expedition, and another Irishman, Ambrose Kyte, financed it; Wentworth was the father of Australian liberties.  An Irish Roman Catholic, Sir Redmond Barry, founded the Public Library, Museum, and University of Melbourne.  In the political annals of Victoria and New South Wales the names of Irish Catholics, men to whom no worthy political career was open in their own country, were prominent.  Sir John O’Shanassy, for example, was three times Prime Minister of Victoria, Sir Brian O’Loughlen once.  Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, a member of O’Shanassy’s Cabinets, and at last Prime Minister himself, is the colonial statesman whose career and personality are the best proof of what Ireland has lost in high-minded, tolerant, constructive statesmanship, through a system which silenced or drove from her shores the men who loved her most, who saw her faults and needs with the clearest eyes, and who sought to unite her people on a footing of self-reliance and mutual confidence.  One of the ablest of O’Connell’s young adjutants, editor and founder of the Nation, part-organizer of the Young Ireland Movement which united men of opposite creeds in one of the finest national movements ever organized in any country, Duffy’s central aim had been to give Ireland a native Parliament, where Irishmen could solve their own problems for themselves.  He saw the rebellion of 1848 fail, and Mitchell, Smith O’Brien, Meagher, McManus, and O’Donoghue transported to Tasmania; he laboured on himself in Ireland for seven years at land reform and other objects, and in 1855 gave up the struggle against such hopeless odds, and reached Melbourne early in 1856 in time to sit in the first Victorian Parliament returned under the constitutional Act of 1855.  From the beginning to the end of an honourable political career which lasted thirty years, he made it his dominant purpose to ensure that Australia should be saved from the evils which cursed Ireland; from government by a favoured class, from land monopoly, and from religious inequality and the venomous bigotries it engenders, and he took a large share in bringing about their exclusion.  His Land Act of 1862, for example, where he had another Roman Catholic Irishman, Judge Casey, as an auxiliary, put an end in those districts where it was fairly worked to the grave abuses caused by the speculative acquisition of immense tracts of land by absentee owners, and promoted the closer settlement of the country by yeoman farmers.

In Australia, as in Canada, we see the vital importance of good land laws, and can measure the misery which resulted in Ireland from an agrarian system incalculably more absurd and unjust than anything known in any other part of the Empire.  The stagnation of Western Australia was originally due to the cession of huge unworkable estates to a handful of men.  South Australia was retarded for some little time from the same cause, and Victoria and New South Wales were all hampered in the same way.  It was not a question, as in Ireland, and to a less degree in Prince Edward Island, of the legal relations between the landlord and tenant of lands originally confiscated, but of the grant and sale of Crown lands.  Yet the after-results, especially in the check to tillage and the creation of vast pasture ranches, were often very similar.[33]