And now, having passed through the _Sturm und Drang_ of early manhood, he had reached a period of life when youth had flown—when strength and activity could no longer be looked for—when whatever changes took place must necessarily be, in some respects, for the worse. What would the future be? In what direction would the rising generation of the family, nay, of Australia, be impelled?
What would be the character, the fate of this infant British nation, so strangely inaugurated, so wondrously, providentially, even, cast forth upon the shore of an almost unknown continent?
The exiles came to strive with hostile natives and an unfamiliar climate. They found, day by day, birds and beasts, plants and seasons, alike foreign to all previous experience. Yet, so far, how amazingly has prospered the daring experiment in colonisation!
This founding of empires was undertaken with the splendid British contempt for obstacles and dangers, which, if often giving encouragement to apparently imprudent enterprises, has always ennobled the race. Not only was it such, but initiated almost in the throes of a conflict which imperilled Britain’s national existence,—a war, under the ablest generals, directed by the subtlest organising intellect in the then known world, aiming not so much at European conquest as the subjugation of the Mistress of the Seas!
But the haughty Spaniard—in the sixteenth century—who had planned to humble, to discrown, was doomed, like the world-absorbing Corsican, to ruin and defeat—his ‘invincible Armada,’ tempest-driven on the rocks of a hostile coast, his grandest towering ‘tall Amiral,’ shot-shattered, burned, sunk, and destroyed by the unconquered naval heroes of ‘the spacious times of Great Elizabeth.’ What men the times bred!—captains by land and sea: soldiers, whether privates or officers, who, trained to obey to the death, stood unflinching or advanced resistless; sailors who walked above the blood-stained decks, cool as on a carpet, or swarmed over the enemy’s battleship to the maddening sound of ‘Boarders away,’ where every third man fell dead or wounded.
Have we such sailors, such soldiers still?
Yes! a thousand times, yes! and from this very land of the distant South. Was it not abundantly proved in the South African War, when the half-disciplined or wholly untrained colonial troops, whether Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, or Tasmanians, excited the wonder and admiration of all competent critics?—their initiative, their endurance, their intelligence proved on many a hard-fought field; not less also the stubborn valour which gloried in scorning to surrender, while the last man and the last horse lay dying, side by side!