Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/244

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212
AUSTRALIA AND THE EMPIRE

As his Lordship very properly points out, it is the progress of scientific invention, and notably of telegraphic science, which differentiates the case of the English Colonies in America in the eighteenth century, from those that now exist there, and from those in Australia. Not only, as he points out, do steam and telegraphy render remote dependencies more open to concentrated attack, but they also bring them in a perfectly marvellous manner within the radius, as it were, of the Imperial Government, or, as I should prefer to say, within the family circle. No one but a colonist who has resided in a remote province of the Empire, before and after the laying down of the ocean cable, can realise the difference. In all essential respects the resident in Australia or New Zealand is as well informed of what transpires at Westminster as though he were a denizen of London itself. In some respects he is in a better position to judge of the actual changes and movements of the time, for he receives his news in a concentrated form, and without any of the "dreary drip of dilatory declamation." In a word, the diurnal cablegram has the effect of making the remote antipodean realise that he is a member of the European family. How different was the case