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THE THREE COLONIES OF AUSTRALIA.
In the new province of Victoria, and in South Australia, the new law was received, as was to be expected, with universal satisfaction. They had obtained at least as much as they expected; but when the colonists of New South Wales found that the clauses as to land and revenue for which they were most anxious had been excised, their universal discontent was embodied in the following remonstrance, and passed as almost their last act by the expiring Legislative Council. The hand of the author, William Wentworth, fiercely eloquent, is visible in every line:—
"We, the Legislative Council of New South Wales, in council assembled, feel it a solemn duty which we owe to ourselves, our constituents, and our posterity, before we give place to the new legislature established by the 13 and 14 Vict., cap. 59, to record our deep disappointment and dissatisfaction at the constitution conferred by that act on the colony we represent. After the reiterated reports, resolutions, addresses, and petitions, which have proceeded from us during the whole course of our legislative career, against the schedules appended to the 5 and 6 Vict., cap. 76, and the appropriations of our ordinary revenue therein made, by the sole authority of Parliament—against the administration of our waste lands, and our territorial revenue thence arising—against the withholding of the customs department from our control—against the dispensation of the patronage of the colony by or at the nomination of the minister for the colonies—and against the veto reserved and exercised by the same minister, in the name of the crown, in all matters of local legislation; we feel that we had a right to expect that these undoubted grievances would have been redressed by the 13 and 14 Vict,, cap. 59; or else that power to redress them would have been conferred on the constituent bodies thereby created, with the avowed intention of establishing an authority more competent than Parliament itself to frame suitable constitutions for the whole group of the Australian colonies. These our reasonable expectations have been utterly frustrated. The schedules, instead of being abolished, have been increased. The powers of altering the appropriations in these schedules, conferred on the colonial legislature by this new enactment, limited as these powers are, have been, in effect, nullified by the subsequent instructions of the colonial minister. The exploded fallacies of the Wakefield theory are still clung to; the pernicious Land Sales Act (5 and 6 Vict., cap. 36) is still maintained in all its integrity; and thousands of our fellow-countrymen (in consequence of the undue price put by that mischievous and impolitic enactment upon our waste lands, in defiance of the precedents of the United States, of Canada, and the other North American colonies, and even of the neighbouring colony of the Cape of Good Hope) are annually diverted from our shores, and thus forced against their will to seek a home for themselves and their children in the backwoods of America. Nor is this all. Our territorial revenue,, diminished as it is by this insane policy, is in a great measure confined to the introduction among us of people unsuited to our wants, in many instances the outpourings of the poorhouses and unions of the United Kingdom; instead of being applied, as it ought to be, in directing to our colony a stream of vigorous and efficient labour, calculated to elevate the character of our industrial population. The bestowal of offices among us, with but partial exceptions, is still exercised by or at the nomination of the colonial minister, and without reference to the just and para-
