Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/258

 take years of bitter experience to teach the masses of the people that the business of legislation cannot with safety be entrusted to the ignorant stump orators and pothouse politicians who are now practically our rulers.

"It is possible that you and I, if in the same assembly, would not often agree in reference to the forms of the Constitution, but in all those matters which constitute the business of Government I am disposed to think that we should generally be found voting on the same side.

"Again thanking you for your kind remembrance of me, believe me to be yours most faithfully, "."

A new Administration, under Mr. McCulloch, was now created, which exercised power under various modifications and some temporary interruption for eight years, a period nearly as long as the seven Administrations which preceded it had occupied. It was a coalition between the squatters and the more moderate of the democracy. The former were represented by three squatters, two of them were also import merchants, a banker, and two barristers at the head of their profession. The democracy were represented by a coachbuilder, a mining agent, an attorney, and an accountant. It did not include one of the discontented democrats who had gone over to the squatters on the fall of the Nicholson Government; and Mr. Brooke, the agent of that intrigue, and author of the illegal Occupation Licenses, was omitted. Mr. McCulloch was the head of the squatting party, and Mr. Heales of the democracy; the Law Officers, Messrs. Michie and Higinbotham, constituted a nexus between them. When I went, according to ordinary official courtesy, to introduce the new President of the Board of Land and Works to the Department I was quitting, I exhorted him to save my Land Act in the spirit he had always professed. He said he had only entered the Government on a strict understanding that he would be able to establish the principles he had always contended for, and he could count upon Grant and Sullivan to aid him. Mr. McCulloch told him that his friends would not endure Brooke, and so that ingenious person was happily got rid of. Dr. Owen was made Whip, neither he nor any of