he may then be able to form some idea of the difficulty that even men like himself and Sir William Foster Stawell would have had in the early days of "responsible government" in the colony. As a matter of fact, they would have been swept into the sea.
In the course of a recent correspondence with Mr. John Bright—to whom every loyal Englishman, irrespective of mere party divisions, should feel profoundly and personally grateful—I put the case of the supposed analogy in a way that seemed to meet with his approbation. Let me quote a paragraph of my letter for the special benefit of Sir Andrew Clarke.
"In the colonies we may have strayed in some points from what you would deem true Liberalism; but in all our legislation we have proceeded on the principle that we are one people. Our Irish fellow-colonists, when ill-advised, clamour against this. On Mr. Gladstone's plan we should have, in the colonies, a distinct and hostile Irish Roman Catholic nationality in a generation." This, in the fewest possible words, is the answer to the tissue of fallacies which Sir C. Gavan Duffy has woven together and called an " Australian example."
