Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/345

 which it would be pleasant to work; Henry Parkes was the Prime Minister, and Edward Butler the Attorney-General. I concluded that Federation was now safe, but I took too little account of the strong and perverse interests I had to encounter at home. My most bitter party opponents in the Press acknowledged that I had vindicated the interests of the colony prudently and successfully. But a section of the Opposition in Parliament which did not dispute this fact, seized the opportunity when I was most deeply immersed in the Inter- colonial Conference to move in the Assembly a vote intended to destroy the Government. The vote concerned the Railway Department, and as it altogether failed is only necessary to be noticed in this place, because it withdrew me for a day from the Inter-colonial Conference, where my place as chairman was filled by Sir James Martin. When I returned to the Conference, we completed the case to be submitted to the Imperial Government. It was not reasonable, we insisted, that communities which founded great states, built great cities, and established a commercial navy larger than that of many kingdoms in Europe, and who did these things without asking assistance from the Imperial Government, should be treated as persons who could not be entrusted to regulate their own inter-colonial interests at their own discretion, and we claimed that all existing restrictions on the power of making fiscal agreements between the colonies should be removed. Our appeal was successful, and the statute we demanded was speedily passed into law.

But to succeed is not the way to placate an Opposition. Some inaccurate and exaggerated gossip about differences in the Conference had got abroad, and Mr. Fellows accepting it as true, framed 3. vote of want of confidence against the Government, in which, after objecting to certain propositions to which the Colonial Conference had agreed, he asked the House to affirm that they had been induced to adopt these objectionable propositions by the Chief Secretary of Victoria. He proceeded to say that it was known the Chief Secretary had refused to sign an address to the Secretary of State, framed by Sir James Martin, because it contained a passage strongly objecting to the dismemberment of the British Empire. This was the case against me, but never had party