CHAPTER V
IN OPPOSITION
Position of the defeated Government—"The Corner"—Organisation of the Opposition—New opinions and desires—Distribution of the business of the party—Political badinage—The Chinese invasion—Land Bill of the new Government—Slow progress—Two Ministers retire—Proposed squatting government—How this project was defeated—Mr. Heales sent for by the Governor, and asks me to take the lead and become Prime Minister—The difficulty about a dissolution—The Nicholson Government remain—Are again defeated, and the Heales Government is formed by the aid of the squatters—Proposal to me to become Speaker declined—The Occupation Licenses—My exposure of their weakness and futility—Mr. Loader's resignation—Dissolution of Parliament—Success of the Government on the goldfields—My election and the elections in the western district—Rally of the new Opposition—Haines and O'Shanassy—Defeat of the Heales Government—Letters from Richard Cobden, Sir Emerson Tennant, John Henry Newman, Sir Arthur Helps, Henry Parkes—Letter from the professors of the Melbourne University.
The remnant of the defeated Government took up their places on the front Opposition Bench, of which they only occupied a corner; with the few supporters who followed them they rarely mustered half a dozen members. Below the gangway the real Opposition were gathered, the Mining and Convention members and the men who adhered to me when I retired from the late Government, the whole amounting together to somewhat more than a score. The new Government slightly outnumbered both sections of the Opposition, and were rendered safe by the fact that these sections disliked each other more than they disliked the enemy in front. The party below the gangway was without a name, without a policy, and without a leader; in a debate one of them spoke of the members surrounding him as "the men in that corner," and the name of "the Corner" was fixed
202
