annot form the foundations of a new one," said a Parliamentary
Report of July 28, 1785. But they could do so, and did do so. Ruskin's
saying, _a propos_ of Australia, that "under fit conditions the human
race does not degenerate, but wins its way to higher levels," comes
nearer the truth. In an amazingly short time after the transportation
policy was reversed the taint disappeared. We must remember, however,
that, sheer refuse as some of the convicts were, especially in the later
period, a large number of the earlier convicts were the product of that
"stupid severity of our laws" which the Vicar of Wakefield deplored, and
to this category belonged many an unhappy Irish peasant, sound in
character, but driven into Whiteboyism, or into the rebellions of 1798
and 1803 by some of the worst laws the human brain ever conceived.
Hundreds of these men survived the barbarous and brutalizing ordeal of a
penal imprisonment to become prosperous and industrious citizens.

It was not until 1825, or thereabouts, that free white settlers, many
Irishmen among them, came in any substantial number to the Mother Colony
of New South Wales, and not until 1832 that these men began to press
claims for the management of their own affairs, under the inspiration of
an Irish surgeon's son, William Wentworth, the Hampden of Australia. The
later Colonies rapidly came into line, Western Australia, for the reason
given above, remaining stationary. The first representative institutions
were granted in 1842 to New South Wales, and in 1850 to Victoria, South
Australia, and Tasmania. At that date, therefore, these settlements
stood in much the same constitutional position as the Canadas had stood
in 1791 (although technically their Constitutions were of a different
kind), but with this important difference, that the Act of 1850, "for
the better Government of Her Majesty's Australian Colonies," gave power
to those Colonies to frame new Constitutions for themselves. This they
soon proceeded to do, each constructing its own, but all keeping in view
the same model, the British Constitution itself, and aiming at the same
ideal, responsible Government by a Colonial Cabinet under a Government
representing the Crown. Since responsible Government in Great Britain
itself was not a matter of legal enactment, but the product of slowly
evolved conventions and precedents, to which political scientists had
not yet given a scientific form, it is no wonder that the colonial