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 considerable interest in damaging the Government. During the recess the fire of their journals was fierce and incessant. A happy accident furnished a convenient mode of reply. The popular sympathy with the Government expressed itself in invitations to banquets in all the great towns of the colony in succession, and on all the great goldfields. I was unwilling to divert time from administrative work, but I could not allow the authority of the Government to be undermined by slander, and I accepted the invitations and took the field in our defence. I scorned to answer personal attacks, but the standard-bearer of a party, the head of an Administration cannot permit his principles or his colleagues to be belied, and I answered all that had been said against us to the vehement satisfaction of our audiences. I still more industriously expounded and justified the opinions which we represented. I presented to the people the record of a state endowed with prodigious natural gifts, and which might confidently count, with wise government, on a great future. Her revenue was greater than that of any British colony, far greater than that of all the South African colonies united or all the West Indian settlements, greater than any of the Australian colonies or of three of them taken together, and greater than one of the oldest and most populous of the colonies—Canada. Her foreign commerce was in about the same proportion as her revenue to that of these other British possessions. And this prosperity was on the increase, the three great colonial interests—mining, agriculture, and squatting—were more prosperous than they had been for the past ten years. A community where property is widely diffused among the class who actually till the land is of all others the community most contented, most orderly, and where manners are simplest and morals purest—and that class of cultivators obtain most from the soil and increase most rapidly the savings which constitute the wealth of a nation. I constantly reiterated the advice to be prudent and saving, not because I rated money-making as the highest of human pursuits, but because history teaches that national wealth is the nurse of civilisation and liberty. With wealth come the agents of civilisation and the inevitable ambition to be first in the arts of peace and war; and the late conflict in the United States