pedition, and another Irishman, Ambrose Kyte, financed it; Wentworth
was the father of Australian liberties. An Irish Roman Catholic, Sir
Redmond Barry, founded the Public Library, Museum, and University of
Melbourne. In the political annals of Victoria and New South Wales the
names of Irish Catholics, men to whom no worthy political career was
open in their own country, were prominent. Sir John O'Shanassy, for
example, was three times Prime Minister of Victoria, Sir Brian
O'Loughlen once. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, a member of O'Shanassy's
Cabinets, and at last Prime Minister himself, is the colonial statesman
whose career and personality are the best proof of what Ireland has lost
in high-minded, tolerant, constructive statesmanship, through a system
which silenced or drove from her shores the men who loved her most, who
saw her faults and needs with the clearest eyes, and who sought to unite
her people on a footing of self-reliance and mutual confidence. One of
the ablest of O'Connell's young adjutants, editor and founder of the
_Nation_, part-organizer of the Young Ireland Movement which united men
of opposite creeds in one of the finest national movements ever
organized in any country, Duffy's central aim had been to give Ireland a
native Parliament, where Irishmen could solve their own problems for
themselves. He saw the rebellion of 1848 fail, and Mitchell, Smith
O'Brien, Meagher, McManus, and O'Donoghue transported to Tasmania; he
laboured on himself in Ireland for seven years at land reform and other
objects, and in 1855 gave up the struggle against such hopeless odds,
and reached Melbourne early in 1856 in time to sit in the first
Victorian Parliament returned under the constitutional Act of 1855. From
the beginning to the end of an honourable political career which lasted
thirty years, he made it his dominant purpose to ensure that Australia
should be saved from the evils which cursed Ireland; from government by
a favoured class, from land monopoly, and from religious inequality and
the venomous bigotries it engenders, and he took a large share in
bringing about their exclusion. His Land Act of 1862, for example, where
he had another Roman Catholic Irishman, Judge Casey, as an auxiliary,
put an end in those districts where it was fairly worked to the grave
abuses caused by the speculative acquisition of immense tracts of land
by absentee owners, and promoted the closer settlement of the country by
yeoman farmers.