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AUSTRALIA AND THE EMPIRE

the first among the ruling caste of Australia. Still, comparatively few ambitious young Englishmen of the high type of Robert Lowe went so far afield to pick up a fortune. Among the English emigrants attracted by the gold discoveries, there were, for the most part, a number of thoroughly respectable, though in most cases unfortunate, middle-class families. With these went in shoals the οἱ πολλοί—lowly men and women,—who, however, by the very fact that they had the spirit and enterprise to cross the great waste of waters, displayed their superiority, at least in these qualities, to their equally poor and discontented but stay-at-home kinsfolk. What part, let me incidentally ask, has this great bulk of Englishry played in the making of Australia?

Were any one to take the trouble to go through the lists of Cabinet Ministers, members of Colonial Legislatures and Municipal Councils, and to examine the names in the learned professions, and those over the great houses of business, and to glance down the roll of members of the clubs and scientific and philosophic institutions, he would find that the overwhelming majority are English.

The "constitutional history of Victoria," says Sir C. Gavan Duffy truly enough, "cannot be written