laboured on himself in Ireland for seven years at land reform and other objects, and in 1855 gave up the struggle against such hopeless odds, and reached Melbourne early in 1856 in time to sit in the first Victorian Parliament returned under the constitutional Act of 1855. From the beginning to the end of an honourable political career which lasted thirty years, he made it his dominant purpose to ensure that Australia should be saved from the evils which cursed Ireland; from government by a favoured class, from land monopoly, and from religious inequality and the venomous bigotries it engenders, and he took a large share in bringing about their exclusion. His Land Act of 1862, for example, where he had another Roman Catholic Irishman, Judge Casey, as an auxiliary, put an end in those districts where it was fairly worked to the grave abuses caused by the speculative acquisition of immense tracts of land by absentee owners, and promoted the closer settlement of the country by yeoman farmers. In Australia, as in Canada, we see the vital importance of good land laws, and can measure the misery which resulted in Ireland from an agrarian system incalculably more absurd and unjust than anything known in any other part of the Empire. The stagnation of Western Australia was originally due to the cession of huge unworkable estates to a handful of men. South Australia was retarded for some little time from the same cause, and Victoria and New South Wales were all hampered in the same way. It was not a question, as in Ireland, and to a less degree in Prince Edward Island, of the legal relations between the landlord and tenant of lands originally confiscated, but of the grant and sale of Crown lands. Yet the after-results, especially in the check to tillage and the creation of vast pasture ranches, were often very similar.[33]