Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/173

 the career of this Australian "nation-builder." He crave New South Wales its constitution. He established in the colony trial by jury. He founded the Sydney University, from which has sprung every other alma mater at the Antipodes. That such achievements were not the results of mere good fortune, or blind chance, but were the work of a great and comprehensive political genius, will perhaps best be brought home to the minds of Englishmen, by reiterating that Wentworth's rival, both in the Senate and at the Bar of New South Wales, was Robert Lowe, and that on most occasions he proved himself quite the intellectual compeer of the future Viscount Sherbrooke.

William Charles Wentworth, who was born in New Norfolk, then a famous, or infamous, penal settlement, and educated at the University of Cambridge, was by descent Anglo-Irish; his father hailing from Ireland, but his historic name and religious creed are full evidence of his English lineage. Turning to the colony with which, like Sir C. Gavan Duffy, I am most familiar, Victoria, I too can recall the time when its intellectual princes were, with one or two exceptions, of Anglo-Irish stock. What Victorian can forget Sir William Foster Stawell,