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MORAL OF QUEENSLAND IMBROGLIO
237

who have stepped into their places. Wentworth, Lowe, Higinbotham, and Grey were all men of oldworld culture, for the most part English university men; but they have been succeeded by those who graduated in the rough-and-tumble of early colonial pioneer life. The old veterans, if their souls longed for an ideal condition of democratic equality in the new world, drew their inspiration from the time when they pondered, in some cloistered precinct, over the Republic of Plato; but, at the same plastic period of life, their successors had vexed themselves over the actual inequalities of fortune, whilst vainly "fossicking" for gold at the diggings, or trying to "run" a store on the very harassing system of "long credit" and "deferred payment." Many of the men who were to take the place of Wentworth and Lowe in the forum began their public career as local preachers and temperance lecturers—those modern representatives of the preaching friars of the Middle Ages,—who, like their forerunners, are almost always on the democratic "ticket," and against the established order of things in Church and State. From the pick of these itinerant preachers has been evolved a very considerable portion of the collective legislative wisdom of Australia.