Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 60.djvu/299

 tion and liberal party,’ of which (Sir) Henry Parkes was the moving spirit (, Fifty Years in the making of Australian History). It was only by the most strenuous effort that Wentworth retained his position on the poll, while his old friend and colleague, Dr. Bland, was defeated, and Lowe returned in his stead. The contest was uncompromisingly bitter from start to finish, and the two chief orators vied with one another in personal invective (, Life and Letters of Lord Sherbrooke, i. 362). It shows Wentworth's acknowledged supremacy that Lowe, in the flush of his popular triumph, declared, when returning thanks after the election, that there was ‘no man in or out of Australia with whom he would be more proud to act, nor, if Mr. Wentworth would but regard public affairs from a national and not a merely personal standpoint, was there one whose leadership he should be more proud to follow’ (ib.)

On 4 Oct. 1849 Wentworth carried the second reading of a bill to found a university at Sydney; but owing to preliminary difficulties with regard to the constitution of the senate, it did not finally receive the assent of the governor, Sir Charles Fitzroy, until 1 Oct. 1850. When ‘the first colonial university in the British empire’ was formally inaugurated on 11 Oct. 1852, its founder was present as one of the fellows. Wentworth was a member of the first senate. In 1854 he gave 250l. for an annual prize for the best English essay; in 1862, 445l. towards a travelling scholarship; and in 1876 Mr. Fitzwilliam Wentworth, his eldest son, made a bequest of 2,000l. to found two bursaries in his father's honour. By royal charter (7 Feb. 1858) the same rank, style, and precedence were granted to the students at Sydney as are enjoyed by those at the English universities.

On 5 Aug. 1850 Earl Grey's Australian colonies government bill was passed (under which Port Phillip was erected into the separate colony of Victoria, and the 20l. household suffrage in the colony reduced to 10l.) Wentworth at once obtained a select committee of the legislative council to report on this measure; and on 1 May 1851 a ‘remonstrance’ was adopted and entered on the minutes. ‘The hand of the author, William Wentworth, fiercely eloquent, is visible in every line’ (, The Three Colonies of Australia, p. 176). At the election of 1851 Wentworth, though again returned for Sydney, was third on the poll; this was the result of the rapid increase of working-class immigrants, ‘interlopers,’ as he once termed them. Sir John Pakington, secretary of state, in a despatch on 15 Dec. 1852, announced that the English government had practically decided in accordance with Wentworth's ‘remonstrance’ to empower Australia to mould her own future (cf., Hist. of Australia, ii. 503). On receipt of this despatch (20 May 1853) the council appointed a committee to prepare a constitution; of this committee Wentworth was the mover, chairman, and dominant spirit. On 28 July Wentworth brought up the report which advocated ‘a form of government based on the analogies of the British constitution,’ and urged the advisability of ‘the creation of hereditary titles, leaving it to the option of the crown to annex to the title of the first patentee a seat for life’ in the upper house, ‘and conferring on the original patentees and their descendants, inheritors of their title, the power to elect a certain number of their order to form, in conjunction with the original patentees then living, an upper house of parliament which would be a great improvement on any form of legislative council hitherto tried or recommended in any British colony.’ The opposition on the part of the rising democracy out of doors to this clause was overpowering, and Wentworth very reluctantly had to consent to abandon his scheme for creating an Australian peerage. By abandoning the clauses relating to hereditary honours, Wentworth carried his bill by an overwhelming majority, and it was ‘reserved for her majesty's pleasure,’ the governor being requested to inform the secretary of state ‘that large majorities both of the nominated and elected members’ had voted for it. Wentworth and (Sir) Edward Deas Thomson [q. v.] were deputed by the council to proceed to England to advocate the constitution bill before the imperial parliament. The leaders of the liberal opposition in the colony, through Mr. (afterwards Sir Charles) Cowper, co-operated with Robert Lowe, who was then member for Kidderminster, to modify and amend the bill in the imperial parliament. This, to Wentworth's disgust, they succeeded in doing; and to his dying day he bitterly regretted that Lord John Russell had consented to strangle the clause under which it was decreed that no change in the Australian constitution should become law without the consent of a two-thirds majority of both houses. Having been compelled to forgo his titled upper house, Wentworth regarded this clause as the sheet-anchor against the storms and dangers of the rising colonial democracy whom he dreaded, and whose leader (Parkes) he dubbed the ‘archanarchist.’ He formed in London a ‘General Association for the