We'll plant a Tree of Liberty
In the centre of the land,
And round it ranged as guardians be,
A vowed and trusty band;

And sages bold and mighty soul'd
Shall dress it day by day:
But woe unto the traitor who
Would break one branch away.

Then sing the Tree of Liberty
For the vow that we have made;
May it so flourish that when we
Are buried in its shade,
Fair Womanhood and Love and Good,
All pilgrims pure shall go
Its growth to bless for happiness -
O may it flourish so!

Till felled by gold as bards have told,
In the Old World once it grew,
But there its fruits were ever sold
And only to the Few:
But here at last, uncurs'd by caste,
Each man at Nature's call
Shall pluck as well what none may sell,
The fruit that blooms for All.

By gold 'twas felled as bards have held
In the Old World where it grew,
But here the power that there dispelled
Its life shall be its dew:
The evil bout of Time is out,
And gold no more a thrall,
Shall here but build for Truth and gild
The fruit that blooms for All.

Then sing the Tree of Liberty,
And the men who shall defend
Its glorious future righteously
For this all-glorious end --
That happiness all men to bless
Out with its growth may grow --
Our Southern Tree of Liberty
Shall flourish even so!

For the republican spirit of this and others, of not all of my national poems, I can offer no apology. Why, indeed, should I? Believing, as I do, that men progress as sequently from monarchical to republican ideas (when they do make any moral and social progress at all), as they do from fuedal and despotic ones to those of a limited monarchy. This is strikingly evident in the political tendencies of all modern colonies.

Let civilized men be but placed for a few generations beyond the direct action of courtly and aristocratical influences, and the idea of Equality becomes fundamental in their sense of political and social obligation. They are republicans, in short, and mostly democrats also, before they can render a definite reason, it may be, for the faith that is in them. And this results, I repeat it, from a moral and social progress purely natural to civilized men, though quickened by peculiar circumstances.

The empires, the kingdoms, and aristocracies of Europe were founded either in military dictation, or piece-meal conquest by provincial combinations, during the barbarous, or semi-barbourous ttimes, and have been perpetuated by force and craft, either despotic or legal - by state debts and unequal taxes (as in England), which stipend and favour the wealthy, while they grind the poor into abjectness; or by imperial warcraft, and the not less imperial knout (as in Russia), which brutalize men into hordes of bloodhounds; and they neither would have originated in enlightened times, nor could have obtained over communities previously civilised, in any rational and rightly applied sense of the term.

But although utterly Republican in my politics, speculatively, I yet believe that it will be best for Australia to continue during the present century (at the very least) a part of the British monarchy. For even the state-botches of Downing Street are full fifty years in advance of our present half-educated wool-kings; and such forms of government, therefore, as they may from time to time fabricate for us, though upon the most threadbare models, will be altogether preferable to any things of the kind which the latter would or could tinker up in the event of premature separation. And hence I have called the poem, parenthetically in the heading - A Song for the Future.

But the mere form of a government is, after all, a question of only secondary importance. With out prime moral and intellectual rights thoroughly - that is, constitutionally secured to us; namely, the right of all free men to pursue together upon political and social terms of perfect equality, both their own individual happiness and their country's welfare; to discuss publicly any and every public matter; and to dissent openly from any system of religion. or conform unmolestedly to any mode of worship, however peculiar; with these great rights thus secured, the mere official machinery of a government were, in fact, but a progressive testing and development of the best modes of inter-municipal combination for the general good and security of the state.

And thus simplified, its places - being conferative of onerous honour rather than of pecuniary emolument or political patronage - would no longer be gambled and scrambled for, as hitherto, by countryless lawyers and unprincipled men of talent; nor would they be convertible, as heretofore, into baits and bribes for furthering the worst designs of the self-begodding ambitionist.