152 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



not only as destroyers of human life, but as the assassins of 

 Ireland's good-name. Some of the best blood in my veins is 

 Irish, and who will venture to tell me that I am bold enough or 

 base enough to calumniate the land of my father ? " 



Unlike Gladstone, he had grown Conservative with 

 age, and the champion of the unrepresented populace 

 would now restrict the franchise he had proposed to 

 enlarge in 1839. He had ceased to be a democrat, and 

 yet was much of a Liberal. His chief offence, however, 

 was that he was a squatter, and the squatters were not 

 now popular. But who made them unpopular, he 

 queried ? What monopolies and what privileges loaded 

 them with odium ? Who gave them fixity of tenure 

 and the right of pre-emption ? It was the very people 

 — the anti squatting democracy — that gained these 

 things for the mahgned squatter. Was it not they who 

 crowded to the Royal Hotel in Sydney in 1844, and pe- 

 titioned the Home Government to grant twenty-one 

 years' leases to the squatters ? 



Did he not again resemble Gladstone — the Gladstone 

 of the famous peroration beginning : 



Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor — 



when he said — still in this impassioned harangue of 

 1848 ? 



" You may cause it to be written on the tombs of my friend 

 and myself — Here lie the rejected of Sydney. But I will venture 

 to prophesy that in juxtaposition with these words posterity will 

 add — Who gave to those who deserted them the liberty of the Press, 

 Trial by Jury, and the constitutional right of electing their own 

 representatives.'^ 



There spoke the true patriot, and the words that followed 

 burned still more ardently with love for what was, by 

 both birth and adoption, his native land. 



As it happened, he was not one of " the rejected of 

 Sydney," which in after-years was twice or thrice to re- 

 ject another greatLiberal, Sir Henry Parkes, but only after 

 he had rejected his own most characteristic principles.* 



• RuSDEN, G. W., History of Australia, ii. 449-54. 



