picked by the Crown on the lines long familiar in Ireland; but even these juries refused to convict, as they so often refused to convict in cases of agrarian crime in Ireland.  The State trials were then abandoned, a Royal Commission reported against the licence system, and Parliamentary representation was given to the goldfields.  It came to be universally acknowledged that the talk of “treason” was nonsense, that the outbreak had been provoked by laws which could not be constitutionally changed, and that the moral was to change them, not to expatriate and persecute those who had suffered under them.  Lalor reappeared, entered political life, became Speaker of the reformed Assembly of 1856, and lived and died respected by everyone.  He now appears as a prominent figure in a little book entitled “Australian Heroes,” and it is admitted that the whole episode powerfully assisted the movement for responsible government in the Colony.  Smith O’Brien, Meagher, Mitchell, and others concerned in the Irish rebellion of 1848 were at that moment languishing in the penal settlement of Tasmania for sedition provoked by laws fifty times worse; laws, too, that a Royal Commission three years earlier had shown to be inconsistent with social peace, and which others subsequently condemned in still stronger terms.  From their first establishment far back in the seventeenth century it took two centuries to abolish these laws.  In the Australian case it took one year.

As for the Irishmen of all creeds and classes who took such an important part in the splendid work of building up these new communities, and who are still estimated to constitute a quarter of the population, one can only marvel at the intensity of the prejudice which declared these men “unfit” for self-government at home, and which is not yet dissipated by the discovery that they were welcomed under the Southern Cross, not only as good workaday citizens in town, bush, or diggings, but as barristers, judges, bankers, stock-owners, mine-owners, as honoured leaders in municipal and political life, as Speakers of the Representative Assemblies, and as Ministers and Prime Ministers of the Crown.[32] is true, and the fact cannot surprise us, that the intestinal divisions of race and creed in Ireland itself, stereotyped there by ages of bad government, were at first to a certain extent reproduced in Australia, as in Canada.  Aggressive Orangeism was to be found sowing discord where no cause for discord existed.  But the common sense of the community and the pure air of freedom tended to sterilize, though they have not to this day wholly killed, these germs of disease.  A career was opened to every deserving Irishman, whether Catholic or Protestant.  Hungry, hopeless, listless cottiers from Munster and Connaught built up nourishing towns like Geelong and Kilmore.  Two Irishmen, Dunne and Connor, were the first discoverers of the Ballarat goldfields.  An Irishman, Robert O’Hara Burke, led the first transcontinental