"Victoria's troops, as seen marching through the city streets on Friday, were as nuggety a set of well-nourished thick-limbed citizens as ever gave the lie to the libel that the Australian is a scraggy, long-legged, weak-backed hybrid.

"From Parliament House to Spencer Street stretched as sturdy and ruddy-faced a column of humanity as any part of the British Dominions will be sending forth. At the time of the Boer war there were some thin and lanky fellows going out, but those were hard times. Successive years of prosperity appear to have wrought a miraculous improvement in Australians, according to the latest soldiering sample.

"Another change since the Kruger crusade was the comparative quietude of the crowd in the streets. When the first South African contingent went away Australia was on the verge of delirium, but the people are sober today. Maybe there is something in the commonly expressed opinion that the occasion is so much more serious that nobody feels much inclined to whoop, but more may be found in the idea that we are changing and becoming a much more phlegmatic nation now that our wild colonial spirits are sobering down. Whatever changes may have come over the character of the crowds, however, the underly with a dash of the bull-dog in it."