Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/156

 Englishmen, and would welcome you in common with Irishmen for the sake of being popular with the Irish—only that they dare not. You will say naturally enough, 'Why should I trouble myself about all these people?' For several reasons. First, if you settle in this colony, it is well not to mar your entrance into it by a mistake. Next, the character of our old cause of Young Irelandism will be made or marred for ever in this part of the world by you; and, believe me, you will come to understand how this light can guide one's actions, feeling as if he should compromise his old friends and his old country the moment he compromised himself. It has been my guiding maxim many and many a lonely hour, and I hope and believe that in this respect my life here has been no subject of reproach. Then remember the future, friend and foe concur in destining you for a high career in Australia."

I had gone to the new world weary of political life, and resolved to become a successful lawyer. Some business came to me immediately, and I sat down to work. But a different course had been expected by political friends, and my natural tastes corresponded with their wishes to draw me into public life. The foundations of a new nation were to be laid, the principles for which reformers contended at home might have fair play in a country where there was no aristocracy, no large estates, no paramount authority, and to aid this development was a task which might repay endless toil.

I had been cordially received by the leaders of the Liberal Party, and their programme included the measures that seemed most urgent. Opening the public lands to the people, enlarging the basis of political freedom, and the proclamation of complete religious equality. Among the men who had been the most prompt to welcome me were a small sprinkling of squatters who insisted that I who had fought the battle of the tenants in Ireland must necessarily sympathise with the Crown tenants who were menaced in their rights by a new population who had come for gold, and would abandon the country when they had got it. But I retained one guiding axiom of Jeremy Bentham, then and always "the greatest good of the greatest number," and I