Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE IMPERIAL AND NATIONAL SPIEIT " She is not yet; but he whose ear Thrills to that finer atmosphere Where footfalls of appointed things, Reverberant of days to be, Are heard in forecast eohoings, Like wave-beats from a viewless sea— Hears in the voiceful tremors of the sky Auroral heralds whispering, ' She is nigh.' " James Beunton Stephens. Australia presents a paradox. There is a breezy, buoyant Imperial spirit. But the national spirit, as it is understood elsewhere, is practically nonexistent—though one sees the green leaf sprouting. This seems strange. Yet the explanation is simple enough. The population in all the States has been drawn from one common source: the British Isles. There is a warm and generous love for the Motherland. When the Australian uses the word " home," he does not mean his home. He means England. And that one word "home," more than arguments about the advantages of Imperial trade or demonstrations in favour of Imperial cohesion, has soaked into the brain of the Australian, and he appreciates—not always by reasoning about it, but with the regard a son has for his father—that "home" is his country just as much as is Australia, and that what affects the Englishman affects him. Hence the growing spirit of Imperialism throughout the continent. But you drop from Imperialism to something like parochialism in Australia, with little of the real national spirit intervening—though it exists and must increase. Here is the reason. The old settlements were made on the seaboard long before the doming of railways. For all practical purposes, the States might have been so many islands. The only communication was by flea. Indeed, to-day there is no railway communication between Western Australia and the eastern States. It tak...