“The Government also desires to express the feeling which it entertains of the readiness which Lieutenant-Colonel Elliot, and the Officers commanding detachments under him, have always displayed to aid the Colony as far as lay in their power.
“The Government also desires to record its appreciation of the uniform courtesy and consideration which they have experienced on the part of Lieutenant-Colonel Elliot in their communications with him through His Excellency the Governor.
By the beginning of March, 1870, the various detachments of the regiment had settled down in their new stations, but they were not destined long to enjoy the pleasures of life in the capitals of the Australian colonies,[223] for very soon came orders for the regiment to return to England. The policy of withdrawing all Imperial troops from New Zealand had been carried out. It was now Australia’s turn to be denuded of her garrison, and in August 1870, after hundreds of men had taken their discharges in order to settle in Australasia, the Royal Irish embarked for Plymouth. The sailing ship _Silver Eagle_ left Sydney on the 21st of August with the four headquarter companies; Lieutenant-Colonel Elliot was in command, and with him were one captain, four subalterns, two surgeons, and one hundred and thirty-five other ranks. On board the sailing ship _Corona_, which left Melbourne about the same time, were Brevet-Lieutenant-Colonel Rocke and two other field-officers, five captains, nine subalterns, and two hundred and forty-six other ranks. The _Corona_ arrived at Plymouth on November 16; the _Silver Eagle_ made so long a voyage round Cape Horn that before she reached port on December 5th, it was currently reported that she had been lost at sea.
The Australians were profoundly moved when the Royal Irish left their shores. The XVIIIth was already very popular, and apart from this personal feeling, the settlers were deeply wounded at the removal of this, the last British regiment of the garrison of Australasia. While all men regarded this step as the breaking of one of the few visible links between the mother country and her offshoots in the southern hemisphere, many pessimists hinted that the policy of the Home government was intended to force all the colonies into a declaration of independence. When the _Corona_ sailed from Melbourne fifty thousand people crowded to the beach to wave a sad farewell to the XVIIIth, gloomily comparing the departure of the regiment with the abandonment of Britain by the Roman legions. Happily these prophets of evil were mistaken. The loyalty of the colonies to the Empire is unimpaired, and the tie of sentiment has been strengthened by the presence in three African campaigns of large bodies of volunteers from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, who fought shoulder to shoulder with Imperial troops in quarrels with which the colonists were concerned solely as members of the British race. Though the offer of two thousand Australasian militia and volunteers to serve against the Boers in the war of 1881 was refused by Mr Gladstone’s government, four years later eight hundred men from New South Wales were fighting at Suakim, and four hundred Canadian _voyageurs_ were steering whale-boats upon the Nile in the expedition towards Khartoum: while in the recent struggle with the Boers for the possession of South Africa, nearly thirty thousand men from Greater Britain represented the oversea provinces of the Empire in the army of the old country.