In two of the Australian colonies, New South Wales and Queensland, some journals are found which make it their business to cultivate an anti-British and separatist feeling, and it must be admitted that they give themselves to their task with great and unflagging energy. It is very difficult to estimate accurately the range of their influence. I found the most divergent opinions held upon the point by well-informed Australians themselves, some looking upon them, and the idea which they represented, as forces that would have to be reckoned with in the future: others regarding them as unworthy of notice, and without any permanent influence. Certainly in strength of language they have no parallel in any other part of the British world, or in the United States. British people {220} outside of Australia may be interested in knowing something of their tone and aim. I select a comparatively moderate passage. 'What does it [British Federation] offer us in exchange for our ideals and our aspirations, and our sympathies and our interests? ... It offers us only an unwieldy Empire, crusted over with fungi, rotting with inequalities, governed by a class which is blown out with Privilege and Pride, that ignores the Spirit of the Age and clings to the brutal Past. In this Empire our Australia will be swamped, under it she would be buried; in it our inspiration to lift again the torch of Liberty would be smothered and drowned. We do not want it and we will not have it. Our Australia shall be as free from foreign control as is the sunshine that the Australian loves; as is the billowing sea that surges eternally around her shores. She shall in herself be complete, in sympathy with all, in dependence upon none. ... We have no interest in British Trade and still less in the maintenance of the Empire. We do not care who owns India; we hope that if any more opium wars come about the white ensign will be blown out of Chinese waters; nothing would please us better than to hear that the Spaniards had retaken Gibraltar and the Germans Heligoland and that the huge facade of commercial aggression and oligarchic robbery had come down with a crash.' This passage fairly represents a kind of political pabulum which is dealt out very freely and finds an audience in Sydney and Brisbane. For the most {221} part it is furnished, not by native Australians, but by imported talent. In Sydney a higher grade of newspaper freely discusses the question of separation from the Empire, with a distinct inclination towards independence as the true Australian ideal. At a public meeting which I addressed in Sydney the statement of the arguments for British unity met with what seemed to me a distinctly unfriendly reception. The case stands quite alone in my experience of the British world. I was, however, to my surprise assured by leading men who were present that the hearing given me was, for Sydney, a very good one. If so, the lot of a public man in New South Wales is not an enviable one.