The early reports from the Philippines and from San Francisco, and the crushing news of the destruction of the Pacific fleet, swept like a whirlwind through the streets of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Wellington and Auckland, and gave rise to tremendous public demonstrations. Business came to a stand-still, for the Australian people had ears only for the far-off thunder of cannon, and their thoughts were occupied with the future. Huge open-air mass-meetings and innumerable demonstrations before the American consulates bore witness to Australia's honest sympathy. The time had arrived for the fifth continent to establish its political status in the council of nations. In Sydney the mob had smashed the windows of the Japanese consulate. Satisfaction was at once categorically demanded from London, where the government trembled at the bare idea of a hostile demonstration against its ally. The apology was to take the form of a salute to the Japanese flag on the consulate by a coast battery, etc. But the Australian government refused point blank to do this, and contented itself with a simple declaration of regret; and as there was no other course open to him, the Japanese Consul had to be satisfied. But in Tokio this affair was entered on the credit side of the Anglo-Japanese ledger, offsetting the debt of gratitude for August 10, 1904, when the English fleet constituted the shifting scenery behind Togo's battleships. A great many of the Japanese located in Australia had left the country before the outbreak of the war to join the army of invasion, and those who remained behind soon recognized that there was no work for them anywhere on the continent. When they refused to take this hint and make themselves scarce, Australian fists began to remind them that the period of Anglo-Mongolian brotherhood was a thing of the past. The last of the Japanese settlers were put aboard an English steamer at Sydney and told to shift for themselves. The Chinese, too, began to leave the country, and wherever they did not go of their own accord, they were told in pretty plain language that the yellow man's day in Australia was ended. Australia, up to this time merely an appendage of the Old World, a colony which had received its blood from the heart of the British Empire and its ideas from the nerve-center in Downing Street, which had hitherto led a purely dependent existence, now awoke and began to develop a political life of its own. And this development, born of the outbreak of Mongolian hostilities, could not be restrained. The time had passed when the European nations could say: The world's history is created by us, other nations are of no account.