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78
AUSTRALIA AND THE EMPIRE

one colonial historian have been entirely wasted by reason of an unconquerable anti-democratic bias. One need not go quite so far as that worthy old Victorian colonist who stoutly maintained that no one who did not firmly believe in democratic institutions had any right to live in Australia, Such a law would promote a very considerable exodus. But assuredly it seems to me that no one can be trusted to relate the annals, or trace the social and political evolution of Australia, who starts with an invincible prejudice against democracies. It is to be regretted that such writers, when they expatiate pungently on the degradation of their countrymen, whether of republican America or of self-governing democratic Australia, receive a too-ready and sympathetic hearing in England. Yet what would be thought if Mr. Henry Labouchere were accepted by our non-aristocratic kinsmen across the seas as the final and most philosophic authority on such an institution as the House of Lords?

It was inevitable that the Australians, as soon as the matter was placed in their own hands, would frame their political institutions on a democratic pattern. No doubt the greatest of Australian