Greymouth Evening Star. AND BRUNNERTON ADVOCATE. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1901. AUSTRALIA TRIUMPHANT.

Greymouth Evening Star, Volume XXXI, 1 October 1901, Page 2

Greymouth Evening Star. AND BRUNNERTON ADVOCATE. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 1, 1901. AUSTRALIA TRIUMPHANT.

The 9th of July, 1900, saw the birth of a great Nation—whose foundations, unlike the foundations of Nations of the Old World is unsullied with bloodshed—whose origin and.career so far has been associated with the arts of peace and industry, and whose course, it-is hoped, will be guided by the better ways of humanity. In fourteen months Australia has sprung from being a few unimportant States to that of a Nation commanding respect from all. We need not go back a century and remember Australia was then hardly beginning to emerge from the darkness in which she had been hidden, in order to understand the very natural exultation of those who now look on her as a pearl in the Imperial Crown of Great Britain. What a change has taken place since Europe first came into contact with the Antipodes, since the day when modern progress became a force on a continent which seems a survival of the earliest geological periods, and when traces are t > be found of the most remote ages in the evolution of the world ! There, where a hundred years ago desert and ocean met, scarcely bordered by a narrow fringe of civilised settlement, newly built and meant to serve as a convict establishment for England, now stand the towns, Sydney and Melbourne, containing more inhabitants than were possessed in the last century by the : most populous towns of England, ■ London excepted. Ije Temps, a re- i

preservative French journal, referred to the Commonwealth, says : —“ A new Europe has arisen in the Antipodes. Five great states, whose populatiyn is counted by hundreds of thousands and whose budgets amount to hundreds of millions, share a continent where formerly negroes and kangaroos, reigned undisputed. A sixth community, the island of Tasmania, has joined her five sisters and knitted together the bands of a federation which will become an immense empire. New Zealand alone, with her long and narrow ribbon of islands, proud of <her independence, and too much pleased with her autonomy to fuse it in ,tho Commonwealth, remains in her splendid isolation, and, as an outpost of Polynesia, mounts guard over an archipelago, where she intends, sooner or later, to exercise the maritime supremacy of Minos or Athens. The consciousness of this high destiny, the recollection of this rapid growth, the contrast between the majestic edifice of to-day, and the modest beginning' of yesterday, may well inspire Australians with pride of the kind to which nations are particularly inclined in their youth. Add to this the fact that Imperialism has nowhere spread so rapidly as in the Colonies, and, among the Colonies, in Australia. The tour of the heir to the throne has shown the full strength of feeling. Under the feet of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York have flowered an almost courtier-like loyalty, an enthusiasm of devotion, of almost monarchic devotion, and an aggressive and warlike [patriotism that have surprised and charmed Jingoism itself. One can but suppose that the democracy, which enjoys at one and the same time 'both the positive advantages of a Republican State and the pomp of a monarchial one, wished to show the son of their distant King that it sees in the Crown the keystone of the unity of the Empire. It is impossible to overlook the meaning of these outbursts.” Such then is the testimony of a foreign journal that loves not the Anglo-Saxon.