nge them, not to expatriate and persecute
those who had suffered under them. Lalor reappeared, entered political
life, became Speaker of the reformed Assembly of 1856, and lived and
died respected by everyone. He now appears as a prominent figure in a
little book entitled "Australian Heroes," and it is admitted that the
whole episode powerfully assisted the movement for responsible
government in the Colony. Smith O'Brien, Meagher, Mitchell, and others
concerned in the Irish rebellion of 1848 were at that moment languishing
in the penal settlement of Tasmania for sedition provoked by laws fifty
times worse; laws, too, that a Royal Commission three years earlier had
shown to be inconsistent with social peace, and which others
subsequently condemned in still stronger terms. From their first
establishment far back in the seventeenth century it took two centuries
to abolish these laws. In the Australian case it took one year.

As for the Irishmen of all creeds and classes who took such an important
part in the splendid work of building up these new communities, and who
are still estimated to constitute a quarter of the population, one can
only marvel at the intensity of the prejudice which declared these men
"unfit" for self-government at home, and which is not yet dissipated by
the discovery that they were welcomed under the Southern Cross, not only
as good workaday citizens in town, bush, or diggings, but as barristers,
judges, bankers, stock-owners, mine-owners, as honoured leaders in
municipal and political life, as Speakers of the Representative
Assemblies, and as Ministers and Prime Ministers of the Crown.[32] is
true, and the fact cannot surprise us, that the intestinal divisions of
race and creed in Ireland itself, stereotyped there by ages of bad
government, were at first to a certain extent reproduced in Australia,
as in Canada. Aggressive Orangeism was to be found sowing discord where
no cause for discord existed. But the common sense of the community and
the pure air of freedom tended to sterilize, though they have not to
this day wholly killed, these germs of disease. A career was opened to
every deserving Irishman, whether Catholic or Protestant. Hungry,
hopeless, listless cottiers from Munster and Connaught built up
nourishing towns like Geelong and Kilmore. Two Irishmen, Dunne and
Connor, were the first discoverers of the Ballarat goldfields. An
Irishman, Robert O'Hara Burke, led the first transcontinental
ex