Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/263

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NATIVE AUSTRALIANS
231

Wellington, attended by the Secretary of State for the colonies and one or two prominent English politicians! We should have daily bulletins in the London press as to the discussions of such a body; and by thus making, even for a few weeks, an antipodean city the political centre of gravity, we should, in my opinion, be welding together the scattered parts of the Empire far more effectually than by establishing what even the Prince of Wales regards as an Imperial Institute at South Kensington.

These suggestions are the rudest of hints, loosely thrown out by one who sincerely prays that there may be no fresh disruption among the English-speaking races of the world; but who, at the same time, has a feeling amounting to conviction that any of the new parliamentary panaceas, proposed under the name of Imperial Federation, would be the sure and speedy road to that deplorable catastrophe.