CHAPTER IV. 



THE ADMINISTRATION OF SIR HENRY BARKLY, 1856-1863. 



WITHIN a month of the opening of the new Parliament, the first 

 constitutional Governor arrived to look after it. The mail steamer 

 Oneida, which anchored in the bay on Thursday evening, the 23rd 

 of December, 1856, took the colonists by surprise, having completed 

 her voyage in the then unprecedented time of sixty-four days from 

 Plymouth. No preparations had been made, and no demonstration 

 awaited the Queen's representative, Sir Henry Barkly, K.C.B., 

 greatly to his own satisfaction, for the grotesquely effusive but 

 shallow plaudits with which Sir Charles Hotham had been greeted 

 would have jarred upon his more retiring nature. He was a man 

 cast in a different mould from his predecessor. A civilian, who 

 had graduated in Parliamentary life as a vigorous supporter of Sir 

 Eobert Peel, and had acquired valuable experience as the Governor, 

 first of British Guiana and subsequently of Jamaica. In the latter 

 post, under conditions of exceptional difficulty, he had inaugurated a 

 Constitution which for many years conferred peace and prosperity 

 on one of the most turbulent of Great Britain's dependencies. His 

 transfer to the important position of Governor of Victoria, at the 

 handsome salary of 15,000 a year, was admittedly in recognition 

 of his valuable services to the Crown, and during the seven years 

 of his residence in Victoria he fully justified his promotion by the 

 firmness and sagacity with which he handled the conflicting political 

 interests coming within his province, and by his careful abstention 

 from anything that could be regarded as trenching upon the functions 

 of his advisers. Sir Henry was in the prime of life, in his forty-first 

 year, when he landed in Melbourne ; a tall, handsome man, of culti- 

 vated tastes, with a considerable store of scientific knowledge, and a 

 thorough grounding in those principles of political economy and con- 



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