AUSTRALIAN INDEPENDENCE.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume VIII, Issue 2210, 3 February 1886, Page 2

AUSTRALIAN INDEPENDENCE.

The Press Association furnishes us with the following particulars of Mr Douglas 1 speech respecting Australian independence, received by telegram from the Bluff

Hobart, January 28. The President of the Federal Council £jave a dinner last night to the other members of the Council, the Tasmanian Ministers, and the local leading citizens. In responding to the toast of the Federal Council, Mr Douglas, Premier of Tasmania, said though the present was only a Bmall union of the colonies it : would afterwards become a greater one ; in fact, it wonld become as it were the United States of Australia, independent of the Mother Country. The colonies had be/ como a great empire, whioh at no distant period would not be satisfied with beirig under, the littlo.lsland in the Northern Hemisphere called Great Britain. He did not mean that the colonics qhould separate froin the Mother Country in an improper The initiation cjf the States and separation would be of a friendly character when it came, and it (would: come as soon as a European war forced, the colonies to consider their position. He was expressing his own ideas, and gave them for what they wero worth, Messrs Griffiths, Dobson (speaker of the Tasmanian Assembly), and Berne,Justice Gibbon, Judge Kerford, Mr Service, and others, in the course of their speeches, took occasion to dissent from Mr Douglas' views,