erings. We are
commanded to stand ready--commanded by God, I believe with all my
soul--and those of us who have the aspirations of men and the spirit of
true Britons must look to our arms. The commissioners of the various
fields have been particularly venomous in their treatment of the poorer
diggers of late. On all the fields license-hunting has been pushed to
such an extremity of oppression that only dingoes and Chinamen could bear
it. We must fight! Men, no human creature detests bloodshed more than I,
but what else can your leaders ask of you but to fight? Every channel of
peaceful progression is closed to you. You are a great population of
strong men, the adventurous spirits of the world, and you are held under
the lash by a stupid minority so weak that one free movement of your
limbs may dash them to perdition. You are asked to confine yourselves to
peaceful and legal forms in conducting this agitation, while those who
ask you deny you a breath of power, an iota of right, and manifest their
goodwill by riding you down like wallabies, or rounding you up like
scrub-cattle, and tearing from you the scandalous taxes that go to pay
the expenses of a robber Government that represents only your enemies.'

The spirit of the crowd had undergone a surprising revolution; the gaiety
of a few minutes since had fled from every heart, and Lambert confronted
a great crowd, the faces of which glowed whitely in the moonlight, a
crowd that broke into vehement cheering and a babel of oaths and yells at
every pause.

The quoted words were the opening sentences of a speech that lasted
nearly an hour, and held the diggers by their heart-strings every second
of the time. Done felt himself strongly moved--the vehemence, the lusty
eloquence, and the unquestionable honesty of the speaker possessed him.
He was filled with a longing for strife; the fighting spirit strong
within him was up in arms. Like many another in the crowd, he was ready
to carve out a republic with a pick-handle, even though a score came to
resist him with rifles.

Lambert spoke of the simple rights of manhood, of the demands of the new
democracy in the Old World, and the growing belief in the sacred right of
a people to govern themselves according to their light, and finished with
an impassioned description of a recent digger-hunt on Forest Creek, in
the course of which a man had been killed. The crowd was slow to depart
when the speech was ended, and broke into knots