old Free-trader, "why you exclude English products—a strange way for the offspring to behave to the mother country."
"You overlook," said the colonist, "that under the present British system of one-sided free-trade, we, the offspring, are simply placed on the same footing as the most hostile of foreign states. It is you who do not show towards us those feelings of partiality which, in individuals, are considered worthy of all praise as being parental, and according to the instincts of nature."
It must already have struck the English reader that, with all the talk about Australian democracy, the number of public men in the colonies with "handles" to their names is somewhat portentous. Yet any colonist who has arrived at middle age can remember the creation of the entire batch of K. C. M. G.'s, and other colonial knights, who, it must be confessed, have taken very kindly to the distinctive appellation of "Sir." It is true that at first when the order of St. Michael and St. George, originally intended, according to Sir George Grey, for "Maltese and Italians," was relegated to "distinguished colonists," there was a feeling against it, as though, like some kinds of merchandise, it was of an inferior
