Page:Australian views of England.djvu/47

 LETTER IV.

CAN imagine with what anxiety the Australian colonists will have waited for the intelligence by the present mail, and what a healthful feeling of relief will glow in every breast when the first tidings fall upon their ears. Not that the simple apprehension of the cost of war, nor any lower sense of fear, will have occupied the minds of Englishmen in the remote dependencies of the empire any more than the minds of Englishmen at home. But there were so many conflicting interests to be torn and trampled in the threatened strife between England and America, and so much danger of being precipitated upon ground foreign to all the national sympathies—so much that, while it damped all chivalry of spirit, would