Page:Banking Under Difficulties- Or Life On The Goldfields Of Victoria, New South Wales And New Zealand (1888).pdf/45

36 the Queen’s troops and the insurgents. Begun at Bendigo in 1853, the agitation against the goldfields license tax, and for representation in Parliament, was quickly taken up in Ballarat, and was there pushed forward with more eventful incident to a more tragic conclusion. The outbreak was not that of a stupid, solid, ignorant peasantry in arms, against haystacks and threshing machines, but of a free spirited, intelligent people, goaded to resistance by intolerable wrongs, and guided, at all events during a portion of the period, by men of education and character among themselves, aided by a provincial press created and sustained for the most part by men also from among their own ranks. When commissioners, magistrates, and troopers had got used to treat the diggers as people to be taxed and worried at pleasure, the offensive method of carrying out the obnoxious license law had grown so irksome that a reform of the whole system was irresistibly pressed upon the population.”