Read "In an Unknown Prision Land" by George Griffith online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
No doubt it was due to the very wide difference between the two points of view from which I had seen Australia and the Australians, but I must confess that my first impressions were more pleasant than my second. Naturally the happy-go-lucky-sailor lad who thought that the earth was his and the fulness thereof as long as he had a shilling in his pocket and a square meal ahead of him, would not look upon things in general with the same eyes that I did after twenty years of changing fortunes and the gradual fading of the "golden dreams of trustful twenty,"-or eighteen, to be more exact.
In those days I was, almost of necessity, a practical democrat living in a democracy which neither had the time nor the inclination to bother about politics; but now many experiences in many lands had taught me that democracy of the political sort is more pleasant to read about than to rub shoulders with!