Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/193

 that you never were so vigorous as when personally assailed. That speech, I think, will bear you interest in the vindication of both character and intellect."

This ignominious defeat of the first popular Administration was pronounced by enthusiastic Conservatives to be not only a decisive victory for Conservative opinions, but a fatal, if not a final, overthrow of the Progressive Party. But the interregnum was brief. After a single session, protracted to over nine months, the reformers returned to office, and under some form, sometimes as a naked democracy, sometimes in coalition with men of more sober views, they have exercised power from that period to the present.

The history of the interregnum may be briefly told. The new Government consisted of Mr. Haines and a couple of his original colleagues and three or four men who had been leaders among the Opposition before which Mr. Haines had fallen. They were greatly strengthened by the adhesion of Mr. Michie as Attorney-General; a debater so skilful and accomplished that I constantly compared him in my mind to Mr. Disraeli, with whom, under favourable conditions, he could have maintained a not unequal fight.

It was certain in a Democratic community like Victoria that Democratic changes would be effected, and this Conservative Government determined to concede the measures which were inevitable, confident that they could regulate them more considerately than their probable successors. But this is always a dangerous experiment. If the people have not confidence in the intentions by which the promoters of a reform are moved, it is necessary to make larger concessions than would content them from the natural spokesmen of their opinions. The programme of the Government was to postpone all serious questions, such as that of the Public Lands and Civil Service, till the Legislative Assembly was brought into closer harmony with public opinion, and with that view they proposed to extend the franchise, to increase the number of members, to reduce the duration of Parliament from five to three years, and to secure its independence by prohibiting any salaried officer from sitting in either House. The Opposition assailed this programme as stinted and meagre. I, on the contrary, admitted that if the measures