AN ERA OF CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE, 1864-1868 115 



of employment for his children, threw in his lot vigorously with 

 the party which then, and for many years after, had Graham 

 Berry as its most voluble and resourceful champion. 



The amount of fiery talk, the scorn of opposition, the derision 

 of warning, the glowing pictures of " a paradise for the working 

 man," which irradiated the speeches of aspiring legislators during 

 the general elections of 1864 and 1865, came as a startling revela- 

 tion to the industrious but prosaic business men of the colony. In 

 the early sixties no educated man, no one with a rudimentary 

 knowledge of the history of his mother-country, or of the operations 

 of commerce and exchange, would have cared to pose as an advocate 

 of Protection to native industry, which was so soon to sweep all 

 before it at the polls. If they thought about it at all in the inter- 

 vals of business, it was as a gloomy memory of desperate times in 

 the old land, where its monopolistic tendencies drove the labouring 

 classes to the verge of revolution : where it was a synonym of the 

 most hateful form of the oppression of the capitalist, and was 

 broken down and routed by the Parliamentary champions of the 

 working man. Not a few of the colonists who had achieved pros- 

 perity in the land of their adoption had sad memories of the state 

 of despair to which the starving operatives in the manufacturing 

 centres of England had been reduced in 1842 under Protection, 

 and of the rioting, bloodshed and bitterness which had accompanied 

 its overthrow. But here, at the Antipodes, it was not the grasping 

 capitalist who led the clamour to resuscitate the rule of Protection, 

 but the artisan and the labourer, who had otherwhere been its 

 irreconcilable opponents. 



This is not the place to elaborate the arguments that have been 

 advanced in favour of or in opposition to the doctrine. Number- 

 less writers have dealt with it in its special application to Victoria, 

 and it is very doubtful if all the discussions which have filled the 

 pages of Hansard and the columns of the daily press for the last 

 forty years have materially modified the opinions held respectively 

 by supporters and opponents. Yet, while arguments have had 

 little effect, results cannot entirely be ignored, and it will be seen 

 in the annals of the twenty-five years following that in which 



Parliament complied with the popular mandate, and established 



ft * 



