least in theory, as good as another. What America to-day is, argued these wiseacres, Australia will become to-morrow.
Clearly, this pair of Commissioners from a far-off democratic colony had come to England—"Home," as they affectionately termed it—at a very untoward time. Famine stalked abroad in the land, yet the people turned a deaf ear to the eloquent pair who would fain have charmed them away to the antipodean land of plenty. But the Emigration Commissioners though baffled were not beaten, and the readers of the Sydney journal were assured, by its energetic correspondent, that Mr. Dalley, all undaunted, was "agitating the home counties"; while "Mr. Parkes was moving about in the manufacturing districts."
Perhaps History presents no other record of a mission, undertaken by men of such peculiar fitness for it, that ever failed so utterly. It has been asserted, probably with some slight exaggeration, that Messrs. Parkes and Dalley did not induce a single English family to emigrate to Australia. A friend of Mr. Dalley used to repeat a story which that admirable raconteur was fond of relating on his return to Sydney. He had been dining at a pleasant
