The wide and varied resources of the country, and the ups and downs which men experience, breed a merciless courage which in some of its manifestations is very fine. During my first stay in Melbourne the waiter who attended to my wants at Menzies' Hotel brought up, with something of a dubious air, a scrap of blue paper, on which was written, "Your old friend------." I instructed him to show my visitor in, and a minute later beheld the face of an old companion, a little more grizzled and wrinkled than I had last seen it, but otherwise unchanged. When we had shaken hands and he was seated, I found that he was dressed like a common labourer; and in answer to my inquiry he told me, bravely and brightly, that he had fallen upon evil times. "I should like a glass of champagne, old man," said he when I asked him to refresh himself, "and a square foot will run to enjoy it." We talked away, and he told me of a history of success and failure, and at last he explained the purpose of his visit. He wished to hear the three lectures I was advertised to deliver, and he had come to ask me for a pass. "I shall not disgrace you, old boy," he added, "I have been down on my luck for a couple of years past but I am not going to stay where I am, and _I have kept my dress clothes_." I do not know that I ever saw a finer bit of unconscious courage, and the incident gave me a certain faith in the spirit of the colonies which has never left me. There is a gambling element in it no doubt but the ever present sense of hope is a great and valuable thing. It finds such a place in a new country as it can never have in an old one. The English gentleman who in England had fallen to be a mere hewer of wood and drawer of water would never have "kept his dress clothes." He would have known that he was permanendy under, but here the British pluck had rational hope of recovery, and on that rational hope survived and even flourished.
And this leads me back to that question of the self-confidence of the Australian-born colonial with which I started. Hope looks so sure, that what Australia wants and has not it seems self-evident in a little while she will have. And so she might if she would go the right way for it, and instead of keeping three-quarters of her sparse inhabitants in towns, would take the work that lies before her nose and subdue the land and replenish it; and instead of shutting the gates deliberately on rival labour, would draw the stranger to her coasts and pour population on vast tracts of land which now lie barren and unproductive, but only wait for the hand of man to break into beauty and yield riches.