Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/77

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SIR HENRY PARKES IN ENGLAND
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crats of England, while the sympathies of the aristocracy are undisguisedly offered to the rebellious Southerners. And it is remarkable how little original thought appears to be expended on this fratricidal war. Liberal journalists and popular lecturers repeat each other without end; but no one thinks it worth his while to investigate the causes of the quarrel with earnestness, and place the whole case before the public in the light which the history of the last five-and-twenty years might throw upon it."

Looking at the faded old colonial newspaper on which these words appear, how vividly one realises that there was something more than mere empty compliment in the felicitous phrases of the Mayor of New York, who, in congratulating the Queen on her Jubilee, recalled the fact that it was largely through the personal influence of herself and the Prince Consort that England had not thrown herself into this great struggle on the side of the South. One must also pay a tribute to the masculine common-sense of Sir Henry Parkes, who not only declined to go with the stream, but did not suffer his judgment to be distorted by the two Englishmen, for whom, in literature and politics, he then felt supreme admiration—I allude to Thomas Carlyle and Mr.