Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/194

 proposed were discreet and liberal they would prove adequate and satisfactory; but I warned the Government that while the Land Bill was postponed they must forbid a system which had hitherto prevailed of selling the territory in principalities to squatters. The proposed extension of the franchise, it was insisted, did not go far enough, and it retained unjustifiable privileges in the interests of the wealthy. The merchants and lawyers, for example, who resided in the suburbs would have votes where they resided, and would have other votes in Melbourne from their warehouses or chambers. The Opposition insisted on the arrangement which in these times is called "one man one vote," but it is a fact of curious significance that though the proposal was renewed on every suitable occasion during the forty years which have followed, it has not yet become law in that democratic colony. The measure had another provision to which some of the supporters of the Government and several of the Opposition took exception; it recognised the right of minorities to be represented, and proposed to provide for it by three-cornered constituencies, or by constituencies with five representatives, of whom an elector could only vote for three. I recognised this as a just proposal, and separated from the bulk of the Opposition by giving it my cordial support. Mr. O'Shanassy took the same course, and the supporters of the Government who had been murmuring their apprehensions now burst out with the objection that the proposed arrangement would doubtless give an undue advantage to Catholics. In the existing Chamber Catholics were entitled by population to seventeen members, and they had only seven, the utmost the proposed change could give them was some approximation to the number they were entitled to, but, to bigots, that seemed an alarming calamity. The desire that Parliament shall be the exponent of the whole people, not merely of a majority, is true Democracy. But Democracy commonly abandons that position and allies itself with the selfish interests of a single class. Mr. Haines, who was not at all a bigot, but a High Churchman, who probably thought a Puritan more objectionable than a Papist, was alarmed at the clamour, and proposed a new and, as he affirmed, less dangerous manner of applying the system, the