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MY LIFE IN TWO HEMISPHERES

result considered politically dangerous. It was directed that a large proportion of the Irish immigrants should be female servants, who, having no votes, could not disturb the balance of parties. Johnny Fawkner, who considered himself the founder of the colony, hit on a bolder measure of protection. The Germans were our kinsmen, he said, and co-religionists, and they might be brought out on the same footing as British subjects, and a considerable sum was sent home for this purpose, and lastly a provision was put into an Immigration Act that for the first nine months of the year emigrants should be selected in exact proportion to their number in the population of the United Kingdom, and the fund be open only during the last three months to applicants irrespective of nationality. It was a subject of constant banter how completely these precautions had failed. The Irish servants got quickly married, and it became well known to the wirepullers in politics that no vote was so certain for a popular Irish candidate as the husbands of Irish wives. At my first election it was a marvel to me how often my committee, in speculating on the votes of electors, sometimes with Puritanical or Covenanting names, declared, "Oh, he is all right; he has married an Irishwoman." In another and wider constituency, where there were few roadside inns, the chairman of one of my election meetings, a German settler, invited me to be a guest at his house, and as he drove home I was perturbed with the thought that I understood his language so imperfectly that I would scarcely be able to ask for a cup of tea from the Frau Mama. But when we approached the house I found it lighted up from basement to garret, and a kindly, sonsy woman came out of the hall door and welcomed me. "Arrah, Misther Duffy, am n't I glad to see you under my roof. I give you the Caed Mile failthe." The Teutonic experiment broke down more fatally. Johnny Fawkner supposed that to say German was to say sound Protestant, but the immigrants came from an overcrowded quarter of the Rhine district near Cologne, and every soul of them were Catholic. The bulk of them were settled at Albury on the Murray, and Michael O'Grady who visited the district twenty years after told me that the local priest asked him to inspect his schools, and proposed that he should hear the children of