The Temple Primers

Excerpt from The Temple Primers: Australasia the Commonwealth and New Zealand Since we Britons first discovered that the toil of nation making was peculiarly suited to our tastes and powers, we have set oulselves many problems in colonization, working them out rather by mere instinctive doggedness in the right direction than by a close attention to rules or the guidance of theorizing philosophers. We took over botched jobs from France and from Holland, and have made of them dominions to stir the envy of a Roman emperor we trained the Thirteen States, that are now the mightiest of republics, till they retorted upon us our own lessons: to the ancient civilizations, to yet more ancient savagedoms, of India our rule has brought peace and an orderly growth in which all the virtues of all her tribw are finding their fit use and value. And once we undertook a task unlike all these in its elements, full of natural difficulties, free of international complications. We chose a region that was scarcely more than the raw material of a country, as far removed from the homeland as it well could be: we peopled it for a beginning with men whom we were not disposed to retain in England: we made upon it all manner of experiments, and later on left it to its own devices with the expressed hope that we should soon part company altogether. Our reward is, that the Australian Commonwealth to-day is sturdily proud of its British blood. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.