As for the Irishmen of all creeds and classes who took such an important part in the splendid work of building up these new communities, and who are still estimated to constitute a quarter of the population, one can only marvel at the intensity of the prejudice which declared these men "unfit" for self-government at home, and which is not yet dissipated by the discovery that they were welcomed under the Southern Cross, not only as good workaday citizens in town, bush, or diggings, but as barristers, judges, bankers, stock-owners, mine-owners, as honoured leaders in municipal and political life, as Speakers of the Representative Assemblies, and as Ministers and Prime Ministers of the Crown.[32] is true, and the fact cannot surprise us, that the intestinal divisions of race and creed in Ireland itself, stereotyped there by ages of bad government, were at first to a certain extent reproduced in Australia, as in Canada. Aggressive Orangeism was to be found sowing discord where no cause for discord existed. But the common sense of the community and the pure air of freedom tended to sterilize, though they have not to this day wholly killed, these germs of disease. A career was opened to every deserving Irishman, whether Catholic or Protestant. Hungry, hopeless, listless cottiers from Munster and Connaught built up nourishing towns like Geelong and Kilmore. Two Irishmen, Dunne and Connor, were the first discoverers of the Ballarat goldfields. An Irishman, Robert O'Hara Burke, led the first transcontinental expedition, 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