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attempting to give, in the compass of a short book, some general account of the interdependent relations between "Australia and the Empire," I think I may lessen my reader's labour, as well as my own, by opening with two retrospective sketches. In the first, which takes us back some forty years, I propose to give a brief, but hitherto unwritten narrative of the public life in New South Wales of one of the most brilliant of contemporary Englishmen. And this may be not unfitly followed by a description of the England of a quarter of a century ago, as seen by the distinguished Australian statesman who may be said to have commenced his public career in Sydney under the ægis of Lord Sherbrooke,

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