No Foreign Foe Has Menaced Her Thrifty
Progress Since The British Planted Themselves At Port Jackson In 1788;
Nor Have Any Internal Broils Of Serious Importance Interrupted Her
Prosperous Career.
This striking variation from the common fate of peoples is attributable
to three causes.
First, the development of a British civilisation in
Australia has synchronised with the attainment and unimpaired maintenance
of dominant sea-power by the parent nation. The supremacy of Great
Britain upon the blue water enabled her colonies to grow to strength and
wealth under the protection of a mighty arm. Secondly, during the same
period a great change in British colonial policy was inaugurated.
Statesmen were slow to learn the lessons taught in so trenchant a fashion
by the revolt of the American colonies; but more liberal views gradually
ripened, and Lord Durham's Report on the State of Canada, issued in 1839,
occasioned a beneficent new era of self-government. The states of
Australia were soon left with no grievance which it was not within their
own power to remedy if they chose, and virtually as they chose. Thirdly,
these very powers of self-government developed in the people a signal
capacity for governing and being governed. The constitutional machinery
submitted the Executive to popular control, and made it quickly sensitive
to the public will. Authority and subjects were in sympathy, because the
subjects created the authority. Further, there was no warlike native race
in Australia, as there was in New Zealand and in South Africa, to
necessitate armed conflict.
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