Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/194

 feelings of the great majority of the colonists was proved in the next election, when gentlemen with the highest claims to the honours of Legislation were rejected on the one ground of having supported the transportation compromise.

Earl Grey, in his recent apology for his colonial policy, treats this absolute reversal of the compromise previously offered as something marvellously inconsistent, if not unprincipled: his own "error of judgment" in sending the poison without the antidote, he treats very lightly.

But Earl Grey writes like a man whose political position and still more his tone of mind remove him altogether from those influences which affect popular assemblies. During his official career he had no constituents; no equal cared, no subordinate dared, to controvert his fixed ideas on all colonial subjects; and when colonists ventured in deputation to urge unpleasant arguments, we have ourselves witnessed with what impassive, incredulous sternness he bowed them out!

Earl Grey takes some pains to marshal the respective elements of the pro and anti-transportation parties; he performs his task in a manner which reminds one of the instruction for a brief given, according to an old circuit story, by an attorney to his new clerk "our client, the plaintiff, is a most respectable baker, the defendant is a rascally cheesemonger."

And so Earl Grey declares, that the "minority in favour of the renewal of transportation included no small proportion of the most intelligent and enterprising members of society," whilst the majority against included not only those "who sincerely entertained the repugnance they professed on moral grounds, but a great number of the labouring classes who were influenced by jealousy of the competition of convicts, and a fear that their coming might lead to a reduction of the extravagant wages they had been in the habit of obtaining. Others, again, for personal or electioneering objects, thought it their interest to excite popular passions. The anti-transportation party in the interval since the subject was previously considered in the Legislative Council gained the ascendancy, assisted in no small degree by the diminished urgency of the demand for labour, in consequence of the large free emigration."

It is worthy of note that the dearth of labour which had prevailed in previous years, was owing entirely to Earl Grey's refusal to adopt the measures pressed upon him by "the most intelligent and enter-