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142
AUSTRALIA AND THE EMPIRE

formerly Chief-Justice, now Lieutenant-Governor of the colony, a man with the singleness of purpose, and inflexibility of will, of his great countryman the Iron Duke, and who, whether as the leading politician or the highest judge, has left the impress of his character and personality like that of a die on the colony? As a judge, however, he was surpassed by the judicial temperament and legal attainments of Mr. Justice Molesworth, who for many years presided over the Equity Court, and whose decisions were often reviewed, but rarely if ever reversed, by the Privy Council. He too was born in Ireland, educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and called to the Irish bar, but was of course of an English patrician family. The late Dr. William Edward Hearn,[1] the well-known constitutional lawyer and political economist, "the greatest thinker who ever made his home in a British colony," was also of the "English garrison" of Ireland; while in Mr. George Higinbotham, who has worthily succeeded Sir "William Foster Stawell in the Chief-Justiceship of Victoria, we have yet another Anglo-Irishman, who, under the widest democratic suffrage, ruled the colony, for a number of years, with almost the

  1. See Appendix G,—Obituary, Dr. Hearn.