AUSTRALIA AND IMPERIAL DEFENCE.
Extracts from an Address delivered before the Imperial Federation League of Victoria at Melbourne, October, 1896.[1]
The Imperial Federation League and its work.We are met to-night under the auspices of the Imperial Federation League of Victoria. The Imperial League Federation League of the United Kingdom was dissolved two years ago. Many members of the League in the United Kingdom, and, I suppose, a majority of the members of the branches both in Canada and here in Victoria disapproved of the dissolution. To devise a scheme of political federation was outside the scope of an irresponsible body of men however representative. All the work that it was in the power of the League to accomplish in the United Kingdom, at any rate, has been done. Mainly through the efforts of the League a complete revolution of popular sentiment has been effected. The idea of the old Manchester School that the Colonies were a burden on the mother country, and should be cut adrift at the earliest possible opportunity, has completely died out. With few insignificant exceptions, statesmen, politicians, and pressmen of all shades of political opinion, are now looking to the maintenance of the Union
- ↑ This address was to some extent a résumé of the points given in the article reprinted from the Nineteenth Century.
37
