THE CONSTITUTION STATUTE OF 1842 287 



Yet, this deserving community had not one really resident repre- 

 sentative in the Councils of the State, but was compelled to be 

 content with the proffered mediation of Sydney citizens to look 

 after its interests. The learned Doctor anticipated everything that 

 could possibly be said on the other side, and was never at a loss 

 for example or comparison. He reviewed the area, the Govern- 

 ments, the expenditure, and the productiveness of all the West 

 India Islands ; exhausted comparisons with each and all of Great 

 Britain's colonial possessions, and inflicted a mass of statistics 

 upon the awed Chamber which were sadly inoperative on the 

 foregone conclusions of the Senators. His excursions into history 

 ranged from the Peloponnesian War, down through the troubles 

 of Charles I. with his Virginia Patents and the maladministration 

 of George III., out into the visionary future of Australian inde- 

 pendence. The speech was illuminated with quotations from 

 old Scotch songs, from the Classics, from Sterne's Sentimental 

 Journey and other sources of enlivenment. But the dogmatic tone 

 of the pulpit was there, the confident assumption of wicked wrong 

 in his opponents, and the harsh terms of reprobation, of which he 

 was a master. His figures, his arguments and his illustrations, 

 unless they could be proved inaccurate, left him unanswerable. 

 But he unnecessarily irritated the Council by accusing them of 

 " downright public robbery," and of a " semi-felonious abstraction of 

 the Port Phillip revenues for the maintenance of an unnecessarily 

 extravagant system of Government, adverse to their interests ". 

 Upon one point only did he differ from his constituents. He had 

 no sympathy with the pretended anxiety to cut the connection with 

 what was formerly recognised as a convict colony. On this ground 

 he stood up manfully for his fellow-citizens, and denounced as ab- 

 surd what he called the moral contamination fad, justly remarking 

 that the danger from contamination, if it existed, would be exactly 

 the same after as before separation. But against the argument 

 that the Port Phillip people were neither sufficiently numerous 

 nor sufficiently intelligent to be entrusted with self-government he 

 was witheringly sarcastic, and denounced his hearers for presuming 

 to think that they, without the necessary local knowledge, could 

 manage affairs for them better in Sydney. 



