The salmon madness will at least have two results: the catalogue of indigenous birds will be reduced to a blank sheet, for every wretched Tasmanian bird that never saw a salmon egg in all its life is shot down and nailed to a post for fear it should eat the ova; and the British wasp will be acclimatized in the southern hemisphere. One is known to have arrived in the last box of ova, and to have survived with apparent cheerfulness his 100 days in ice. Happy fellow, to cross the line in so cool a fashion!

The chief drawbacks to Tasmanian picnics and excursions are the snakes, which are as numerous throughout the island as they are round Sydney. One of the convicts in a letter home once wrote: " Parrots is as thick as crows, and snakes is very bad, fourteen to sixteen feet long;" but in sober truth the snakes are chiefly small.

The wonderful "snake stories" that in the colonial papers take the place of the English "triple birth" and "gigantic gooseberry" are all written in vacation time by the students at Melbourne University; but a true one that I heard in Hobarton is too good to be lost. The Chief Justice of the island, who in his leisure time is an amateur naturalist, and collects specimens for European collections in his walks, told me that it was his practice after killing a snake, to carry it into Hobarton tied to a stick by a double lashing. A few days before my visit, on entering his hall, where an hour before he had hung his stick with a rare snake in readiness for the Government naturalist, he found to his horror that the viper had been only scotched, and that he had made use of his regained life to free himself from the string which confined his head and neck. He was still tied by the tail, so he was swinging to and fro, or "squirming around," as some Americans would say, with open mouth and protruded tongue. When lassoing with a piece of twine had been tried in vain, my friend fetched a gun, and succeeded in killing the snake and much damaging the stone-work of his vestibule.

After a week's sojourn in the neighbourhood of Hobarton, I again crossed the island, but this time by a night of piercing moonlight such as can be witnessed only in the dry air of the far south. High in the heavens, and opposite the moon, was the solemn constellation of the Southern Cross, sharply re

lieved upon the pitchy background of the Magellanic clouds, while the weird-tinted stars which vary the night-sky of the southern hemisphere stood out from the blue firmament else where. The next day I was again in Melbourne.

CHAPTER XI.

CONFEDERATION.

MELBOURNE is unusually gay; for at a shapely palace in the centre of the city the second great Intercolonial Exhibition is being held, and, as its last days are drawing to their close, fifty thousand people-a great number for the colonies-visit the building every week. There are exhibitors from each of our seven southern colonies, and from French New Caledonia, Netherlandish India, and the Mauritius. It is strange to remember now that in the colonization both of New Zealand and of Australia, we were the successful rivals of the French only after having been behind them in awakening to the advisability of an occupation of those countries. In the case of New Zealand, the French fleet was anticipated three several times by the forethought and decision of our naval officers on the station; and in the case of Australia, the whole south coast was actually named “La Terre Napoléon," and surveyed for colonization by Captain Baudin in 1800. New Caledonia, on the other hand, was named and occupied by ourselves, and afterwards abandoned to the French.

The present remarkable exhibition of the products of the Australias, coming just at the time when the border customs between Victoria and New South Wales have been abolished by agreement, and when all seems to point to the formation of a customs union between the colonies, leads men to look still further forward, and to expect confederation. It is worthy of notice at this conjuncture that the Australian Protectionists, as a rule, refuse to be protected against their immediate neighbours, just as those of America protect the manufactures of the Union rather than of single States. They tell us that

they can point, with regard to Europe, to pauper labour, but that they have no case as against the sister colonies; they wish, they say, to obtain a wide market for the sale of the produce of each colony: the nationality they would create is to be Australian, not provincial.

Already there is postal union, and a partial customs union, and confederation itself, however distant in fact, has been very lately brought about in the spirit by the efforts of the London press, one well-known paper having three times in a single article called the Governor of New South Wales by the sounding title of "Governor-General of the Australasian Colonies," to which he has, of course, not the faintest claim.

There are many difficulties in the way of confederation. The leading merchants and squatters of Victoria are in favour of it; but not so those of the poorer or less populous colonies, where there is much fear of being swamped. The costliness of the federal government of New Zealand is a warning against over hasty confederation. Victoria, too, would probably insist upon the exclusion of West Australia, on account of her convict population. The continental theory is undreamt of by Australians, ɔwing to their having always been inhabitants of comparatively small States, and not, like dwellers in the organized territories of America, potentially citizens of a vast and homogeneous empire.

The choice of capital will, here as in Canada, be a matter of peculiar difficulty. It is to be hoped by all lovers of freedom that some hitherto unknown village will be selected. There is in all great cities a strong tendency to Imperialism. Bad pavement, much noise, narrow lanes, blockaded streets, all these things are ill dealt with by free government, we are told. Englishmen who have been in Paris, Americans who know St. Petersburg, forgetting that without the Emperor the Préfet is impossible, cry out that London, that New York, in their turn need a Haussmann. In this tendency lies a terrible danger to free States-a danger avoided, however, or greatly lessened, by the seat of the Legislature being placed, as in Canada and the United States, far away from the great cities. Were Melbourne to become the seat of government, nothing could prevent the distant colonies from increasing the already gigantic power of that city by choosing her merchants as their representatives.

The bearing of confederation upon Imperial interests is a more simple matter. Although union will tend to the earlier independence of the colonies, yet, if federated, they are more likely to be a valuable ally than they could be if remaining so many separate countries. They would also be a stronger enemy; but distance will make all their wars naval, and a strong fleet would be more valuable to us as a friend than dangerous as an enemy, unless in the case of a coalition against us, in which it would probably not be the interest of Australia to join.

From the colonial point of view, federation would tend to secure to the Australians better general and local government than they possess at present. It is absurd to expect that colonial governors should be upon good terms with their charges when we shift men every four years-say from Demerara to New South Wales, or from Jamaica to Victoria. The unhappy governor loses half a year in moving to his post, and a couple of years in coming to understand the circumstances of his new province, and then settles down to be successful in the ruling of educated whites under democratic institutions only if he can entirely throw aside the whole of his experience, derived as it will probably have been from the despotic sway over blacks. We never can have a set of colonial governors fit for Australia until the Australian governments are made a distinct service, and entirely separated from those of the West Indies, of Africa, and Hong Kong.

Besides improving the government, confederation would lend to every colonist the dignity derived from citizenship of a great country-a point the importance of which will not be contested by any one who has been in America since the war.

It is not easy to resist the conclusion that confederation is in every way desirable. If it leads to independence, we must say to the Australians what Houmai ta Whiti said in his great speech to the progenitors of the Maori race when they were quitting Hawaiki: "Depart, and dwell in peace; let there be no quarrelling amongst you, but build up a great people."