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 VICTORIA. 541 acquisitions, giving astonishing increase in commercial lines and revenues. Sir Edwin Arnold, who has certainly been in a posi- tion to realize these facts, tells us that "the discovery of gold at Bathurst on May 14, 1851, and in the following September at Ballarat, commenced a new Golden Age, not, indeed, of wholly Arcadian type, but prodigiously important, nevertheless, and utterly world-altering. In six years the population of New South Wales doubled. Australian exports jumped from four million to twenty-three million, Australian imports from three and three-quarter millions to twenty-four millions sterling. The gold fields cleansed Tasmania, as it were by magic, of the con- vict dregs which had been drafted there, and caused Australia to grow like Jonah's gourd, so that the sheep, which were three and a half millions in 1837, have risen to eighty millions; the revenue, which was £429,000, is now £25,000,000. * * * * Great Britain, which measured two million square miles in 1837, extends now over nearly ten million." Wars and rumors of wars have left their trace on the heart and brow of the Queen. The Peace Jubilee was soon overtaken by clouds of war that broke with slaughter and siege over Crimea in 1854. The Indian Mutiny followed in 1857, and in 1881 the war with Egypt. Add to these the persistent and fear- ful struggle in Africa, all waged at a cost of valuable human life and sorrow, which to a monarch who loves peace and her people, has come as a personal grief. Such warfare has not come about with the sanction of the sovereign, nor her easy acquiescence in measures that have seemed necessary, but finally precipitated war. Absolutism is not her power ; but Her Majesty has lived up to the full power she wields as constitutional monarch, and by such power has averted many a threatened catastrophe. As evidence of her ability to cope with such international questions as the controversy with Russia concerning the Turkish question, in 1853, is the reply made by England's ambassador to Count Nesselrode in St. Petersburg, when the latter asked if he knew the purport of the Queen's reply to the Czar. "No," he replied, "these correspondences between sovereigns are not regular according to our constitutional notions ; but all I can say is, that if Her Majesty were called upon to write upon the Eastern affair, she would not require her ministers' assist- ance. The Queen understands these questions as well as they do." At this time Aberdeen was premier and Gladstone chan-