it is no wonder they do not care about undertaking odd jobs.  If their manner is as independent as their character, I am far from blaming them for it, though occasionally one could wish they did not confound civility and servility as being equally degrading to the free and independent elector.  But when you meet the man on equal terms in an omnibus or on other neutral ground, this cause of complaint is removed.  Where he is sure of his equality he makes no attempt to assert it, and the treatment he receives from many parvenu employers is no doubt largely the cause of intrusive assertion of equality towards employers in general.  Politically he is led by the nose, but this is hardly astonishing, since, in nine cases out of ten, his electoral qualifications are a novelty to him.  He carries his politics in his pocket, or what the penny papers tell him are his pockets; or, if he rises above selfish considerations he is taken in by the bunkum of his self-styled friends.  But in what country are the free and independent electors wiser?  Happily for Australia, his Radicalism rarely lasts long, if he is worth his salt.  He becomes in a few years one of the propertied class, has leisure to learn something of the conditions under which property is best preserved and added to, and thus—­according to the admission of the leading Radical paper—­Conservatism is constantly encroaching on the ranks of Liberalism.  Except under very rare circumstances poverty in Australia may fairly be considered a reproach.  Every man has it in his power to earn a comfortable living; and if after he has been some time in the colonies the working-man does not become one of the capitalists his organs inveigh against, he has only himself to blame.

Of the three sections into which the working-class may be divided—­old chums, new chums, and colonials—­the first-named are, on the whole, the best.  For the most part they began life with a superabundance of animal spirits, and a love of adventure, which have been toned down by a practical experience of the hardships they dreamed of.  They certainly drink most and swear most of the three sections, but with all their failings there are few men who can do a harder day’s work than they.  Barring pure misfortune, there is always some good reason for their still remaining in the class they sprang from.  Though this is not always strictly true, since a good many of them began life higher up in the world than they are now.  Still I prefer them to the pepper-and-salt mixture which has been sent out under that happy-go-lucky process—­free immigration.  When the colonies were so badly in want of population, they could not stop to pick and choose.  Hence a large influx of loafers, men who, without any positive vice, will do anything rather than a hard day’s work, and who come out under the impression that gold is to be picked up in the streets of Melbourne.  Under the name of ‘the unemployed’ they are a constant source of worry to the Government, whom they consider bound to give them something light and easy, with 7s. 6d. or 8s. a day, and give rise abroad to the utterly false impression that there am times when it is hard for an industrious man to get work in Australia.  Of course many of our immigrants have become first-rate workmen, but such men soon rise in the social scale.