The same question might with very good reason be raised concerning the political life of Australia, which has been almost entirely neglected since Mrs. Campbell Praed used up the best of her early impressions and settled in England. The majority of the writers of fiction who continue to live in the country are women, and possibly not interested in politics; but the chief reason why the romance is seldom written of the Cabinet Minister who started life as a gold-digger or draper's assistant, or of the democratic legislator whose first election was announced to him through a hole in a steam-boiler that he was riveting, is to be found in a belief that it would not be appreciated in the far-off land whither all Australian books must go for the sanction of their existence. Here again the British reader appears to be misjudged, for has he not accepted from another direction, and enjoyed, _Democracy_ and _Through One Administration_? Mrs. Praed, lightly skimming the surface of Antipodean political life in two of her stories, has shown it to be not without humour, nor lacking in the elements of more serious interest. But she cannot be said to have exhibited any particular belief in the political novel, and none of the more practised among her colonial contemporaries has ever given it a trial.
On the main question of a national literature it will perhaps be concluded that Australia has yet scarcely any need to be concerned: that not much must be expected from a civilisation which, though it has been rapid, began little more than a century ago; and that the existence of wealth, and the possibilities of leisure and culture which wealth affords, cannot produce the same effect upon art in a new country as in an old one. The whole matter no doubt is somewhat difficult of decision. It has been none the less useful to indicate why so little of the work already done is the work of native writers--why the existence of much of the best of it may almost be considered accidental. And while a refusal to take the trouble of independently judging the worth of a local artistic product may or may not be an invariable characteristic of a new country, it was also right to contradict on the best available authority the assertion of a 'prejudice' against the work of Australian authors.