movements and personal manœuvres of even so august a body as the House of Commons. However, William Macleay, whenever he thought the Sydney legislators were doing anything either noteworthy or reprehensible, promptly posted marked copies of the local journals to Lowndes Square and sometimes added a few pungent comments of his own. It was an interesting time in Australia, and even the scholarly recluse of Elizabeth Bay often sent what an alert journalist would call a first-class item. The gold-fields of Victoria were then in full swing. At that early period there was a romance about the new El Dorado which sent men from the uttermost parts of the earth to the colony of Victoria. This state of things was by no means relished in Sydney, an old and settled city, which suddenly found itself depleted of its working population, every man who could manage it being off to the diggings in the erstwhile despised Port Phillip district. In April 1852, Macleay writes to Lowe :-- We thought that we should be inundated with emigrants, instead of which we are worse off for labour every day. Our own diggings do not absorb much of the labouring class, but at Mount Alexander and the Loddon there are more than 70,000 diggers at work from all parts of the world except Europe. Captain Bunbury, the postmaster, who has just come up from Melbourne, tells us that every person there carries fire-arms with him when he leaves his house, and no wonder, when Sir William Denison is constantly pouring out shoals of Lord Grey's pets upon the Victorian shores. The other night a gang of twenty armed villains took a ship anchored close to Melbourne on the eve of sailing for London, and carried off 8.000 ounces of gold (about 30,000l.) when almost within hail of the Melbourne Police Office. This has had such an effect that the insurance offices will not now insure vessels in harbour, nor until they are outside Port Phillip. As all our mauvais sujets are off to Melbourne, I never knew this place so quiet; a robbery in Sydney is never heard of. The writer then proceeds to dilate on the doings of Bishop Broughton. 'Since you left (he writes), the Bishop has Then Governor of Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania). broken his tether and become quite rampant and unmanageable. He has quarrelled with the Chief Justice, Captain King, and even with Charlie Cowper, and in fact has turned them all out neck and crop from that conclave of his elect, the Diocesan Committee.' Macleay was, if anything, more anticlerical than Lowe himself; many of the attacks in the Atlas on Bishop Broughton were from his pen, though the public and the bishop attributed them to Lowe. Cowper, on the other hand, who also wrote regularly from Sydney to Lowndes Square, was a strange mixture of pious predilections and mundane practices. He was Lowe's foremost follower as a Sydney politician, and he had many excellent qualities as a public man. With the possible exception of the present Sir Henry Parkes, Cowper proved himself in after years the most successful Prime Minister of New South Wales. Lowe thought more highly of him on the whole than of almost any other politician in Australia; but his attachment to Bishop Broughton and the Laymen's League' provoked Lowe on one occasion to declare that if Cowper saw the Gates of Heaven thrown open, he would not walk through straight, but would wriggle in.' This is one of those pungent sayings which are remembered and thrown in the teeth of a public man by opponents too stupid to invent an epigram. When Sir Charles Cowper had become the foremost public man in the Colony, Lord Sherbrooke's swift and momentary retort was quoted ad nauseam, usually without the slightest appositeness, by envious rivals. Years after the wit who first uttered it had quite forgotten the circumstance, it was used again and again to show the light estimation in which he must have held the person so severely satirised. But such a deduction would be equally unfair, both to Lord Sherbrooke and Sir Charles Cowper. In fact, it is only another illustration of the misleading nature of most anecdotes and sharp sayings of celebrated men; they are told, as a rule, with a complete oblivion of the context and the circumstances that evoked them-deprived, so to say, of their 'atmosphere.' Such an anecdote as this, told in the common way as a kind of isolated Joe Miller,' would leave the impression that Lord Sherbrooke thought very meanly of Cowper, whereas he distinctly regarded him as the best man of business and the ablest politician, except Wentworth and Windeyer, whom he had met in Australia. Cowper was, in fact, the only active politician in Sydney with whom Lowe kept up any regular correspondence after he came to London. His letters fully made up for Macleay's deficiencies in the matter of political intelligence. Cowper had assumed the leadership of what, for want of a better term, must be called the Liberal party in Sydney after Lowe relinquished it. He kept a most vigilant eye on Wentworth and Deas Thomson, and duly reported their various manœuvres to head-quarters at Lowndes Square. His letters, like those of other pious' persons, teem with gossip and scandal-but there