The only names of Australians which are at all familiar to the general run of Englishmen are those of cricketers, rowers, and prizefighters.

If the individualities of merely the Australian public men who, like many of these others, have visited England, were but half as familiar as those of (say) Spofforth, Beach, or Slavin, Imperial Federationists would not be agitating so helplessly in the dark for such hopeless impracticabilities as they are, and there would be a much more appreciable chance than there is of England and Australia getting to understand one another before they are separated à perpetuité.

Let me not seem to depreciate the athletes.

Quite unconsciously, of course, these men of brawn have done more to impress on the race, in its different world-scattered habitats, the fact of its solidarity than all the purposeless rhodomontade that has been, and is being, written and spoken by the amateur and professional agitators on this already tiresome topic.

A few Englishmen talking nonsense about England to Australians, a few Anglo-Australians talking nonsense about Australia to Englishmen, have now become something very like an organised, self-advertising chorus of social cliques, while timid and narrow-minded political leaders in both countries, aware that all this clamour amounts to nothing, are waiting to see if anything verifiably genuine can yet proceed from it before they declare themselves.

Alas, it is not in this way that communities far removed and strange to one another, by reason of in many ways very dissimilar natural and social conditions, escape radical misapprehensions, overcome innate prejudices, learn to understand and trust each other's efforts and aspirations.