This poster sums up the argument for Federation based on national feeling.

Focus questions
NaQ1 What reasons are given for voting for Federation?
NaQ2 What sort of feelings do you think the poster is designed to excite in the reader?

To the Australian Born.

No people in the world have been so manifestly marked out by destiny to live under one Government as the people of this island continent; but no people with so little reason have been so disunited in their public actions.

The Vote On Tuesday next will determine whether we will: continue as we are, a cluster of petty provinces, each waging a wasteful competition with the other by means of hostile tariffs and railway rates; or whether we shall have the courage to accept the responsibility cast upon us by our heritage of this great Continent.

"A Continent for a People, a People for a Continent," was Mr. Barton's fine expression of a noble hope four years ago. If Australians are true to themselves this hope will be realised on June 20th.

All the difficulties in the way of Union vanish if we look at them as Australians, and not as the inhabitants of any single province. There should be no more difference between, say, Victoria and New South Wales, than there is in Great Britain between Somerset and Yorkshire.

Australia is our home. Our aspiration is to make Australia great.

If this is "sentiment" it is also "hard sense." No Nation has ever played a worthy part in the world unless it has had confidence in its own future.

A Nation's Greatness does not depend upon Acreage of Territory or Material Wealth, but on the nobleness of the thoughts by which its people are inspired; and of all the impulses to noble deeds which history records there is none more universal or more potent than this sentiment of Nationality.

Let us become a Nation

and establish in the Southern Hemisphere a POWER which makes for Peace and Order in the sight of other nations, and which will prove to men of every race that the decendants[sic] of Britons in AUSTRALIA HAVE NOT LOST THEIR CAPACITY FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT.

William Brooks & Co., Printers, 17 Castlereagh Street, Sydney.

In Scott Bennett (ed.), Federation, Cassell Australia, North Melbourne, 1975, p. 29.