SYDNEY MORNING HERALD EDITORIAL

Today we begin the new year and the new century, and the dual epoch is signalised for Australia by our entry on a new and broader nationhood. It is not often in history that we meet with coincidences so striking, for it is not often that a nation or a continent takes so momentous a departure, and seldom indeed in the world's history have a people entered into full possession of their heritage under circumstances so auspicious and with an outlook so full of dazzling promise. The year that begins to-day will witness the laying of the basecourse of that political structure which is to rank in future in the world's annals as the Commonwealth of Australia. But who will venture to predict or forecast for us what the century has in reserve of national destiny and brilliant achievement? We begin with a dower of peace. Far removed from the clashing interests of the old world, our people are equipped by a more than usually high average of education, a broader measure of political privilege, and a more generous share of individual freedom and public liberty than those who have preceded us in the race. We inherit to the full those proud traditions which have made the statesmanship and the policy of Britain the admiration of philosophic historians and the models of constitution-makers. We share the national life and thought of an Empire of which the peer has yet to make itself known. We are guarded in our isolation by the iron wall of a navy which is admittedly incomparable, and by a military prestige built up on a record which has never known complete defeat. We have within our borders, in our but partly discovered and exploited natural resources, all the material guarantees for prosperity and greatness. We enter on the new year and the new century a united Australian nation.

The outlook abroad reminds us how rapidly and how radically the conditions of the world are changing ... For with Japan a recognised naval Power, with China opened up and reconstructed as the almost unavoidable result of the campaign of the Allies, with Russia firmly established on the Pacific and linking St Petersburg with Port Arthur [China] by a continuous length of rail, with the United States sharing the domination of the Pacific, and Germany and France active in the same waters, the isolation in the midst of which Australia has grown to today's fruition of nationhood is not likely to remain altogether undisturbed. It has been said that the wars of the future will be wars of trade, and whether this is to be taken literally or in the sense of commercial competition, our share in the developments of the future will not be free from the impact of this responsibility. But even with so pregnant a prospect before us, so full of the chances of national fate, it may be said in no spirit of boastfulness that Australia confidently awaits the future. As the conditions change and grow our population, our prosperity, our enterprise will grow with them. We have a right to expect to be able to more than keep pace with any possible developments in the Pacific, even after the revolutionising effects of a canal across central America have time to make themselves apparent. Nor need we forget that men of British speech all over the world look forward with ever-increasing confidence to that alliance of English-speaking peoples which will one day hold with secure and loyal hands the balance of the world's peace in the interests of civilisation and progress. In that day the federation of South Africa will join hands with those of Canada and Australia in an alliance of brotherhood which will include India and that new dominion growing up under the flag along the banks of the Nile. These daughters of the imperial mother will share in the greater conclave of the nation, and make manifest in counsel the blood-tie and common racial instinct already proved on South African battlefields.

Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 1901, p. 4.