ABSTRACT
There is no doubt that the attitude of New South Wales towards the Act of 1850 was in large measure due to lack of confidence in Lord Grey; and that this lack of confidence was due far more to his land policy and his transportation policy than to his constitutional policy properly speaking. It is significant that the Vagrancy Act, brought up by the Legislative Council as an example of misuse of the veto power,! was a product of the anti-transportation movement. After all, he had given to South Australia and Van Diemen's Land their first free constitutions, and to Victoria the wished-for separation from New South Wales; abandoning Durham's reservation of the 'form of constitution' as an Imperial matter, he had given wide powers of amendment to the Colonial Legislatures; he had extended their control of finance. Outside of New South Wales, the changes he had effected had been nothing less than a transformation. Where he had differed from his critics the Colonial Reformers he had on the whole been right. He saw that there was such a thing as a 'second chamber question'. No one would now pretend as his critics did, that it was of vast importance that the colonies should then and there be set on 'the right path', as though there were but one 'right path', its direction once and for all determined. He saw that two of the greatest dangers threatening the Australian colonies were those of centralization on the one hand, of colonial localism and intercolonial rivalry on the other. Impotent though he proved to be to avert these dangers his attempt was a statesmanlike attempt. If the twentieth-century Australian, every time he changes trains on the journey from Brisbane to
Perth, knew that Lord Grey expressly warned the colonists of that day of the danger that such things would happen, he might perhaps be ready to appreciate the good points of the statesman of whom the histories remark that he was the last opponent of responsible government and the last defender of transportation.
