anada and in Ireland, and with whom the
ruling classes at home were in instinctive sympathy. There were stormy,
agitated times, there were illegal movements against the reception of
convicts, struggles over land questions, religious questions, financial
questions, the emancipation of ex-convicts, and the many difficult
problems raised by the discovery of gold and the mushroom growth of
digger communities in remote places. There was in the air more genuine
lawlessness--irrespective, I mean, of revolt against bad laws--than ever
existed in Ireland, though there was never at any time any practical
grievance approaching in magnitude to the practical grievances of
Ireland at the same period. But, could the spirit of English
statesmanship towards analogous problems in Ireland have been maintained
in Australasia, systematically translated into law and enforced with the
help of coercion acts by soldiers and police, communities would have
been artificially produced presenting all the lawless and retrograde
features of Ireland.

The famous affair of the Eureka Stockade in 1854 is an interesting
illustration. A great mass of diggers collected in the newly discovered
Ballarat goldfields had petitioned repeatedly against the Government
regulations about mining licences, for which extortionate fees were
levied. This was before responsible government. The goldfields were not
represented in the Legislature, and there was no constitutional method
of redress. The authorities held obstinately to their obsolete and
irritating regulations, and eventually the miners revolted under the
leadership of an Irishman, Peter Lalor, and with the watchword "Vinegar
Hill." There was a pitched battle with the military forces of the
Crown, ending after much bloodshed in the victory of the soldiers. Lalor
was wounded, and carried into hiding by his friends. Other captured
rioters were tried for "high treason" before juries of townsmen picked
by the Crown on the lines long familiar in Ireland; but even these
juries refused to convict, as they so often refused to convict in cases
of agrarian crime in Ireland. The State trials were then abandoned, a
Royal Commission reported against the licence system, and Parliamentary
representation was given to the goldfields. It came to be universally
acknowledged that the talk of "treason" was nonsense, that the outbreak
had been provoked by laws which could not be constitutionally changed,
and that the moral was to cha