f in a month; and then again you may have to dig and slave for half a
year, at heavy expense, only to find out at last that the gold is not
there in cost-paying quantity, and that your time and your hard work have
been thrown away. It might be wise policy to advance the miner a monthly
sum to encourage him to develop the country's riches; but to tax him
monthly in advance instead--why, such a thing was never dreamed of in
America. There, neither the claim itself nor its products, howsoever
rich or poor, were taxed.

The Ballarat miners protested, petitioned, complained--it was of no use;
the government held its ground, and went on collecting the tax. And not
by pleasant methods, but by ways which must have been very galling to
free people. The rumblings of a coming storm began to be audible.

By and by there was a result; and I think it may be called the finest
thing in Australasian history. It was a revolution--small in size; but
great politically; it was a strike for liberty, a struggle for a
principle, a stand against injustice and oppression. It was the Barons
and John, over again; it was Hampden and Ship-Money; it was Concord and
Lexington; small beginnings, all of them, but all of them great in
political results, all of them epoch-making. It is another instance of a
victory won by a lost battle. It adds an honorable page to history; the
people know it and are proud of it. They keep green the memory of the
men who fell at the Eureka Stockade, and Peter Lalor has his monument.

The surface-soil of Ballarat was full of gold. This soil the miners
ripped and tore and trenched and harried and disembowled, and made it
yield up its immense treasure. Then they went down into the earth with
deep shafts, seeking the gravelly beds of ancient rivers and brooks--and
found them. They followed the courses of these streams, and gutted them,
sending the gravel up in buckets to the upper world, and washing out of
it its enormous deposits of gold. The next biggest of the two monster
nuggets mentioned above came from an old river-channel 180 feet under
ground.

Finally the quartz lodes were attacked. That is not poor-man's mining.
Quartz-mining and milling require capital, and staying-power, and
patience. Big companies were formed, and for several decades, now, the
lodes have been successfully worked, and have yielded great wealth.
Since the gold discovery in 1853 the Ballarat mines--taking the three
kinds of mining