Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/339

 CHAPTER III

PRIME MINISTER

the administration of public affairs with the confident determination that for once there should be a Government framing large and generous projects, and against whose exercise of patronage or encouragement of enterprises no man could utter a just reproach. But reproaches which are not just can no more be shut out than the east wind. A quarter of a century after the events of that day, I look back on them with the confident assurance that nothing was done which needs to be repented, or which I would not repeat if the occasion occurred.

Among the designs in which I had been baulked by the ignorance and prejudices of successors, the design of establishing new industries suitable to a southern soil and climate, was the most important. I determined to take it up anew. Without importing more than a score of teachers there were 321