The “ New Australia “

 PARADISE IN PARAGUAY.

 WARNINGS TO AUSTRALIAN WOMEN.

I.

 (By ' Australian Trades Unionist.')

In spite of its wildly Utopian character the promoters of the “ New Australia “ scheme persist in their endeavors to boom it and, what is worse, their efforts have not been futile. It is reported, upon what would appear to be very reliable authority, that already several hundreds of Australian citizens — most of them shearers or miners, and many of them with wives and children — have been induced to throw in their lot with the movement, together with whatever the industry and thrift of years have enabled them to save. This, in all conscience, is serious enough ; but these

 SEEKERS OF THE SOCIAL ELDORADO

 in South America, being, presumably, rational creatures, are free agents, must be allowed to make their choice and act upon it and to suffer the consequences of that choice, however fantastic and fateful it may seem. When, however, the promoters of this strange scheme endeavor to inveigle young, single, respectable, but inexperienced, women to participate in it, on a vague and merely implied promise of providing them with husbands, the matter assumes a most grave and extraordinary complexion. This is precisely what the promoters are doing, and this is what they must not be permitted to do without protest. In a leaflet which they have issued broadcast the originator and chief " boss” of the scheme, W. Lane, alias “ John Miller,” explains at length his ideas of

 MARRIAGE ON THE CO-OPERATIVE PLAN.

 He says:

 The latest development of the New Australia movement is the opening up of the organisation of single women, which is so promising that it is practically certain that the settlement will draw to this all-important part of its people girls whom any honest man may be proud to claim as a sister or win as a wife.

 Next he proceeds to explain that Tasmania has been chosen as the " main organising ground " (or as the " happy hunting ground ") where he and his partners are seeking to select the girl-partners of their expedition. The reason of this choice is that in Tasmania "women form not only the great majority of the population, but are healthy with the healthiness of a bracing climate and of a very general home life." Then this wonderfully fastidious connoisseur in healthy girls goes on to explain the

 TERMS OF GIRL MEMBERSHIP,

 which, as he sets them down, form the queerest sample of communistic cant ever yet penned or uttered for the delusion of men and women :

 The conditions under which they will join the association are such, that while questionable characters will be rigidly excluded, no honest, healthy young woman could possibly find a better opportunity to live out her life in a true womanly way. Safeguarded by the wives of married members, and doubly safeguarded by the loyal respect of every man in the settlement; given absolute equality in voice and vote and earnings dividend ; absorbed in a life from which immorality will be banished, by the positive removal of all bars to marriage, and by the loyal maintenance of the marriage tie ; freed from the fear of honest motherhood, which begins to rot Australian society just as it rots the social life of France; comrades in all honesty of earnest men, to whom a happy home and loving wife, and love-born children are sacred rights. The position of single girls who accept membership will be one of the first evidences of the humanity which inspires and pervades the New Australia movement. We may justly feel proud, in all sincerity, that not only to our own wives do we bring a new life, new hopes, and new happiness, but bring the same also to the stranger — sisters whom we hope in the nearing future to greet as the wedded wives of our now homeless and wifeless mates.

 Evidently dubious as to the modesty displayed in the above quotation

 THE MODERN YANKEE MOSES,

 W. Lane, alias “John Miller,” hastens to reassure the healthy virtuous girls whom he wishes to convert into partners in his pilgrimage to Paraguay in the following Mother Girling shaker-sort of rhapsodical rot:

 It is absurd that we should have any false modesty in speaking of the sexual relations in which are bound up all the strength, the happiness, and the purity of our race. Others may regard it as the higher life to live unmarried, and to die without having known the true kiss of love, and without having felt one's heart gush out to the baby life that binds two other lives eternally together. We do not.

