Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/45

 After reading such gentle effusions as these, Sir George Gipps must have felt that the great "power of public opinion," so far as his late nominee member was its interpreter, was thoroughly antagonistic, not only to him personally, but to the entire system of government then in vogue in the Colony.

But it was in dealing with the wider question of the relations existing between England and her Colonies that Robert Lowe's pen found its fullest scope. It should be borne in mind that he wrote before the era of "responsible government" in the Colonies. The outlying possessions of England were then governed, or rather misgoverned, by despatches from Downing Street, which, as Lowe pointed out, were not the work of the Secretary of State, or even of the chief permanent officials, but emanated from "the doubly-irresponsible, because utterly unknown and obscure. Clerk."

The account he gives of the manner in which our whole Colonial Empire was governed forty years ago can only be applicable now to the straggling remnant of Crown Colonies. For the evils under which New South Wales was then, according to the