the Australian democracy, and more especially the native-born Australians, who are, as has been seen, the very soul of the federal movement, are resolute not to allow any part of Australia to be over-run, as it easily might be, by swarms of such Chinese, Japanese, Cingalese, Javanese, Malays, and Kanakas, as have already secured a foot-hold in Queensland. The danger is far from being imaginary. Japanese women fill the brothels of the colony; Japanese men employ white labour in the pearl fisheries and on sugar plantations; white unfortunates are used as prostitutes by the Kanakas; Thursday Island is Asiatic; and the existence of a "secret protocol" between the Brisbane Government and that of the Mikado is apparently not denied. There were, it must be confessed, all the materials for a very pretty quarrel over these matters, taken as a whole. And yet, as seems to have been all along the expectation of those who know Australia most intimately, the one dominant desire for union carried the day, though, it is true, by a very bare majority; and even these final and most serious obstacles were somehow adjusted.
The case of Western Australia has been left to the last, because her case is singular. She is, in the first place, not essential, at all events at present, to the formation of the Commonwealth; and, in the second place, after having obviously waited to see if the recusancy of Queensland, or some other accident, might not give her a much desired excuse for not entering the Union, she is now showing her heartfelt reluctance (or rather that of her governing class) to pass under the central control. The history of this colony, as we have seen, has been entirely separate from that of the rest of Australia. Her population—the older section of it—has lived apart; and she is in a different stage of political and economic development Her agriculturalists are anxious to keep their home market,
