Duffy was not the only colonial statesman to apply Irish experience to the problems of newly settled countries.  An Englishman who became one of the greatest of colonial statesmen and administrators, the Radical Imperialist, Sir George Grey, began life as a Lieutenant on military service in Ireland in the year 1829, and came away sick with the scenes he had witnessed at the evictions and forced collections of tithes where his troops were employed to strengthen the arm of the law.  “Ireland,” his biographer, Professor Henderson, tells us,[34] “was to him a tragedy of unrealized possibilities.”  The people had “good capacities for self-government,” but Englishmen “showed a vicious tendency to confuse cause and effect,” and attributed to inherent lawlessness what was a revolt against bad economic conditions.  “All that they or their children could hope for was to obtain, after the keenest competition, the temporary use of a spot of land on which to exercise their industry”; “for the tenant’s very improvements went to swell the accumulations of the heirs of an absentee, not of his own.”  “Haunted by the Irish problem,” Grey made it his effort first in South Australia, and afterwards in New Zealand, where he was both Governor and Premier at various times, to secure the utmost possible measure of Home Rule for the colonists, and, in pursuance of a policy already inaugurated by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, to establish a land system based, not on extravagant free grants, or on private tenure, but on sales by the State to occupiers at fair prices.  The aim was to counteract that excessive accumulation of people in the large cities which, thanks to imperfect legislation, still exists in most of the Australian States.  Subsequent New Zealand land policy has been generally in the right direction, and is acknowledged to be highly successful.  In the Australian mainland States the absentee and the squatter caused constant difficulties and occasional disorder.  The Commonwealth at the present day is suffering for past neglect, and has found itself within the last year compelled to imitate New Zealand in placing taxes on undeveloped land, with a higher percentage against absentees.

Let us add that Grey, like Duffy and most of the strongest advocates of Home Rule for the Colonies, was a Federalist long before Federation became practical politics, seeing in that policy the best means of achieving the threefold aim of giving each Colony in a group ample local freedom, of binding the whole group together into a compact, coherent State, and of strengthening the connection between that State and the Mother Country.  As Governor at the Cape from 1854 to 1861 he vainly urged the Home Government to promote a Federal Union of the various South African States, Dutch and British, in order, as he said, to create “an United South Africa under the British flag,” a scheme which, it is generally agreed, could then have been carried out, and which would have saved South Africa from terrible disasters.  And he wished to apply the same Federal principle to the Australian Colonies, and to the case of Ireland and Great Britain.