Looking back from the present time it appears to me that the Colonial Office was guilty of a serious tactical blunder in appointing Mr. Charles Joseph Latrobe, as the first Governor of Victoria. He had been appointed Resident Magistrate, or Superintendent, of the Port Phillip District in 1839; and, during the agitation for the separation of that district from the huge colony of which it was a part, Mr. Latrobe, very naturally perhaps, did all that he could to prevent the inhabitants from gaining their end. As a consequence, he was perhaps the best hated man that has ever lived in Australia. He was usually called "the Governor's poodle," and was denounced in no measured terms by the advocates of separation. When that was carried, and Mr. Latrobe became Lieutenant Governor, his harsh treatment of the diggers nearly drove them into rebellion. This is not the place to give the history of the Ballarat riot, but some reference to it is necessary. A most exorbitant licence fee was imposed on all residents on proclaimed goldfields, and this tax was collected in a most arbitrary and brutal manner. There were no gaols nor lock-ups on the diggings at the time, and men arrested for all sorts of offences--murder, bushranging, stealing, or the non-payment of licence fees--were simply fastened with handcuffs to a bullock chain attached to a tree stump by a huge staple. Later some boxes, made of corrugated iron, were put up as cells and these were known as "the Dutch ovens," or "the sardine boxes," and prisoners confined in them on hot summer nights suffered tortures, and begged to be put "on the chain" as a relief. Mr. Latrobe, therefore, soon came to be as cordially hated by the new comers as he had been by the older inhabitants of the district. But whatever may be said as to the harshness of his treatment of the gold diggers, the efforts he made to check the lawlessness rampant in the colony cannot be too highly commended. He and the Legislative Council organised a fine body of police in a very short time. The horse police were as well-disciplined and mounted as any similar body in any part of the world, but allowing for their efficiency, it would have been impossible for them to repress lawlessness so rapidly and completely as they did, had they not been assisted by the attitude of the general public. I may be wrong perhaps, but it has always appeared to me that the antagonism between the free and the convict elements in the population of which I have already spoken was continued long after the abolition of the convict system, and even passed on to those who landed in the country during the rush to the diggings. There was a general tendency at the time to credit all sorts of misdeeds to the convicts. No doubt, among the enormous crowds which landed in Victoria in the early years of the rush to the diggings, there was a fair admixture of rough and reckless characters who were not convicts, but it was the custom to assume that all crimes