Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/212

 Gray, some of which were extreme and impracticable, but which greatly increased the public knowledge and interest in the land question. Before they separated they desired to thank the land reformers in the Government and Parliament for their help and sympathy, and I advised my colleagues and supporters that we should invite them to meet us in a committee-room of the House. This was done, to the consternation of many timid persons, and I told the deputation that as a General Election must follow the Reform Bill, the best way they could promote their opinions was by getting some of themselves elected to Parliament. This sentiment was sharply censured, but after a time nearly a moiety of the delegates became members of the Legislative Assembly. After the convention they established a Land League, which thereafter took an active part in public affairs. I was in general sympathy with it, and helped it occasionally with a little money.

In the Government I gradually found my opinions were not in a majority, and that there was apparently a jealousy of the individual position I occupied in public life, as a man of a certain experience and knowledge. We were tending the infancy of a State which in time would become immense in its power and resources, and I was constantly, perhaps sensitively, anxious to base it on the experiences of the mother country. Some of my colleagues had been municipal councillors, and scarcely realised the difference of the new position they occupied from the old. An incident which seemed trifling at the moment, but involved serious and permanent consequences Occurred. The Indian Mutiny and the frightful stories of massacre which accompanied the first reports, raised a keen feeling of sympathy in the colony. The Legislature voted £25,000 for the relief of the injured and distressed, and the Corporation of Melbourne sent an address of sympathy to the committee managing a fund for the same purpose in London. The committee transmitted their thanks to the Mayor of Melbourne, uniting in a strange salmagundi with him and his colleagues, the Government of the country, as persons to whom the public gratitude was due. The Mayor brought the document to the Chief Secretary, and Mr. O'Shanassy, who was unfamiliar with official practice or