 This is the kind of language in which this American immigrant, and abortive strike leader appeals to the daughters and sisters of Australian citizens to join him and take part in the paradise which he promises to prepare for them in Paraguay. Is it not more like the raving rhodomontade of a visionary than that of the founder or pioneer of any sort of a settlement, communistic or otherwise, fit for decent, honest women to live in ? Truly the public patience is profound, and its credulity unfathomable, when such unutterable bosh as this can be circulated without confining the author of it to the padded ward of a lunatic asylum. Nevertheless, this prophet of what he styles the “ monogamic standard of marriage,” displays so much method in his madness as to interlard his manifesto to the girls and single women of Australia with all sorts of catchpenny cries, such as

" ONE MAN ONE WIFE —

 once and for always." He carefully avoids all reference, however, to the methods by which he and his co-promoters are going to secure a husband for every girl whom they succeed in inducing to go off with them to South America. He is very careful not to incur any legal responsibility under this head by promising to provide husbands ; on the contrary he refrains from giving any guarantee of marriage to the girls who confide their future to his keeping, but distinctly states and reiterates that they will have to take their chance of getting married, pretty much the same as their sisters have to do in Australia, and all over the world, thus :

 We do not compel either man or woman to marry, but as an association we scorn the morbid notion that either man or woman was made to live alone. . . We hold that this marriage is a sacred thing, not to be entered into except of free choice, in the fullest sense of choice.

 This is all very right and proper as an abstract sentiment, but how will it square with W. Lane's, alias "John Miller's " female proselytes' practical views ; how will it fit in with the expectations of those " healthy, honest women and girls " who become partners in this Lane, Mooney, and Head venture, principally, for the purpose of finding husbands ? If they are not to be married before they go, and there is no compulsion or obligation to marry them after they get there, in what way will their matrimonial prospects be improved ? Yet this W. Lane, alias “John Miller," holds out

 MARRIAGE AS THE SEDUCTIVE BAIT

 to the girls he is angling for — it is the main, if not the sole, inducement. He thus artfully endeavors to play upon the natural and almost universal inclination of women to become loved wives and honored mothers :

 We hold that woman has lived vainly and without the crowning joy of living unless from among manly men she has chosen in free will a husband upon whom in all purity and virtue she can pour out the passionate affection that is in all true women's hearts.

 This, too, as sentiment is all very well, though somewhat crudely, expressed ; but what about the practical part of it ? No doubt W. Lane's, alias Miller's, female disciples would be quite willing to enjoy the “ crowning joy “ of choosing from “among manly men” husbands upon whom they could "pour out the passionate affection" of their hearts, but what if the "manly men," not yearning after this " passionate affection," should decline to be chosen — what then ? The prospectus and the rules and regulations of this new communistic commonwealth, put forward by Lane, Head, Mooney and Company, make no provision for overcoming the coyness of the man members, so that after all the marriageable husband seeking girl members might, and in all probability would, be baulked in their main object, and, as the sporting phrase has it, "get badly left." The is the serious, practical side of the question which every good Australian girl or woman, who has been duped by the fantastical proposals and theories of the promoters of this abominable New Australia business, would do well and is

 BOUND IN HONOR TO WEIGH

 seriously, before entrusting her person and her fair fame to the chances of so crude and hazardous an enterprise. It is all very well for W. Lane, alias “ John Miller,” to spout bunkum about marriage being "a sacred thing," and it is because it is far too sacred a thing to be trifled with, in the manner he proposes that I now warn the maidens and single women of Australia, who have been attracted by the glamour of his twopenny-halfpenny sentimental nonsense, to beware of quitting the shelter and care of their homes and friends, and the protection of their country's laws, in order to surrender themselves and their reputations, which should be dearer to them than their lives, to the awful risks and chances of a wild communistic scheme yet to be tried in the heart of a semi-civilised and almost lawless South American state. What confidence can modest, true women repose in the promises of social salvation of a man who can write in the following strain of womanhood and motherhood, without first guaranteeing to the girls and women he seeks to take thousands of miles away from kindred and friends either an honorable marriage or a speedy and safe return home :

 And we hold that the mother-woman is the highest and best of all; that she who bears the children who will labor for us when we are past laboring ; who nurses on her knee the lives of ours in which our own lives may mock at the death that comes to men, but not to man; who is our fondest recollection, and before whose unselfish devotion all other devotions are weak and worth less, is the woman whom we should idealise in our thoughts and exalt in the family life, which without her can never be.

