ANJEEA OF CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE, 1864-1868 139 



a denouncer of Parnell and all his ways. His antagonism to the 

 Legislative Council was open and undisguised. He would gladly 

 have seen it abolished, as a hindrance upon the free expression of 

 the will of the people, which he mistakenly considered was alone 

 expressed by the Acts of the Assembly. An unreasonable assump- 

 tion that the Council only represented wealth and vested interests 

 made him unjust in the face of opposition, and some of his bitterest 

 philippics were displayed in deriding what he called the "preten- 

 sions " of its members, for whom and their supporters he coined 

 the contemptuous epithet, "the wealthy lower orders". He be- 

 lieved that the theory of a Second Chamber even as a court of 

 review was unworkable, and he persistently opposed all propositions 

 to liberalise the Council by extending its franchise and bringing it 

 more under the control of the electors. 



Severed from politics George Higinbotham was one of the most 

 unselfish, sympathetic and lovable men in the community. If his 

 dreams for a truly patriotic democracy were hopelessly optimistic, 

 it was because he based his opinion of the people, not on the precise 

 data of the student of sociology, but upon an abstract idea of which 

 his own individuality was the basis. Generous even to prodigality 

 with his own means, he somewhat hastily associated the idea of 

 wealth with hardness of character and narrowness of mind, and his 

 too frequent expression of that opinion was greedily seized upon by 

 the champions of labour as vindicating their onslaughts on capital. 



He was certainly the most striking figure in Victorian politics, 

 but his convictions were urged with such a fiery intensity that 

 even those of his followers who most admired him could not keep 

 up the pace. He gradually fell apart from the ruck of legislators, 

 depressed by his unrealised dream of Government by the people, 

 brain- weary of the deplorable waste of time over trivialities, the 

 jealous rancour between the ins and the outs ; and at length it 

 wrung from him an expression of belief that political life was "a 

 sort of pandemonium in which a number of lost souls are en- 

 deavouring to increase one another's torture". 



Such was the man who, being dissatisfied with the Ministerial 

 surrender in the matter of the first " tack," was quite ready to 

 revive the fray, and bring it to an issue in which there should be no 



