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 majority who voted 'Aye' in favour of the Constitution most perceived the evils and the risks of Provincialism more clearly than they appreciated the significance of Federalism. Consequently, from the first the friends of the Commonwealth have seemed half-hearted and its enemies have been persistent.

There is nothing in this experience which need excite surprise. There was the same discontent in the early days of the United States, which found expression in the now half-forgotten rising known to history as the 'Whisky Rebellion'; and contemporary observers have related of Canada that, during the first ten years of the Dominion, not 80 per cent. of Canadians would have voted for its continuance had any opportunity been offered to them of expressing an opinion. It was the same in the case of the Scottish Union with Great Britain, which Lockhart, a contemporary, declared to be 'a base betrayal and mean giving up of the sovereignty, independence, liberty, laws, interest, and honour of Scotland'; and with regard to which he was as thoroughly convinced as any New South Wales provincialist that, if Scotland had only stood out, she could have made her own terms, so satisfied was he that England would not have a lost "a good thing."' 'Had the Scots,' he says, 'stood their ground, I have good reason to affirm that the English would have allowed a much greater number of representatives. The English saw too plainly the advantage that would accrue to England by a union of the two kingdoms upon his scheme, and would never have stuck at any terms to obtain it'

We can now inquire into some of the special difficulties which have beset Australian Federation.

The Government of Sir Edmund Barton had a difficult task from the beginning.

No first Federal Ministry is ever likely to arouse popular enthusiasm, both because it must be formed