Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/163

 attractions that have fixed you in Victoria. Now I cannot help teasing you with a faint picture of some of the good things you have missed. Here you might have been at once the popular leader and the highest Minister of State, with a fairy nook on the romantic shores of our noble haven for your home and the most cultivated men in the community as your admiring friends. But what would have been of far higher interest a more spiritual satisfaction to you here you would have had a direct and definitely-ordered mission which there is no one else to enter upon."

The Rev. Dr. Lang was one of the most energetic politicians in Australia. He was head of the Presbyterian College in Sydney, and had reared a generation of students destined to become public men, and he had been a member of the Sydney Legislature during its whole career. Dr. Lang had got into conflict with the Catholics on the question of immigration and of local elections, with the merits of which I was imperfectly acquainted. But there were two facts I knew of him which recommended him to my sympathy. When the Repeal agitation was at its height in '43 he was in London, and wrote a pamphlet justifying and applauding the movement. Of the project most alarming to prejudiced minds—the Council of Three Hundred—this was the language he held:—

"The Repealers are at present electing members for a National Council of Three Hundred, and there is no reason whatever to doubt that, in the present temper of the Irish nation, they will readily find a sufficient number of resolute and devoted men to form such a body; and by whatever name we may choose to miscall the men who will thus be chosen by their country, the wise, both in Europe and America, will at once vouch for their undoubted nobility. The body that will thus be formed will therefore start into existence with the prestige of the original American Congress, and will thenceforth give the law to Ireland."

And in Australian affairs he and Robert Lowe had been the only members of the Legislative Council of New South Wales who joined the Port Phillip members in demanding the erection of Victoria into a separate colony. On my return to Melbourne he addressed a public letter to me accounting for