The Australians were profoundly moved when the Royal Irish left their shores. The XVIIIth was already very popular, and apart from this personal feeling, the settlers were deeply wounded at the removal of this, the last British regiment of the garrison of Australasia. While all men regarded this step as the breaking of one of the few visible links between the mother country and her offshoots in the southern hemisphere, many pessimists hinted that the policy of the Home government was intended to force all the colonies into a declaration of independence. When the _Corona_ sailed from Melbourne fifty thousand people crowded to the beach to wave a sad farewell to the XVIIIth, gloomily comparing the departure of the regiment with the abandonment of Britain by the Roman legions. Happily these prophets of evil were mistaken. The loyalty of the colonies to the Empire is unimpaired, and the tie of sentiment has been strengthened by the presence in three African campaigns of large bodies of volunteers from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, who fought shoulder to shoulder with Imperial troops in quarrels with which the colonists were concerned solely as members of the British race. Though the offer of two thousand Australasian militia and volunteers to serve against the Boers in the war of 1881 was refused by Mr Gladstone’s government, four years later eight hundred men from New South Wales were fighting at Suakim, and four hundred Canadian _voyageurs_ were steering whale-boats upon the Nile in the expedition towards Khartoum: while in the recent struggle with the Boers for the possession of South Africa, nearly thirty thousand men from Greater Britain represented the oversea provinces of the Empire in the army of the old country. * * * * *