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 that the public are so apathetic as to their nostrums. The great mass of the people are not unmindful of the laborious, and often disinterested, services of these performers on the public stage, but they sometimes grow weary of all this mouthing and iteration, and pay but scant heed to the trumpetings forth about new pieces and new players. For they have a shrewd idea that the pieces would be after all very familiar, and though the chief performer might come out in fresh and gorgeous dresses for which they would have to pay, he would be only the same familiar, much abused, but after all popular old favourite.

Since then, I admit, a practical step has been taken in the direction of Australian federation, mainly at the instigation of Mr, James Service, when Premier of Victoria. This was the result, as all such movements are, of foreign pressure. It arose from a sense of the weakness of the disunited colonies to resent the intrusion of powerful European states in the waters of the South Pacific, and was notably fostered by the characteristically reckless policy of France, which presumed to occupy the New Hebrides, a group of islands whose neutrality had been ratified by treaty, and then