is no need to resuscitate such at this late day. Sydney just then was in the very throes of political agitation. The English Government, despairing of sending out a ready-made Constitution that should satisfy the colonies, had handed over the task to the local Legislative Council. This was certainly a not very heroic proceeding on the part of the Duke of Newcastle, then Colonial Secretary, and, like most easy-going, temporising acts, it led to confusion and unsettlement. The Legislative Council of Sydney, after Lowe's departure, was easily dominated by Wentworth and the old Crown officials, of whom Deas Thomson was the head. These gentlemen, with a sublime disregard of public opinion, framed a Constitution which comprised an Upper House of Crown nominees, who were then and there to become members of a brand-new colonial peerage. The scheme was ridiculed to death by Parkes, Lang, Deniehy, and other popular Sydney orators of the day; and though Wentworth and Deas Thomson came to London officially with a view of expediting the passing of their Constitution Bill through the Imperial Parliament, this proposal came to naught. Wentworth was very much in earnest on the subject, and even Mr. Rusden, the Australian historian, seems to think that a House of Colonial Peers, constructed out of the somewhat dubious elements then to be found in Sydney, would have been a breakwater against democracy. For my part, I think that Robert Lowe, who knew his Sydney well, hit the nail very truly on the head when he thus condemned the scheme in the leading columns of the Times : The plutocracy of the South is much mistaken if it supposes that mere wealth would be considered here any cause for the establishment of, or any title of admission to, hereditary rank. Mere money is sufficiently attractive without embodying its idolatry in an Act of Parliament conferring titles on a large number of men solely because they are rich. These are not times for unnecessarily degrading whatever of the aristocratic principle is left in our Constitution; and if we are to preserve an hereditary peerage in England, we must not establish a ridiculous counterpart amid the reminiscences of a penal settlement. To the ears of many Australians of to-day, who would be equally opposed to such a ridiculous proposal as this colonial House of Peers, it may appear that Lord Sherbrooke in penning these sentences forgot his customary good feeling and courtesy towards the Australian colonies. But it must be remembered that he was writing in 1853, and that the effect of Wentworth's proposal would have been to raise a number of the wealthy 'emancipist' class into a quasi-aristocratic caste, to the infinite disgust of the less wealthy but more respectable inhabitants, and to the permanent degradation of the colony. That this was the prevailing feeling in the colony at the time is shown by a letter of Cowper's, dated 25th February, 1854: Thomson and Wentworth are desperately uncomfortable at the Times article of 31st of October. It was a splendid article, every tittle of it true, and I hope the subject will be discussed throughout in the same slashing style. The colony is delighted with it. Wentworth will go in the Bombay. Edward Hamilton is trying to sell off and quit, and he will, I dare say, get away within a year. Martin' & Co. are getting up a grand dinner for Wentworth before he goes. Write to me how the Constitution Bill is likely to be dealt with at home.' How it was dealt with has been briefly indicated in the preceding paragraph. These few extracts will show what a keen interest was being taken in the little world of Sydney on their future form of government, while the Colonial Minister, Lord John Russell, was in the midst of his Vienna Conferences. The fact is that, but for the influence of Robert Lowe, in Parliament and on the Times, Wentworth and the little knot of Crown officials in Sydney had the whole matter in their hands. As far as one can see, they could have made themselves peers, voted themselves retiring pensions at the rate of their full salaries, or have done anything else without let or hindrance, and in defiance of public opinion in the colony. With the Crimean war on our hands, and afterwards the Indian Mutiny, we had little time to bestow on the squabblings of some three dozen members of a provincial Legislative Council. It was a golden opportunity for the local place-hunter, and with an easy-going epicurean like Sir Charles Fitzroy as Governor, Wentworth and the Crown officials would have done precisely what they liked but for the vigilant watchman of Lowndes Square. It is little wonder that Lowe was hated by the official class in New South Wales. In one of his letters Cowper throws a bright ray of daylight on some of these dark doings. After explaining certain of the provisions in the Constitution Bill which Wentworth and Deas Thomson were to bring home and, if possible, induce the House of Commons to pass, he adds: The Judges and Plunkett and Manning are very much annoyed at the clause which was so shamefully smuggled into the Bill, to provide specially for Roger Therry to get a retiring The late Sir James Martin, Chief Justice of New South Wales. H |