 This is the sort of stuff with which this communistic

 MONOGAMIC-MARRIAGE STANDARD-BEARER

 seeks to savor his unsavory proposal for expatriating Australian girls and single women to some unsettled portion of a wild South American state, the precise locality of which he himself doesn't yet know. Of what use is the statement of such a hair-brained chatterer that —

 All those who have joined our association have joined on the distinct understanding that in the New Australia Settlement the immoralities rife in so-called civilisation will not be tolerated.

 In his or their anxiety to get young girls to accompany them, this W. Lane, alias “John Miller,” Head, Mooney and Company make all sorts of promises, except a positive promise of marriage. The boss boomer of the concern, in regard to the somewhat precarious protection which his socialistic settlement is likely, or rather unlikely, to afford to the persons and characters of his girl recruits, endeavors to reassure them by beating

 THE TOM-TOM OF BALDERDASH

 in the following vigorous fashion :

 All through the western country I have pointed out, as all organisers have been instructed to point out, that looseness of living is the necessary result of the impossibility of natural mating, and that where all men labor and where none need fear to marry the instinct of our people is to live up to the monogamic standard — one-man-one-wife-once-and-for-always.

 The fellow talks as glibly about "natural mating" as though he were dealing with a cargo of quadrupeds he was about to export ; and with all the assurance of the self-inspired socialistic quack, he thus ladles out nauseating doses of his maudlin morality in the following strain :

 I have said that the man who wrecks the happiness of one whom he has pledged himself to hold as a mate and a brother, who wrongs the daughter or the sister, or the wife of his mate—without going into the deeper question of personal morality — will do a blackleg trick, and should be treated as a blackleg; and that the woman who destroys in like manner the happiness of her sister is equally guilty of the grossest violation of all the social bonds. This is a fact, and every straight man knows it, and every straight woman.

 After a lot more of the same sort, this monogamic moraliser proceeds to explain in the crudest terms to his intending female followers that in the place he is going to prepare for them in Paraguay; the

 " PROSTITUTE, POLICEMAN, AND DRUNKARD “

 will not be permitted, as he himself delicately puts it, "to shame the innocent eyes of our little ones." He and his male and female disciples are going to live "as healthy men and women desire to live," and as he is confident " our men and women will loyally live, where their 'healthy natural instincts find natural outlet, and are not warped and depraved by the prison walls of unjust conditions." This is the kind of language in which modest maidens and chaste women are invited by this

 YANKEE APOSTLE OF MONOGAMY

 to accompany him and his " mates " far over the seas in order to find a husband, or whatever else misfortune and misconduct may have in store for them. Although, there is to be no policemen in this New Australia, Mr. "Modern Moses " Lane, alias ”John Miller,” is quite prepared to guarantee the morality and good order of his settlement, and he does it in the following terms :

 And if looseness of living should perchance lift its head among us we will stamp it out by the expulsion of those who commit " unpardonable offence against the wellbeing of the community." We shall not need to resort to such a measure, I am sure, for we go with the determination in our hearts to be loyal and true to each other; but there is this power to protect us as a last resort, and we are the sort of people to protect from all dangers the homes we cross the seas to build.

 It is by such " hair-brained chatter of irresponsible frivolity" as this that Australian girls and women are being beguiled into entrusting their persons, their lives, and their honor to a few communistic cranks, who, resenting the "law and order" system of government in Australia, hope to live peacefully after the desires of their own hearts and according to their own fantasy amid the chronic anarchy and almost incessant civil war of one of the most lawless South American republics. The very nature of such a scheme foredooms it to failure. The terms in which its promoters are promulgating it show that they either do not know or don't care how their communistic settlement is to be carried on and regulated.

In another article the place where and the people among whom they propose to set up and carry on their communistic commonwealth will be described, and it will be shown that the part of South America to which they are going is the last place where they could hope to succeed, and the very worst place in the wide world to which decent and virtuous girls and women could be taken to, and that it is certainly the one place in all the universe where the marriage tie is least regarded as a sacred bond and the honor of women least respected and safeguarded.

Evening News (Sydney, NSW : 1869 - 1931), Saturday 18 February 1893, page 7