come when wealth and riches and conquests had upheaped wrongs, upon the heads of the wrongers, the cross had triumphed over the hammer when the fierce freedom of the North had worn itself out in selfish foray; the shaven-pated priest had come to teach patience as God-given when a robber-caste grew up to whom it seemed wise to uproot the old ideas from the mind of the people whose spent courage it robbed.  Alas, for the days when it was not righteous to submit to wrong nor wicked to strike tyranny to the ground, when one met it, no matter where!  Alas, for the men of the Past and the women, their faith and their courage and their virtue and their gods, the hearts large to feel and the brains prompt to think and the arms strong to do, the bare feet that followed the plough and trod in the winepress of God and the brown hands that milked cows and tore kings from their thrones by their beard!  They were gone and a feebler people spoke their tongue and bore their name, a people that bent its back to the rod and bared its head to the cunning and did not rise as one man when in its midst a baby was murdered while all around a helpless kinsfolk were being robbed and wronged.

“For the past, who would not choose it?  Who would not, if they could, drop civilisation from them as one shakes off a horrid nightmare at the dawning of the day?  Who would not be again a drover of cattle, a follower of the plough, a milker of cows, a spinner of wool-yarn by the fireside, to be, as well, strong and fierce and daring, slave to none and fearing none, ignorant alike of all the wisdom and all the woes of this hateful life that is?

“For only one moment of the past if the whole past could not be!  Only to be free for a moment if the rest were impossible!  Only to lose one’s hair and bare one’s feet and girdle again the single garment round one’s waist and to be filled with the frenzy that may madden still as it maddened our mothers when the Roman legions conquered!  Only to stand for a moment, free, on the barricade, outlawed and joyous, with Death, Freedom’s impregnable citadel, opening its gates behind—­and to pass through, the red flag uplifted in the sight of all men, with flaming slums and smoking wrongs for one’s funereal pyre!”

* * * * *

So Nellie thought in her indignation and sorrow, changing the wet cloth on the baby’s head, powerless to help it, uncomforted by creeds that moulder in the crimson-cushioned pews.  She knew that she was unjust, carried away by her tumultuous emotions, knew also, in her heart, that there was something more to be desired than mere wild outbreaks of the despairing.  Only she thought, as we all think, in phases, and as she would certainly have talked had opportunity offered while she was in the mood, and as she would most undoubtedly have written had she just then been writing.  The more so as there was a wave of indignation and anger sweeping over Australia, sympathetic with the indignation and anger