Victoria than in most countries. But admitting all this, the utmost that the writer of this essay has proved by it is that these colonies have not been retarded in their growth by their peculiar institutions. He does indeed contrast the excellent judges of the present time with a drunken Judge-Advocate under Governor Bligh. But in those days New South Wales had scarcely ceased to be anything more than a huge prison, and he might as well compare a judge of the Court of Queen’s Bench to an Old Bailey practitioner. The press of the present time, no doubt, is superior to that of fifteen or twenty years ago. So is the press of London to that of Birmingham or Dublin; but is that because London has a better political constitution than they have, or because it has many times their population, and is able to demand and pay for better and more expensively conducted publications? As to public expenditure, it is idle to compare old and burdened countries with new ones in this respect, but is it so great a triumph for a Legislature which entered upon its labours with no debt, no foreign ministers, no pauperism, almost no military or naval expenses, no possibility of war, a population extraordinarily wealthy, and millions of acres of land to sell when it pleased, not to have exceeded its income (though in Victoria the Government has fallen back on Protection for revenue), while England, with more than a third of her revenue going to pay interest of debt, with the pauperism of an overcrowded country, and with foreign war constantly threatening, has yet managed, however little, to continue paying off her debt? Nobody disputes the desirability of representative institutions for colonies which have reached a certain stage of development. The point is whether they have worked the better in Australia for being so democratic, and this the essay scarcely even attempts to prove. Still less does it prove that such institutions, even if they are the best it was practicable to obtain for Australia, would be equally applicable under utterly different circumstances in England. With respect to the glaring evils I have alluded to, the writer may perhaps agree with the author of another essay in the same volume, that corruption in the Legislature is, ‘except in extreme cases,’ merely ‘an annoying and offensive, and not a dangerous disease.’ This is the old cry of ‘measures, not men,’ revived. For my own part, I believe that the tardiest and feeblest legislation is far less pregnant with fatal consequences than the habitual contemplation of dishonesty in high places and amongst public men. This is an ever-present pattern and incentive to evil, which, entering every household, offers its drop of poison to every ambitious and aspiring man, and slowly and imperceptibly brings all that is sterling and honourable into disrepute. VI. TASMANIA.