At last, when the public scandal of so grievous a spectacle made longer inaction impossible, when the disappointed and shiftless immigrants began to beat a retreat from the inhospitable colony, the balance streaming by thousands into “Canvastown,” or wandering helpless elsewhere, and mostly ruined by the cost of living—­for a cabbage had risen to 5 shillings at the goldfields, and to 2 shillings and 6 pence in Melbourne—­the Governor, by an adroit move, in the despair of the position, referred the case “Home.”  There common sense decided it at once, or at least as quickly as might have been expected from the leisurely ways of the Colonial Office of those far-back times.  But the decision came, in very great measure, much too late.  There had been in the meantime a blazing fire of land speculation, which, unlike other fires, had blazed all the more intensely from the want of fuel.  The small supply of land, and the fury of multitudinous demands, had driven up prices to such absurd, and, the utilities considered, such impossible heights, that the inevitable reaction had already begun, involving numbers of families in most sudden and unexpected loss, and not a few in ruin.

But Victoria easily recovered from and forgot this preliminary and bad physicking, and was soon to be seen galloping on its road of progress as if nothing to its damage could ever have happened.  Full of work for the day, full of hope for the morrow, the busy colonists saluted cordially the departing Governor.  For my part I do not grudge it to him, for his motives and conduct were of the purest, and he was ever withal a right good Christian gentleman.

SIR JOHN O’SHANASSY, PREMIER, AND FOREMOST PUBLIC MAN OF VICTORIA.

“Altogether directed by an Irishman; a very valiant gentleman, i’ faith.”  —­Henry V.

One of O’Shanassy’s oft-repeated jokes, told with the humorous twinkle of his eye, was that “All men are born free and equal, and must remain so.”  He was wide as the poles asunder from the radical leveller, as this joke of his might help to show.  Indeed, he was decidedly conservative, in a general socio-political sense of the word.  While in strong sympathy with the mass of his countrymen, he might have limped at times alongside even of Parnell, to say nothing of Davitt and O’Donovan Rossa.  He had more than O’Connell’s dread to pass irretrievably outside the law, although he might not have scrupled to drive the proverbial carriage and six through law’s usual dubieties of expression, particularly in certain sections of the Victorian Education Acts.