Quid non mortalia pectora cogis
Auri sacra fames—­

made the meaning perfectly clear; he dropped ferrule and book and ran with the national hunt for gold.  Shops were closed for want of buyers and sellers; the grass crept up between the paving-stones in great thoroughfares; outward-bound ships lay deserted and helpless in the roads; the wilderness was peopled and the cities desolate; commerce was paralyzed, industry contracted.  The wise and good trembled for the destiny of the people, the government trembled for itself—­idle fear.  That which shook this colony for a moment settled it as firm as a granite mountain and made it great with a rapidity that would have astounded the puny ages cant appeals to as the days of wonders.

The sacra fames was not Australian, but human; and so at the first whisper of gold the old nations poured the wealth they valued—­their food and clothes and silk and coin—­and the prime treasure they valued not, their men—­into that favored land.

Then did great Labor, insulted and cheated so many years in narrow, overcrowded corners of the huge unpeopled globe, lift his bare arm and cry, “Who bids for this?” and a dozen gloved hands jumped and clutched at the prize.  And in bargains where a man went on one side and money on the other, the money had to say, “Thank you,” over it instead of the man.

But still, though the average value of labor was now full as high in the cities as in the mine, men flowed to the desert and the gold, tempted by the enormous prizes there, that lay close to all and came to fortune’s favorites.

Hence a new wonder, a great moral phenomenon the world had never seen before on such a wide scale.  At a period of unparalleled civilization and refinement, society, with its artificial habits and its jealous class distinctions on its back, took a sudden unprepared leap from the heights it had been centuries constructing—­into a gold mine; it emerged, its delicate fabric crushed out of all recognizable shape, its petty prides annihilated, and even its just distinctions turned topsy-turvey.  For mind is really more honorable than muscle, yet when these two met in a gold mine it fared ill with mind.  Classical and mathematical scholars joined their forces with navvies to dig gold; and nearly always the scholars were found after a while cooking, shoe cleaning, and doing generally menial offices for the navvies.

Those who had no learning, but had good birth, genteel manners and kid gloves and feeble loins, sunk lower and became the dregs of gold-digging society ere a week’s digging had passed over their backs.  Not that all wit yielded to muscle.  Low cunning often held its own; hundreds of lazy leeches settled on labor’s bare arm and bled it.  Such as could minister to the diggers’ physical needs, appetites, vices, had no need to dig; they made the diggers work for them, and took toll of the precious dust as it fell into their hands.