Indeed, We Can Scarcely Realise How Much Australia Owes To Britain's Overwhelming Strength Upon The Blue Water At The Beginning Of The Nineteenth Century.

But for that, not only France but other European powers would surely have claimed the right to establish themselves upon the continent.

The proportion of it which the English occupied at the time was proportionately no more than a fly-speck upon a window pane. She could not colonise the whole of it, and the small portion that she was using was a mere convict settlement. Almost any other place would have done equally well for such a purpose. It needed some tremendous exertion of strength to enable her to maintain exclusive possession of a whole continent, such as Spain had vainly professed regarding America in the sixteenth century. From the point of view of Australian "unity, peace, and concord," the Napoleonic wars were an immense blessing, however great an infliction they may have been to old Europe. In an age of European tranquillity, it is pretty certain that foreign colonisation in Australia would not have been resisted. Great Britain would not have risked a war with a friendly power concerning a very distant land, the value and potentialities of which were far from being immediately obvious. The Englishman, however, is tremendously assertive when threatened. He will fight to the last gasp to keep what he really does not want very much, if only he supposes that his enemy wishes to take a bit of it.

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