140 A HISTORY OF THE COLONY OF VICTORIA 



compromise. The occasion soon arose. On the 19th of February 

 the reply of Lord Carnarvon to the address of the Assembly seek- 

 ing Her Majesty's sanction to Lady Darling's acceptance of the 

 20,000 was laid before the House. It was an emphatic declara- 

 tion that such a proceeding would be contrary to the regulations of 

 the Colonial Service, which had hitherto been rigidly enforced, and 

 their violation could not now be sanctioned while Sir Charles re- 

 mained in that service. The ex-Governor, believing that the grant 

 by the Victorian Parliament was safe, worried by his necessities, 

 and to some extent misled by his correspondence with the Colonial 

 Office, thought to expedite a settlement by resigning the Queen's 

 Service. When the Victorian Ministry were advised of this step, 

 they, assuming that the Imperial objection to the grant was now 

 at an end, induced the Governor to send down a formal message 

 to the House in July, intimating that Sir Charles Darling had 

 "elected finally to relinquish the Colonial Service," and thereupon 

 introduced a batch of supplementary estimates, wherein the 20,000 

 was included. 



On the 1st of August the debate in the Assembly began with a 

 speech from Mr. E. D. Ireland, in which he exhaustively reviewed 

 the conduct of the late Governor, and unhesitatingly condemned the 

 grant. Head apart from the exciting local surroundings the speech 

 of Mr. Ireland appears calm and dispassionate, but it stirred Mr. 

 Higinbotham to fierce retort. He declared that the vote should 

 have been passed in silence by the House, and at the conclusion of 

 an impassioned speech he said, in a burst of invective: "It is not 

 merely a compensation to Sir Charles Darling, it is not merely a 

 renewal of the expressed opinion of this House on his merits, but, 

 when it is passed, it will be a decisive condemnation of those who 

 pursued Sir Charles Darling through his whole political career and 

 who now avow themselves his unrelenting enemies. ... It will 

 be the censure of the Legislative Assembly upon the constitutional 

 faction of 1865. ... I rejoice that the vote will brand the enemies 

 of Sir Charles Darling, who pursued him while here, and who do not 

 desist from that pursuit now. I will tell those honourable members 

 that I have always considered the faction to which they belong as 

 the very vilest faction by which this country has been cursed." 



