114 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



question of the Crown lands was relegated to the next Parliament. 

 The remaining measures of the short session of 1864 were un- 

 important, and though some five and twenty Acts were assented 

 to, they were mainly machinery Bills. 



The general elections commenced in August, and the new 

 Assembly met for business on the 28th of November. The result 

 had been extremely favourable to the Ministry, for on the opening 

 day no less than fifty-three members ranged themselves on the 

 right of the Speaker, facing a forlorn party of fourteen on the left. 

 The only notable men in the minority were John O'Shanassy, 

 Graham Berry and Sir Francis Murphy, the latter being almost 

 immediately withdrawn by his re-election to the chair. Some 

 well-known faces were missed. James Service and Charles Gavan 

 Duffy were both absent in England, E. D. Ireland and Charles 

 Jardine Don were among the rejected, and Wilson Gray had gone 

 to New Zealand, where he eventually became a judge. 



About thirty new men appeared on the roll, some of them of an 

 ultra-democratic type, for the addresses of many of the candidates 

 had been quite theatrically " liberal " in the colloquial sense of that 

 term. Infallible measures were promised for getting the right 

 people on the land, and driving the squatters off it. Mining 

 legislation was to be brought up to date in the sole interest of those 

 who followed that arduous calling. The export duty on gold was 

 to be abolished, and a Mint provided, whereat the miner could get 

 the full value of his product in new sovereigns. And above all, 

 those sovereigns were to be kept in the country, to circulate from 

 hand to hand amongst the people who created them, and not to 

 fall into the rapacious maw of the foreign exporter in exchange for 

 his goods, the product of the pauper labour of the old world. The 

 fact that Victoria was undeniably a pastoral, agricultural and mining 

 country was ignored, and the proposal to convert her fair domain 

 into a manufacturing centre was hailed by the mass of the popula- 

 tion as a forward step in the race for pre-eminence and prosperity. 

 It seemed so simple a method of increasing employment and main- 

 taining wages to keep out by taxation the goods which could be 

 made locally. Therefore, the working man, looking at it only 

 through the medium of the wages question and the widened area 



