ABSTRACT
The conditions of Australian society were not discovered, so to speak, until Sir Charles Dilke in The Problems of Greater Britain, the standard work of political literature on the great English colonies, disclosed to our surprised eyes the sunny picture of a democracy whose driving principle was social progress. Whoever had associated the name ‘Australasia’ with the idea of a country that had kept the character of a penal colony read with astonishment the description of a blossoming community in which class struggle and domination were unknown concepts; in which revolutionary theories found no foothold because the general prosperity had engendered a conservative line of thought; in which the provocative wealth of the few was as absent as the provocative poverty of the many; in which, in spite of capitalism and the factory system, a paradise was prepared for the workers.
