68 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



mitting, on the ground that it required candidates to take the Oath 

 of Supremacy, which he declared would exclude him from practising 

 in Victorian Courts. And he succeeded in getting the Bill withdrawn. 

 In his autobiography he instances this " blundering " to illustrate 

 his contention that "as not one of these legislators had ever seen 

 a Parliament, business was necessarily conducted somewhat at 

 random ". And yet it was a notorious fact in 1857, that the first Act 

 which Mr. Duffy carried in the Assembly, that for the abolition of 

 the property qualification of members, was so incorrectly drawn as 

 only to abolish one part of the qualification, that of the freehold 

 estate, leaving the alternative leasehold revenue of 200 per annum 

 untouched. 



Before deciding on his future Mr. Duffy took a trip to Sydney, 

 where the adulation of his countrymen carried them so far that at 

 a public banquet tendered him the customary toast of the Governor 

 was withdrawn from the programme as a condition precedent to 

 the guest's acceptance. The reason assigned by Mr. Duffy was that 

 Sir William Denison, in his preceding office as Governor of Tas- 

 mania, had been the official custodian of Smith O'Brien, Meagher, 

 and the other banished Irishmen with whom Mr. Duffy had been 

 so unsuccessfully associated. Even Dr. Lang, who was a perfect 

 fanatic in his distrust of Irish Catholics, is said to have joined in 

 the desire to keep Mr. Duffy's services for New South Wales, and 

 Mr. Henry Parkes offered him 800 a year to remain and edit the 

 Empire newspaper. But he resisted all these blandishments and 

 made his way back to Melbourne, where something still better 

 awaited him. His admirers were determined to have him in 

 the new Parliament, and to overcome the difficulty of a property 

 qualification they set about collecting funds with such assiduity 

 that in a few months they had 5,000 in hand, of which some 

 2,000 came from New South Wales. One-half of this they 

 invested in a freehold estate at Hawthorne, a pretty Melbourne 

 suburb, and at a public meeting on the 20th of August he was 

 presented with the title deeds of his qualification. Mr. Duffy 

 responded to the generous words of the chairman, Mr. O'Shanassy, 

 that the munificence was without parallel in the history of the 

 country, and was accepted by him as "a noble retaining fee to 



