s 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.

Once before Australia had taken an active part in politics. That was
when the Union Jack was threatened, when British regiments were melting
away before the rifles of a peasant people at Magersfontein, Colenso and
Graspan, when Ladysmith was being besieged, and Downing Street trembled
for the safety of the empire. Then, in the hour of dire need, a cry for
help went out to all the peoples dwelling beneath the Union Jack, whose
flagstaff was being shaken by sturdy peasant hands. And the colonial