Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/172

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140
AUSTRALIA AND THE EMPIRE

his mother an actress, who was, I believe, of Jewish descent. But he wrote a very powerful novel, and so is at once claimed, first by Mr. Hogan and then by Sir C. Gavan Duffy, as a "fellow-countryman." Neither space nor patience, however, is sufficiently elastic to permit one to expose these curiously suggestive myths which have been invented, I suppose, to support Mr. Gladstone's Home-Rule proposals.

Let us, however, turn for a while to the genuine annals of Australia, when I think we shall be at once struck with the historic achievements of the Anglo-Irish colonists, whose political and intellectual ascendency reads simply like a brilliant colonial addendum to Mr. Fronde's English in Ireland. Sir C. Gavan Duffy eulogistically refers to William Charles Wentworth, under his old and familiar sobriquet of "the Australian Patriot." Without altogether indorsing Dr. Johnson's familiar definition of patriotism, one can only say that the title fails to describe the supreme achievement of Wentworth, whose real place in our colonial annals is that of the political father of free Australasia. It would take a goodly volume, and one well deserving the reverent labours of a painstaking and patriotic pen, to give an adequate account of