Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/221

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CHAPTER VIII.


NATIVE AUSTRALIANS AND IMPERIAL FEDERATION.


In one of his charming after-dinner speeches recently delivered in Australia, the Earl of Carnarvon, pleasantly paraphrasing the Laureate, was good enough to say that, "if fifty years of Europe are, in point of development and expansion, worth an unlimited era of Cathay, then I say that ten years in these great Australasian colonies match fifty years of Europe."

This truth was borne in upon me very forcibly when I took up one of the later numbers of the now unfortunately defunct Melbourne Review, in order to find out, if I might, what "Young Australia" was thinking about himself and the Empire of which he is at present a unit. The article to which I wish to allude is entitled "Australia for the Australians," and is one of a series by a young Victorian, who writes with a certain crude ability and much self-