I have the strongest hopes for the future of Australia, but the people must never be allowed to forget that eternal vigilance, as in the past, must still in the future be the price we must pay for our liberty.  Later, Mr. Reid presided at our Parliament House meeting, and afterwards entertained us at afternoon tea.  But one of our pleasantest memories was of a day spent with the great freetrader and Mrs. Reid at their Strathfield home.  I was anxious to hear Mr. Reid speak, and was glad when the opportunity arose on the occasion of a no-confidence debate.  But he was by no means at his best, and it was not until I heard him in his famous freetrade speech on his first visit to Adelaide that I realized how great an orator he was.  At the close of the no-confidence debate the triumphant remark of an admirer that “Adelaide couldn’t produce a speaker like that” showed me that a prophet sometimes hath honour, even in his own country.

Mr. Wise was a brilliant speaker, and a most cultured man, and a delightful talker.  Of Mrs. Parkes, then President of the Women’s Liberal League, I saw much.  She was a fine speaker, and a very clear-headed thinker.  Her organizing faculty was remarkable, and her death a year or two ago was a distinct loss to her party.  Her home life was a standing example of the fallacy of the old idea that a woman who takes up public work must necessarily neglect her family.  Mrs. Barbara Baynton was a woman of a quite different type, clever and emotional, as one would expect the author of the brilliant but tragic “Bush Studies” to be.  She was strongly opposed to Federation, as, indeed were large numbers of clever people in New South Wales.  Frank Fox (afterwards connected with The Lone Hand), Bertram Stevens (author of “An Anthology of Australian Verse"), Judge Backhouse (who was probably the only Socialist Judge on the Australian Bench), were frequent visitors at Miss Scott’s, and were all interesting people.  An afternoon meeting on effective voting was arranged at the Sydney University, I think, by Dr. Anderson Stuart.  We were charmed with the university and its beautiful surroundings.  Among the visitors that afternoon was Mrs. David, a charming and well-read woman, whose book describing an expedition to Funafuti, is delightful.  We afterwards dined with her and Professor David, and spent a pleasant hour with them.

I was not neglectful of other reforms while on this campaign, and found time to interest myself in the State children’s work with which my friend, Mrs. Garran, was so intimately connected.  We went to Liverpool one day to visit the benevolent institution for men.  There were some hundreds of men there housed in a huge building reminiscent of the early convict days.  If not the whole, parts of it had been built by the convicts, and the massive stone staircase suggested to our minds the horrors of convict settlement.  I have always resented the injury done to this new country by the foundation of penal settlements, through which Botany Bay lost its natural connotation as a habitat for wonderful flora, and became known only as a place where convicts were sent for three-quarters of a century.  Barrington’s couplet, written as a prologue at the opening of the Playhouse, Sydney, in 1796, to a play given by convicts—­