I was thirty-six and forty-eight hours without going to bed. I believe in those days I could have gone into the fire
As blithely as the golden-girdled bee
Sucks in the poppy's sleepy flower
for the sake of my convictions' (Fifty Years of Australian History).
Parkes threw himself with unbounded energy into the great struggle for the establishment of responsible government in New South Wales. It was on this question that he found himself in the fiercest conflict with the actual founder of that system, William Charles Wentworth [q. v.], whose aim was to copy as far as possible the English system with an upper house of colonial peers, while Parkes insisted on a democracy pure and simple. In this struggle it was inevitable that Parkes should conquer.
On the establishment in 1858 of responsible government, Parkes was elected for East Sydney (1858-61). During this period he was an active supporter of (Sir) John Robertson [q. v.] as a land reformer, and became on most questions the recognised leader of the democratic party. In 1861 Parkes and William Bede Dalley [q. v. Suppl.] came to England as commissioners of emigration. Parkes addressed large public meetings in the north of England and the midlands, and made the personal acquaintance of Carlyle, Cobden, Bright, and Thomas Hughes. He sent a number of interesting letters to the 'Sydney Morning Herald,' which were subsequently published in London under the title 'Australian Views of England' (1869). These letters display keen political insight, and present a number of faithful portraits of the leading English public men of the day (see 'Sir Henry Parkes in England' in A. Patchett Martin's Australia and the Empire, 1889).
Returning to Sydney in 1863 Parkes soon re-entered parliament, and, in January 1866, accepted office for the first time as colonial secretary in Martin's ministry [see Martin, Sir James]. During his term of office he passed the Public Schools Act in the teeth of fierce clerical opposition, especially from the influential Roman catholic body. On 12 March 1868 a murderous attack on the Duke of Edinburgh was made by an alleged fenian named O'Farrell in Sydney Harbour; Parkes, from his official position, was mainly responsible for the execution of the criminal, and for the passage of the Treason Felony Act (1868). Resigning office in 1868, Parkes was in 1871 elected for Mudgee, and in the next year became prime minister of New South Wales, having formed a coalition with Sir John Robertson. It was mainly owing to the enormous influence of Parkes at this time that New South Wales, unlike the other Australian colonies, adhered to free trade. In 1875 the Parkes ministry resigned over the subject of the release of Gardiner, a notorious bushranger; but in 1878 he was again prime minister and colonial secretary. In the previous year he had been created K.C.M.G.
Parkes revisited England in 1882 while still holding office as prime minister, and was received with much distinction in London. But on his return to Sydney his government was defeated, and he himself was rejected at the polls for East Sydney. Thereupon he again revisited England and spent much time in congenial political and literary society, including that of Lord Tennyson, who formed a high regard for him. Parkes himself published two or three slender volumes of verse, in which, among much that is crude and unfinished as to mere technique, there are occasional evidences of poetic ability and fervour.
In January 1887 he once more became the dominant power in New South Wales, forming his fourth administration and bringing the colony back again to free-trade principles, from which it had temporarily departed. He was created G.C.M.G. in 1888, and very fittingly, as the statesman who had kept the banner of free trade floating in his own colony, he was awarded the gold medal of the Cobden Club. In January 1889 he retired from the administration of New South Wales in favour of Mr. (afterwards Sir) George Dibbs, who held office for only a couple of months, when Parkes became for the fifth and last time prime minister. It was during this period that the question of Australian federation first assumed a practical shape. Although Parkes displayed considerable antagonism to Service's scheme of a federal council, he was nevertheless recognised throughout Australia as the foremost advocate of the wider scheme of federation [see Service, James, Suppl.] In February 1890 Parkes attended the intercolonial conference in Melbourne, while he presided over the Sydney convention of 1891, which practically laid the foundations of the Australian commonwealth. Parkes's attitude towards both Australian and imperial federation is eloquently set forth in the volume of his speeches on 'The Federal Government of Australasia,' published in 1890, and dedicated to Lord Carrington. It was in his Melbourne oration that Parkes summed up the matter in a single famous phrase 'the crimson thread of kinship.' When the common-
