"Yis. Maybe y'don't know as how the other two gintlemen got sintinced and were sent out here as convicts, and both of thim now are millionaires, and my poor man is still workin' hard for his livin' in the ould counthry."
Hydrophobia is unknown in Australia. A traveller on arrival has his pet dog taken from him and the poor animal is thrust into quarantine for six months. These four millions of inhabitants, spread over the largest colony in the world, consider themselves so precious they quarantine everything and everybody but lunatics. Why not quarantine lunatics? Are they not dangerous? Did not a whole city go mad? Stark, staring, raving mad--Mad Melbourne--and yet a Maltese terrier is quarantined in the same port for six months!
Yet lunatics arrive and make lunacy rampant, and a whole city is left after such a visitation an asylum of melancholia--Mad Melbourne. Lunacy frequently takes the form of egotism. Peasants imagine themselves princes; Calibans believe themselves to be Adonises; beggars imagine themselves millionaires. It is a harmless vanity and hurts no one, but a mad city may ruin thousands by suddenly imagining itself a gold mine. Melbourne a few years ago imagined it suddenly became the hub of the universe. The world and his wife had but one burning desire--that was to live in Melbourne. Some lunatic started this ridiculous idea, and the boom spread like lightning. Melbourne was by this magic boom turned into an Aladdin cave. No prairie fire ever started with such suddenness, with such fury, burning up, as it leapt and galloped along, all the reasoning powers and common sense of the people. Those who cleared a space around them to avoid destruction were tongued by the fire of speculation, and before they could move away were irreparably lost. Great and small, old and young, were carried away in the blaze of speculation. The frightened reptiles and beasts running in front to escape it were, it was thought, miserable fools who had not the pluck or sense to aid in setting speculation in Melbourne on fire. A fanciful picture on paper this? True, so was the great boom of 1887 merely a fanciful picture on paper. Had it been otherwise banks would not have failed, nor would families have been ruined wholesale, nor would trade and speculation have been left charred roots and stubble on the scene of folly--Mad Melbourne.