seen, on what it was justifiable to do in a community determined to adopt the principle. I agreed that Protection should be given to articles which the colony was peculiarly fitted to produce, and the tariff was modified accordingly. The preference for Protection in Australia was in some degree a reaction from the shameful selfishness with which colonies had been originally governed. George III. would not permit colonists to manufacture a horseshoe, or a hobnail, nor to carry their produce to England in their own ships; and in quite recent times, when Victoria had commenced the manufacture of simple tweed for home use, English manufacturers imitated it in shoddy, undersold us in our own market, and ruined the reputation of the native article. England was Protectionist as long as she believed it to be her interest to be so, and this was a practice which necessarily found imitators in colonies. My policy was to give the working class anything which had been improperly denied them, but not to create any monopoly in their favour. They had cooled a good deal in their enthusiasm for popular measures. They lived in freehold houses, worked only eight hours a day, got good wages, shut out competition by forbidding assisted emigration, and their children were educated almost free. They would give a cheer and perhaps a vote to the popular leader, but they were no longer prepared to make any sacrifice for his public ends. Another serious evil was that they looked too exclusively to the amount of their wages, which greatly hampered the attempt to plant new industries and increase the prosperity of the state of which they were citizens.
The remaining business of the Session occupied a brief period, and I was happily set free for the more fruitful work of Administration. When I took my reforms in hand I found that long and slovenly mismanagement had created serious, almost insuperable difficulties to some of them. The land reforms we brought into immediate effect, and there was wide selection and settlement, but the social reforms were barred on every hand by a complete neglect of direction and supervision over the institutions we had long possessed. The chief Refuge for foundling children was a building separated from the barracks occupied by young soldiers, only by a
