Page:Australia and the Empire.djvu/112

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AUSTRALIA AND THE EMPIRE

aristocracy. The subject had been for years maturing in his mind; he even expounded his views on this question of an Australian House of Lords in a long-forgotten article in the pages of an English magazine. Nothing can surpass the full tide of his eloquence, when on these momentous themes he essayed to address his fellow-colonists in Sydney, many of whom, even in his lifetime, had come to regard him as the Washington of the Antipodes. Yet on this point of creating a brand new colonial aristocracy he failed miserably. The commonest street orator in Sydney could raise a ready laugh by giving a list of the expectant "nobility." Robert Lowe opposed it in the House of Commons, and his criticism had all the weight of his "colonial experience"; while a "young Sydney tradesman, by name Henry Parkes," as Dr. Lang described the present Premier of New South Wales, first rose into public notoriety and favour by his diatribes against this feature of Wentworth's great measure. Despite the unrivalled weight of Wentworth's personal ascendency, his notion of "manufacturing" a privileged order was all but unanimously scouted, even in a colony that had been dry-nursed by Imperial officialdom and