The country round was as much interested in the visit as the city itself. For days before the Prince's coming special trains, crowded to their utmost capacity, had followed one another in quick succession into Sydney from localities sometimes hundreds of miles away in the back blocks. One heard of a father who squeezed his family of tiny children into one of these special trains, and was then unable to get a foothold on it for himself. The mites went to Sydney unaccompanied, but lacked for nothing, either upon the way or when they arrived, for every soul upon the train was prepared to father and mother them. The ten days which followed were crowded with public functions in which what seemed to be the entire population of Sydney participated outside, if not inside, the place of occurrence. One of the principal was the state banquet in the enormous town-hall. Seven hundred and twenty diners here sat down. Three thousand of Sydney's maids and matrons watched the proceedings from the galleries on either side, and at a given signal after the dinner, when the Prince proposed "The Ladies," there was a sound like a vast flight of pigeons and three thousand Union Jacks fluttered into the air. The ladies had responded for themselves. Crowds blocked the wide streets for half a mile round the building, throughout the whole of the proceedings, and took up the cheering again and again. The toasts of the evening were honoured, not only in the banquet hall itself, but by some hundred of thousands outside as well. Mr. Storey, the Premier of the Labour Government in power in New South Wales, made a most cordial speech in proposing the Prince's health. He described the Royal guest as a democrat in whose presence he felt no embarrassment in speaking frankly. He welcomed him on behalf of New South Wales, and declared that the Royal family had always shown sympathy with the ideals for which Labour men everywhere stood. In the course of his reply, the Prince said: "I realize to the full the great part which New South Wales and Sydney have played, and must always play, in the history of Australia. This wonderful city is the cradle of the magnificent development which has made the Australian Commonwealth. The whole thing started here, and in later days you were foremost in the movement of ideas which led to federation. The greatest of all the statesmen who first worked for federation, Henry Parkes, was a Sydney man, and a Premier of New South Wales. The first Australian Prime Minister, Sir Edmund Barton, also came from New South Wales. It is amazing to think that New South Wales holds two-fifths of the population of the whole Commonwealth and that Sydney holds more than half of the population of New South Wales. That fact alone shows the vast importance, not only to the Commonwealth, but to the future of the whole Empire, of this state and its lovely capital. Sydney is indeed the London of the Southern Hemisphere."