Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/341

 grape were as foreign to our forebears as the mango was to us. But ignorance is not easily abashed. Another member whispered, "Let us alone with your new industries. You see what has come of them already. A Scot introduced their charming thistle, and we will have to put a sum on the estimates to extirpate it. Edward Wilson introduced the sparrow, and the sparrow is playing havoc with our vineyards. Some busybody introduced the rabbit, and the income of Ballarat would not save us from the consequences."

The Land Question, which had been my care from the beginning, had been ruined by maladministration. The Land Act of '69 proclaimed free selection over the entire colony, but Mr. McPherson, as Minister of Lands in the last Administration, made such large reserves on various pretences that a map of the colony in which the reserves were marked in red, and the land sold in blue, looked like a shawl of the McPherson plaid; and it was an aggravation of the wrong, that his chief, Sir James McCulloch, the largest owner of squatting runs in the colony, got an inordinate share of these reserves. But from the day we came into office the new Government determined to take the McPherson plaid off the shoulders of Victoria, and establish from the Murray to the sea the Free Selection accorded by law.

The public finances had fallen into confusion. There was a deficit of a quarter of a million. We promised to restore them to order without imposing any new burthen on industry, and in the end we turned the deficit into a surplus. The confusion had been created by a system of finance worthy of Laputa. The State had a reserve of over half a million sterling in the Melbourne banks, yielding only an interest of two per cent., and this identical money we had borrowed in London at five per cent, for a special purpose which had not yet accrued, and Parliament could authorise us to borrow from our own reserve to a prudent extent.

Nothing had been done for the imagination of the people. Melbourne was a provincial English town, and scarcely anything soared beyond the level of provincial mediocrity. All that I had learned in Continental travel I determined to utilise in this new land. History and political science was sometimes taught expressly by the aid of art. On the