udes within its ranks a great
number of the most capable of the rising men and the younger of those
already risen. Speaking broadly, its aspiration is for a separate
national life. It will "cut the painter"--that is the phrase--which
ties it to the old ship of state. In its ranks are many who love the
old country and reverence its history and traditions, and these an
Englishman only remarks with a readier excuse for what he must esteem an
error. But there are others, and the melancholy fact, too long concealed
or slighted, is that they are many and growing in numbers, who hate
England and all things English. There are many, not stigmatised as
dullards or as fools, who publicly oppose the teaching of English
history in the State schools. The feeling against England is not a
fantastical crank, it is a movement growing yearly in strength. I have
seen men keeping their seats in serious protesting silence when the
health of the Queen has been drunk at public banquets, and have found in
private converse that hundreds approve their action but do not follow
it because they dislike to be thought singular. The out-and-out
journalistic supporters of the country vilify the mother country as
a whole. They belittle its history and besmirch its rulers. Loyal
Australians pooh-pooh these prints and entreat the stranger within
their gates to believe that they are despised and without influence.
The stranger has only to travel to learn better than this. The strongest
current of Australian feeling is setting with the tide of growing power
against the mother country.

That this statement will excite anger and derision in the minds of many
Australians is certain. They live entrenched in the flutters of their
own opinion, and are blind to the fact of the power which is mustering
against them. They are as little instructed as to what is going
on around them as we are at home, and our ignorance of our great
dependencies is shameful and criminal. Our colonial governors, from some
of whom we are supposed ourselves to learn something, and many of whom
have been men of especial capacity, do not come in contact with the
crowd. Lord Carrington saw more of the people amongst whom he lived than
any governor before him, and I had from him a single story of a man of
the country who expressed in drunken Saxon his opinion of existing forms
of government; but the tale was jocularly told and was not supposed to
have any importance. It could have had no impor