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38
AUSTRALIA AND THE EMPIRE

Dalley to England in 1861-62 was to induce emigrants to select Australia as their future home. Sir Henry's series of letters open with a suggestive reference to the re-awakened antagonism throughout England to democratic institutions, which he regards as a result of the American Civil War.

"The civil discord in America," he observes, "to an extent unjust to the Americans, has repelled and partly terrified the public mind; and anything that was felt to savour of American democracy, would, I verily believe, be ill-received in any great gathering of the people. The other day I heard a popular lecturer, Mr. George Dawson, discoursing to an audience of at least a thousand persons on the American troubles, and he indulged in some sharp ridicule of universal suffrage, which was received with loud cheers and merriment. The same indifference to what would have elicited a tempest of cheering from any meeting a few years ago, was manifested a night or two back at a great meeting assembled to hear an address from one of your Colonial Commissioners, Mr. Parkes."

"I suppose," he continues, with the charming insouciance of newspaper anonymity, "Mr. Parkes considered it part of his duty to describe the