Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/116

 of natural selection that the democratic party became identical with the colonial, or locally patriotic party; and of course when the conflict came it was victorious all along the line. I am endeavouring at every turn to keep clear of the petty details of party polemics in Australia, and the English reader will be good enough to believe that in refraining from illustrating my points by manifold examples, I do so mainly in his interest. If, however, he will bear in mind that democracy in this way came to be allied in the colonial mind with local patriotism, with a belief in the excellence and in the future of Australia as a land which a man might fitly regard as the patria of his race, he will readily understand its rapid triumph.

At the same time, this generalisation is somewhat too sweeping. As we have seen, the Greatest of Australian public men, and one who certainly was filled with Australian patriotism, favoured the formation of aristocratic, rather than democratic, institutions, for his own particular colony, New South Wales. Sir William Foster Stawell, whose Australian patriotism is quite as strong as Wentworth's, would have probably preferred an anti-democratic constitution fur Victoria.