The new Parliament opened with whatever ceremony and state the colony could furnish. The day was proclaimed a holiday; the soldiers of the 4ist Regiment, the Volunteer Artillery, and Rifles were drawn out. Flags and banners streamed from the houses in the line of procession, bands enlivened the scene. The Corporation, headed by the Mayor, the Judges in their robes, the Town Councillors in their uniforms, the Foreign Consuls looking as like Ambassadors as they could contrive to do, and the Governor, accompanied by a staff, and escorted by volunteer cavalry, arrived at a Chamber crowded with ladies. The military display was very unparliamentary, but this was a harmless blunder: a more serious one fixing the relation of the House to the Executive Government followed. The Chief Secretary announced that the Governor when he reached the Council would "command" the attendance of our House. The Speaker sent the Clerk to me with a scrap of paper on which he had written, "Are we to be commanded?" I consulted O'Shanassy and Chapman, and we frankly told the official leader of the House that this phraseology could not be permitted. After some negotiation the Governor "requested" our attendance.
The Ministry were men of respectable capacity, good character, and reasonably good intentions, but some of them were very prejudiced against popular liberty, and they were all (except the Chief Secretary) responsible for a system of government on the goldfields which had fallen with a crash but was still detested. They had been appointed from Downing Street, or by a Governor nominated from Downing Street, and the current of popular sympathy ran high against them. They brought into the Chamber a larger proportion of paid officers than I have ever seen in any legislature, and they had little other steady support but from the squatters who relied upon them to protect their tenure of the public lands, and the bankers who thought they were the only bulwark against a democratic-digger Administration with which we were constantly threatened by alarmists. The Chief Secretary, Mr. Haines, had been educated at Oxford, and was designed to be a doctor, but in Australia he purchased land and settled down to the quiet life of a gentleman
