The Height of Impudence.—Stopping a railway train to ask the Guard what o'clock it is.
THE GOLDEN AGE COMING.
(From the Sydney Morning Herald, 25th December, 1861.)
This colony is a remarkable colony. The ancient gentleman (we forget his name, and there isn't a Lemprière nearer than Cochin China), who turned everything he touched to gold, must have called here on his way to Hades. Gold, gold, nothing but gold. Let us calmly review what Australia has done since Christmas, 1851.
Although she has separated from the mother country, it was not in anger, but only as a rich child's establishment is naturally apart from that of poor parents. We did not neglect Old England; we paid off her national debt, and we deposited in the hands of trustees (the Emperor Jullien I., King Abbott-Lawrence, and Sultan Abd-el-Kadr) a sufficient sum to render taxes in England unnecessary for two hundred years. Having thus done our duty as a child, we leave the old lady to amuse herself her own way. But we shall not forget her, and each Christmas we shall delight in presenting her with a new Fleet, a box of palaces, or some other tribute of affection.
We laid down the Cape and Algiers Railway, as also that from Gibraltar to St. Petersburgh, and the eighty thousand miles of line in India. We cut through the Isthmuses of Suez and Panama, and lengthened the grand canal of Venice to the Black Sea.
We bought up all the opera singers in the world at their own price (the largest drain our exchequer has known), and we founded the Australian Opera. Meyerbeer received 100,000l. for his opening work—Le Kangaroo, and the "Hopping Chorus" is worth the money.
We arranged a financial system for ourselves, the leading feature of which was, that there should be no fractions, no change, no bargaining (this nearly drove the women out of the colony), and no tick. The lowest price of anything was to be a guinea.
We have an electric telegraph communication between our new capital, Aureopolis, and every other metropolis in the world. Painful as it is to hear the needy creatures of other continents squabbling about miserable loans and wretched subsidies, when, perhaps, the whole sum at issue is not fifty millions, and disagreeable as it must be to regard one's acquaintance as paupers wrangling over halfpence, the lessons are not without instruction.
Such are some of the achievements of Australia. But she is not all-powerful. We have a failure to record. All her proffered treasures could not buy one of the writers in the Comic Almanack. Yet it must be done. Gird up thy loins, young nation! The rest were trifles, but here is a task worthy of thee. Thy mines of wealth against the mines of wit; for one of those priceless men thou must have. To the Diggings! to the Diggings!