Before a brief honeymoon of office was over we had to encounter some of its troubles and disasters. During the adjournment, and while the new Ministers were at their elections, a skilful and vigorous effort was made to reconcile the Ministers who had gone out and the men who had voted against them, but had refused to join O'Shanassy. Among our supporters there was natural dissatisfaction, for several who thought themselves entitled to office had been overlooked.
Dr. Owens wrote me on behalf of the goldfield members, whom he considered himself entitled to represent, "that they were altogether opposed to the bigotry with which the Government had been assailed, but that they could not take cordially to Ministers like Foster, so justly detested by the miners for his past policy;[1] Greaves so constitutionally unreliable, and Home so insignificant. The first popular Ministry ought to consist of widely different elements." Some of the younger men came to me to say that they were not surprised O'Shanassy went off with the old colonists, but how I came to estimate so ill the respective value of men was a perplexity to them. One of the ablest of these men, a journalist, was willing and anxious to accept a place in the Cabinet—without a portfolio or department—as a recognition of his political status, and I strongly urged on my new colleagues to gratify him. But what was sometimes called the "old fogy" element in the Government was dead against him, and his admission would have led to two retirements. Two retirements from the first Government would have been fatal, and I had no choice but to acquiesce.
Suspicion is a sentiment never long absent in democratic communities. Washington was suspected of desiring to turn the Republic he had founded into a Monarchy; Hamilton was suspected of conspiring to ape in the new country the imperialism of Chatham. One of the handiest weapons to employ against the new Adminstration was that I was an Irish rebel, hostile to all peaceful government, and that I was such a bitter Papist that I would never be content
- ↑ Mr. Foster, as it appeared later, was the scapegoat of the Governor's policy, which he could not resist successfully in a Crown Colony where a Governor was still supreme.
