and they have thriven there, like the gorse, the sparrow, the rabbit, and so many other pests which sentimental colonists have introduced in order to remind them of “home.” But new ideas also have been imported, and they find a rich soil in the free, unconventional, enterprising colonial mind. Men and women are asking the same questions there as in London and New York.
The general drift or implication of these questions obsessed me daily during the slow traverse of the Southern Ocean. Day after day the great liner visibly rounded this vast ball of metal which we call our earth; and to me there is no more impressive symbol than this of the power and the future of man. Some complain that at sea they feel the earth and man and man’s concerns made trivial by the great fires which blaze through the darker sky. But largeness is not greatness, and a vast prairie in some inaccessible region does not make less precious the little plot of earth at your door that you can make beautiful. Your predominant feeling, when you round the globe and see with your own eye its limitations, is one of power. This sphere, you feel, is the principality of man; and there never was a power so despotic and far-reaching as the power of a united race would be. You feel as if the earth could be embraced in the arms of a giant, and humanity is the giant. If men were agreed in their designs, the earth would be as clay in the hand of the potter. It would prove as passive and tractable as the child’s ball of plasticine
