Page:Advanced Australia.djvu/168

 and advocated it with constancy and determination. It sent delegates to the other colonies, established branches, and worked up in the minds of the youth a desire that their native land should rise to the dignity of a nation. In its early years the association was viewed, as I have said, with some suspicion, on account of its supposed leanings towards a policy of separation from the motherland. It has now, however, removed all taint of such a suspicion from itself; for it is ultra-loyal, and has always laid it down that federation must be accomplished under the Crown. It was at a conference convened by the Australian Natives' Association, held at Corowa, a small town on the Murray, that the principle was first advocated on which the more recent effort for federation has been conducted. This was that the people must be directly interested in the movement, by themselves electing delegates to a convention, apart from the Parliaments.

It is at this point that Mr G. H. Reid, the then Premier of New South Wales, becomes a prominent figure in the federation movement: which, indeed, it will easily be seen, has throughout (until the uprising of the national sentiment to which I referred) been a favourite means of self-advertisement, or play-ground for the personal ambitions, of one politician after another. Mr Reid is the most astute of them all; and is, indeed, the one man with whom the Home Government will have to reckon in case of trouble over the proposed abolition of the appeal to the Privy Council. He was not a member of the Convention of 1891, and posed as a strong opponent of the measure drafted by that Convention. But it is a curious feature of Australian politics that everyone is in favour of federation—even its most determined opponents. It is always only to the particular form, time, or conditions of federation that ostensible objection is taken, Mr Reid's position, then,