CHAPTER XIX 



THE ANTI-SQUATTING GOVERNOR : SIR GEORGE GIPPS 



So vast a movement as the evolution of the pastoral 

 interest necessarily engendered men of towering indivi- 

 duality and commanding characters, between whom a 

 conflict necessarily arose. Had Wentworth and his 

 followers, aided for the time by men who were after- 

 wards his keenest foes, encountered no effectual resist- 

 ance, it seems far from improbable that the great dema- 

 gogue, who was animated by the same rebellious and 

 domineering spirit as John McArthur, would have done 

 as John McArthur did, and endeavoured to work a 

 revolution in the State. Had Governor Gipps been as 

 heady and as foolish as Governor Bligh, he might have 

 furnished just the kind and amount of provocation that 

 would have made Wentworth's passion blaze up in open 

 revolt. Happily, Sir George was a man of a different 

 stamp. Cool, wary, and resourceful, the anti -squatting 

 Governor was more than a match for the squatters' 

 tribune. 



Belonging to a profession — that of engineering — 

 which has produced some of the greatest philosophers 

 of England, Germany, and Switzerland, and to that 

 military branch of it which has furnished several eminent 

 colonial Governors, and fresh from an official mission 

 in Canada, Gipps came to New South Wales equipped 

 with all the resources requisite for pacific conflict and 

 with much of the experience necessary for deahng with 

 conceited colonials. His term of Governorship, as it 

 happened, lasted through the period when the struggle 



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