Any one must have seen that the Chief Secretary has gradually been gaining the confidence of the House, though no one could anticipate that he would be able to retain office until the division which took place last night. Every one must feel after the result of that division that he has been adopted as the leader of the House, and that the House places the fullest confidence in him. … He may govern the country for many years, with all the strength which must be possessed by a gentleman who governs not by Parliamentary tactics, but by the mere force of genius, and by being at one with the sentiments of the country. … I do not hesitate to say that the present Chief Secretary is the most powerful Minister that this colony has seen since we have had Constitutional Government.[1]
Political friends at a distance sent me abundant congratulations, but the sympathy of a dear kinswoman touched me nearer.
Friday morning.I cannot resist writing to thank you for your noble vindication of the past. It made me feel young again, swept away how many years of sordid cares and commonplace troubles, and set me face to face with the long ago. I could not read it without thick-coming tears, I cannot write about it without the same accompaniment. Your heart must have coined the phrases that so moved me and not only me, but all round me. I had feared that Philip's Irish blood was cooled or rather frozen by long bank discipline; he came home from the House mad with delight one and all they showed, thank God! their Celtic blood and kindly Irish nurture in their generous transports of delight and pride in their kinsman, not that he was Chief Secretary with a great following in the House though that is much to be proud of but that in the face of a hostile assembly at the risk of his great position, he dared to speak in words that shall live as the apotheosis of Irish treason.
Some of my colleagues, especially the Treasurer, Mr. Graham Berry, were Protectionists, and eager to carry their principles a stage farther than Mr. Francis had proceeded. I had been absent from the colony when the Francis Budget was carried. I had been the first to call attention to the exception, which Stuart Mill admits, authorising the State to give temporary support to the manufacture of an article for which the raw material existed abundantly in the colony. I had consulted Bright, Carlyle, and Mill, as the reader has
- ↑ The Argus, which not unfairly claimed to be the leading journal of the colony, was most unfriendly to my Administration, but the Australasian, a weekly journal published by the same proprietors, was more gene Speaking of this scene it said:— "He avowed, in accents which quivered with emotion and produced powerful effect upon the House, that no honours which he had achieved or might achieve, here or elsewhere, could afford him the pride and gratification which he derived from the retrospect of his efforts in early life on behalf of his native land, when it was smitten with famine and pestilence, and the number of those who perished or fled exceeded the population of the whole of these colonies."
