HISTORICAL. REVIEW OF VICTORIA. 359 



Colonial Office, had already signified that, in his opinion, no sufficient case had been 

 made out for the intervention of the British Parliament, and to this opinion he 

 continued to adhere. The right of self-government had been conferred upon the colony 

 of Victoria, and it was for her to work out her own constitutional problems. He 

 advised the Assembly not to introduce foreign elements into Supply Bills, and he 

 considered that the Council in such a case was not likely to reject them. The despatch, 

 which was shown to Messrs. Berry and Pearson before its transmission to the Governor, 

 concluded by stating that the Imperial Parliament would never alter the Constitution of 

 Victoria at the request of one House only. After this the political effervescence, which 

 had lasted with little interruption for upwards of a decade, subsided. Parties became 

 more evenly balanced, and there was less temptation to resort to " the falsehood of 

 extremes." Happily, moreover, the project of an international exhibition to be held in 

 Melbourne, as the sequence of that which had been so brilliantly successful in Sydney, 

 served to divert men's minds from the strife and stress of politics. There had previously 

 been five industrial exhibitions in the former city. The first two those of 1854 and 1861 

 had been of a purely local character ; the others, held in 1866, 1872, and 1875 

 respectively, were intercolonial. The number of exhibits in 1854 was four hundred and 

 twenty-eight only; in 1875 it had risen to four thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine, 

 or, in other words, it had decupled. 



THJE MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION. 



An Act was passed by the Victorian Legislature in 1878 appropriating the sum of 

 one hundred thousand sterling for the erection of a building in the Carlton Gardens, 

 for which the designs prepared by Messrs. Reed and Barnes were accepted by the 

 Royal Commission appointed to conduct the undertaking. It was found necessary to sup- 

 plement the space covered by the main building by the erection of two annexes, and 

 in the end the total cost of the structure amounted to upwards of a quarter of a million 

 sterling, which represented five per cent, of the current revenue of the colony. The 

 fa9ade facing the Carlton Gardens has a frontage of five hundred feet ; the dome has 

 an elevation of two hundred and twenty feet, and the two towers which flank the southern- 

 entrance rise to a height of one hundred feet. The eastern and western facades are four 

 hundred and sixty feet in length. The principal edifice is cruciform, and the dome rises 

 from the intersection of the naves and transepts. Both the drum and the cupola are 

 octagonal, each having an internal diameter of sixty feet, while the apex of the dome is 

 one hundred and sixty-five feet above the floor. At the extremity of the western nave 

 an organ was erected by Mr. Fincham, a local builder, at a cost of five thousand pounds. 

 The space covered by the main structure is less than one-fifth of the area embraced by 

 the annexes, which were less substantially built ; but even then they were not more than 



I 



adequate for the immense volume of exhibits which poured in from all parts of the 

 world. Australia may be said to have been practically unknown to the great bulk 

 of the people of Europe until the International Exhibition in Sydney opened their 

 eyes to the territorial and commercial importance of these colonies, the generally 

 prosperous circumstances of their inhabitants, the character and variety of the natural 

 resources of the country, and the magnitude of the markets, which the rapid increase 



