384 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



classes who had benefited, either by indifference or actual fraud, 

 from the prevailing peculation. The most spiteful stories and 

 mendacious paragraphs were circulated about his " paltry retrench- 

 ments ". He was accused of starving the development of the 

 country ; of parsimony in which he spared himself ; was offensively 

 reminded of his large salary of 15,000 a year, and directly charged 

 with the scandalous waste of some 43,000 which had been foolishly 

 expended in altering and furnishing a leasehold house at Toorak 

 for his occupation. The fact that nearly all the outlay was incurred 

 before his arrival, and that he innocently brought out his own 

 furniture from England, was ignored in the venomous desire of his 

 many enemies to have him in the pillory. He was not by any 

 means the fittest man for the position he occupied. Neither by 

 training, experience nor temperament was his course made easy for 

 him, and he had everything to learn about the aims and aspirations 

 and the strong passions of the mixed population that had so recently 

 overrun the land. Numerous as were the mistakes he made in his 

 short colonial career of eighteen months, he was always sound on 

 the question of finance. Much of the abuse heaped upon him arose 

 out of his determined opposition to corruption and nepotism, and 

 emanated mainly from those whose irregular practices he had 

 stopped. It must have been some consolation to him, in all his 

 troubles, to know that he had carried out the behests of his Imperial 

 employers, and that before his untimely death he had restored the 

 Treasury to a fair condition of equipoise, and had confided its future 

 to more conservative and capable hands. 



But out of these tangled episodes of financial trouble and hap- 

 hazard control, these three years of turmoil that utterly broke down 

 one Governor and hastened the death of a second, the expenditure, 

 if extravagant, was far from being all wasteful. The country was 

 opened up by substantial though over-costly roads ; municipal 

 institutions were established, and liberally endowed ; and the city 

 of Melbourne emerged from its rutty, dirty obscurity into the 

 condition of a well-paved, fairly lighted and convenient metropolis. 

 A beginning was made of substantial wharfage along the river. In 

 November, 1853, Mr. Latrobe inaugurated the works for providing 

 the city with a supply of pure water from a reservoir in the Plenty 



