Personally, I have scant sympathy and no admiration for the fat-fingered publican and his brother (by trade ties) the brewer.
The same objection was taken to the coolie as is taken to the Chinaman—viz., he is saving and economic. And if good citizenship is merely a matter of spending money with the beer vendor—plainly a false and untenable premise—then was the Kanaka of all "desirables" the most to be desired. All he got out of the production of a ton of sugar, valued at £20, roughly, was 30/-, and at that cost he created a profitable avenue of energy for the white worker. He never took a shilling back to his island.
The American is getting over "the dignity of labour" trouble by machinery. The Australian hasn't the brains to do likewise, nor is he a workman as reliable as a mechanical contrivance, because the latter doesn't get drunk or strike on any pretext.
Chapter VI.
THE AUSTRALIAN IN SOCIETY.
There is no work for the phrase noblesse oblige to do in Australia. The nearest one can get to it is noveau riche. For in Australia the parvenu is paramount.
The people have no ancestry to boast of; all its nastiness is near the surface. If it isn't the beer pump half the time I am very much mistaken.
For the other half history is not silent. Arthur Gayle tells of it in the "Bulletin's" History of Botany Bay. Not so very long ago he wrote: "We are still ridden by the influence and ruled by the lineal descendants of the squalid officialdom of the grisly past. The whistle of the lash and the clank of the convict's chain are still distinctly heard though fifty years have passed away since transportation ceased. The reason is, in a word, that the men of the class that came into existence under the Imperial regime made the most of their time. They founded family fortunes and became territorial magnates, the lords of the soil...."
But it was not only "squalid officialdom" that made the most of its time. Those comprising the other class were also "in the van of circumstance."
"Be thou therefore in the van of circumstances,
Yea, seize the arrow's barb."—Keats.