pitch his camp in the presence of their armed hosts, in the confidence (which the event justified) that in spite of all they would still acknowledge him as their Sovereign, and that his life and liberty were safe in their hands.[17]