be to shut out much talent and learning from the colony; but the remonstrants were thinking of a whole line of incapables and insolvents who had been provided for by the British minister at the expense of the colony.
Again, it is desirable that in certain cases the imperial government should have the power of vetoing colonial legislation; but the remonstrants were thinking of instances then recent in which that power had been exercised in a most injurious manner,—as for instance, in the "Wool Lien Act."
We need not pursue further the particulars of a contest which has died away, not without leaving some ill-healed scars, under the conciliating policy of Earl Grey's successors and the hilarious prosperity of the gold discoveries.
We have mentioned enough to prove that the discontents of the colonists of New South Wales were not excited by imaginary causes, but had their source in real and chiefly in taxing grievances—the sort of grievance, next to an interference with his personal liberty, which troubles the Englishman most acutely.
It is quite certain that the colonists were not always in the right; sometimes in their contests with the Colonial Office they were very much in the wrong,—just as we in England are subject to political and commercial aberrations; but in order to form anything like an apology for Earl Grey's unpopularity in Australia we must assume that he was infallible—that he knew better than any colonist what was good for the colony; and that therefore he was justified in ruling a transmarine dependency, peopled by an English race, on principles that no minister dare apply to Yorkshire or Lancashire.
In the midst of the first session of the new Colonial Parliaments, all political contests, internal and external, were cast into the shade by the gold discoveries: land question, convict question, taxation question, all were absorbed by the digging up of gold, over which flocks and herds had long been carelessly driven. The year 1850 found New South Wales with 200,000 free people, an export of £2,899,600, an import of £2,078,300, and 7,000,000 sheep—a surplus revenue and an annual demand for labour—nominal freedom of self-government, actual restriction from legislation on every vital interest. Who can say in what condition, social and political, 1860 will find the felon colony of 1788?
