more than three, may belong to the executive council, and be paid servants of the Crown. This chamber is nominated and elected for three years. It sat for the first time in November, 1870, and was deposed after a second session early in 1872, in consequence of a change in the adjustment of the right of voting. A re-election was about to take place when I was in the colony. The last session had, I was told, been rather stormy. The next, it was thought, would be less so. As things stand at present, the governor can effect nothing without the House, nor can the House effect anything without the governor. It is not so with us or in the other colonies,--as all who understand parliamentary action are aware. The governor of Western Australia is under no obligation to accede to the wish of the people as expressed by the House; but the House has the power of voting supplies, and can, of course, cause this power to be felt. Such a confused condition of governing and legislating,--for it is, in truth, a confused condition,--can only be justified by the inexpediency of rushing at once from the secure but repressing despotism of a Crown colony to the unpractical energies of a full-fledged, double-housed parliament, with responsible ministers, who shall go in and out in accordance with the majorities of the day. The feeling of the present governor, and of the minister at home, is, no doubt, in favour of the full-fledged representation system; but in so small a colony,--in a colony with a sparse population, scattered over an immense area,--there must necessarily be great difficulty in finding men fit to be legislators. And they who may, after a while, become fit, have as yet had but slender means of learning how legislation should be conducted. The system, as at present adopted, which will hardly bear strict investigation on its own merits, may probably be found useful in giving the necessary training to the leading men of the colony, and in bringing them by degrees into the ways of discreet legislation. I must confess that in Western Australia one hears of doings in days not far remote which lead one to think that any amount of ignorance in a legislator, that any amount of what I may, perhaps, call rowdyism in a chamber, is better than practically irresponsible power in the hands of a would-be mighty colonial officer, removed from home by half the world’s circumference.