Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/232

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AUSTRALIA AND THE EMPIRE

race who are so soon to fill our vacant places? Do our sons owe us no better guerdon than this sneer at our rapidly diminishing numbers—at our early and bitter struggles? Not so is kept the memory of the fathers of the Great Republic, to be able to claim whose ancestry is to be 'the heir of all the ages in the foremost files of time.'"

Surely this proud, but far from boastful, retrospect is more moving than all the crude previsions of youth. I have frankly stated that it seems to me impossible to ascertain how far the opinions expressed in "Australia for the Australians" are the evanescent views of individual immaturity, and how far they are the day-dreams of the rising generation. I find in other numbers of the same colonial magazine, the writer was allowed space for "An Australian Protest against Imperial Federation." This essay, in my judgment, is much more worthy of the consideration of grown men, whether English or colonial, than is the cheap rhodomontade of "Australia for the Australians." If the writer may be accepted in any sense as a mouth-piece of the rising (or should it be arisen?) generation, then the colonial-born voters, into whose hands such questions as those involved in Imperial