galvanic battery placed a long distance off. The operation of firing the mine was made a public occasion, and Lady Belmore agreed to go up to the mountains and perform the ceremony of removing the hill. When all was ready, she touched the knob which brought the two ends of the wire together. A dull and rumbling sound was heard, the solid rock heaved slowly upward, and then settled back to its place, broken in a thousand pieces, and covered with rolling clouds of dust and smoke. All that the workmen had then to do was to carry away the immense pile of stone, and the course was clear for laying the rails.
When the line reached the other side of the Blue Mountains there were great difficulties in the descent, and here the engineers had to lay out zigzags of greater extent than the former. By these the trains now descend easily and safely from the tops of the mountains down into the Lithgow Valley far below.
By the southern railway to Albury, crowds of people are daily whirled in a few hours to places which, forty years ago, were reached by Sturt, and Hume, and Mitchell, only after weeks of patient toil, through unknown lands that were far removed from civilisation.
4. Sydney Exhibition.—So on every hand the colony made progress. Her railways expanded in scores of branches; her telegraph lines stretched out their arms in every direction; her sheep increased so that now there are nearly sixty millions of them; her wheat and maize extended to more than half a million of acres; her orangeries and vineyards and orchards, her mines of coal and tin, and her varied and extensive manufactures, make her people, now numbering a million, one of the most prosperous on the face of the earth. Her pride was pardonable when, in 1879, she held an international exhibition to compare her industries side by side with those of other lands, so as to show how much she had done and to discover how much she had yet to learn. A frail, but wonderfully pretty building rapidly arose on the brow of the hill between Sydney Cove and Farm Cove; and that place, the scene of so much squalor and misery a hundred years before, became gay with all that decorative art could do, and busy with daily throngs of gratified visitors. The place had a most distinguished appearance; seen from the harbour, its dome and fluttering flags rose up from among the luxuriant foliage of the Botanic Gardens, as if boldly to proclaim that New South Wales had completed the period of her infancy and was prepared to take her place among the nations as one grown to full and comely proportions. When the building had served its purpose, the people were too fond and too proud of it to dismantle and destroy it, but unfortunately it was not long after swept away by an accidental fire.
In 1885, the colony was stirred by a great wave of enthusiasm when it was known that its Government had sent to England the offer of a regiment of soldiers to fight in the Soudan side by side with British troops. The offer was accepted, and some seven or eight hundred soldiers, well equipped and full of high hopes, sailed for Africa. The war was too soon over for them to have any chance of displaying what an Australian force may be like upon a battle-field. There were many persons who held that the whole expedition was a mistake. But it had one good effect; for it showed that, for the present at least, the Australian colonies are proud of their mother-country; that their eyes are fondly turned to her, to follow all her destinies in that great career which she has to accomplish as the leading nation of the earth; and that if ever she needed their help, assistance would flow spontaneously from the fulness of loving hearts. The idea of this expedition and its execution belonged principally to C. B. Dalley. But the great leader of New South Wales during the last quarter of a century, and the most zealous worker for its welfare and prosperity, has been the veteran statesman Sir Henry Parkes.
CHAPTER XXII.
VICTORIA, 1855-1890.
1. Responsible Government.—In 1855, when each of the colonies was engaged in framing for itself its own form of government, Victoria, like all the others, chose the English system of two Houses of Legislature. At first it was resolved that the Lower House, called the Legislative Assembly, should consist of only sixty members; but by subsequent additions, the number has been increased to eighty-six: in 1857 the right of voting was conferred upon every man who had resided a sufficient length of time in the colony. With regard to the Upper House Victoria found the same difficulty as had been experienced in New South Wales; but, instead of introducing the system of nomination by the Government, it decided that its Legislative Council should be elected by the people. In order, however, that this body might not be identical in form and opinion with the Lower House, it was arranged that no one should be eligible for election to it who did not possess at least five thousand pounds worth of real property, and that the privilege of voting should be confined to the wealthier part of the community.
Along with this new Constitution responsible government was introduced; and Mr. Haines, being sent for by the Governor, formed the first Ministry. Before the close of the year, the first contest under the new system took place. Mr. Nicholson, a member of the Assembly, moved that the voting for elections should in future be carried on in secret, by means of the ballot-box, so that every man might be able to give his opinion undeterred by any external pressure, such as the fear of displeasing his employer or of disobliging a friend. The Government of Mr. Haines refused its assent to this proposal, which was, nevertheless, carried by the Assembly. Now, the system of responsible government required that, in such a case, Mr. Haines and his fellow-Ministers, being averse to such a law and declining to carry it out, should resign and leave the government to those who were willing and able to inaugurate the newly-appointed system. Accordingly they gave in their resignations, and the Governor asked Mr. Nicholson to form a new Ministry; but, though many members had voted for his proposal, they were not prepared to follow him as their leader. He could obtain very few associates, and was thus unable to form a Ministry; so that there appeared some likelihood of a total failure of responsible government before it had been six months in existence. In the midst of this crisis Sir Charles Hotham was taken ill. He had been present at a prolonged ceremony—the opening of the first gasworks in Melbourne—and a cold south wind had given him a dangerous chill. He lay for a day or two in great danger; but the crisis seemed past, and he had begun to recover, when news was brought to him of Mr. Nicholson’s failure. He lay brooding over these difficulties, which pressed so much upon his mind that he was unable to rally, and on the last day of the year 1855 he died. This was a great shock to the colonists, who had learnt highly to respect him. The vacant position was for a year assumed by Major-General Macarthur, who invited Mr. Haines and his Ministry to return. They did so, and the course of responsible government began again from the beginning. At the end of 1856 another Governor—Sir Henry Barkly—arrived; and during the seven years of his stay the new system worked smoothly enough, the only peculiarity being the rapid changes in the Government. Some of the Ministries lasted only six weeks, and very few protracted their existence to a year.
2. The Deadlock.—Sir Henry Barkly left the colony in 1863, and his place was immediately filled by Sir Charles Darling, nephew of Sir Ralph Darling, who, forty years before, had been Governor of New South Wales. Sir Charles was destined to troublous times; for he had not been long in the colony ere a most vexatious hitch took place in the working of constitutional government. It arose out of a straggle with regard to what is called “Protection to Native Industry”.
The colony was filled with vigorous and enterprising men, who had come to it for the purpose of digging for gold. For four or five years gold digging had been on the average a fairly remunerative occupation. But when all the surface gold had been gathered, and it became necessary to dig shafts many hundreds of feet into the earth, and even then in many cases only to get quartz, from which the gold had to be extracted by crushing and careful washing, then the ordinary worker, who had no command of capital, had to take employment with the wealthier people, who could afford to sink shafts and wait for years before the gold appeared. These men, therefore, had to take small wages for toiling at a most laborious occupation. But most of them had learnt trades of some sort in Europe; and the idea sprang up that if the colony prevented boots from coming into it from outside there would be plenty of work for the bootmakers; if it stopped the importation of engines there would no longer be any reason why engineers should work like navvies at the bottom of gold mines—they would be wanted to make the engines of the colony. After a long agitation, therefore, James M?Culloch, the Premier of the colony, in 1864 brought a bill into the Victorian Legislative Assembly according to which taxes were to be placed on all goods coming into the colony if they were of a sort that might be made within the colony. M?Culloch proposed to make this change because it was
