'stunted as the feet of a Chinese dame,' and, says our cruel critic, 'despite their time-honoured boast of absolute freedom, many of our fathers actually did not know what freedom was till they came hither'! How the young cockerel crows! And how we crowed too when the down was on our lips, and we felt that our certain mission was to set the whole world straight. In those days 'Young England' was as fierce and as self-confident as 'Young Australia' is in these, and possibly felt as much contempt for the old fogeys who had made England arbitress of Europe, and first in arts and arms."
Point by point does the old colonist meet and confute the youth. How, he wants to know, can the old decaying generation, with its "hothouse of falsity," have possibly produced such brilliant successors? "The usual fruits of decay," he remarks, with a knowledge evidently not merely theoretical, "are mushrooms, or more frequently poisonous fungi. In which of these somewhat low organisms shall we class our coming rulers?"
The writer clearly shows that he has been ruffled, but his reproof is dignified, not petulant. Young Australia had pointed with youthful conceit, rather
