"An honest man, sir, is able to speak for himself, when a knave is not."
--As You Like It.
In one of our colonial municipalities, which of them I have forgotten,
as I heard my story so long ago, a working furniture-maker, who had
secured an order from the Mayor for his official chair, was observed to
be at particular pains over its construction, and, on being asked the
reason, replied that he intended some day to occupy it himself. If the
subject of this sketch had been of that particular trade, this would
have been a very likely story to fix upon him. Not that he was of
inordinate ambition; for, on the contrary, he looked quiet and contented
beyond most around him. But he was always ready and willing to respond
to the many opportunities of a new colony, and from his great natural
gifts usually able to do them justice. Nature had given him all she
could to make him a good and useful colonist; but there was one thing he
had not had from her, because not within her power, and that was the
school. He was probably not altogether uneducated; but he could not have
had many chances in that direction, otherwise the facility with which he
educated himself in life's practical work after he had reached manhood
would have told for him as a schoolboy as well. In business, in public
speaking and debating, and in public life in general, he took
successfully a first part; but when he had to condescend to such
schooling products as writing and spelling, he made confessedly only a
bad second. But, again, a defect of this kind is much less of an
obstacle in new colonies than in old societies, because for generations
in the former the hand is relatively more important to progress than the
head, and the man of work than the man of thought. In colonies men of
great natural parts, if ambitious, can usually take good positions even
if but little educated. At Home this is hardly possible, and the
consequent social distemper is there a danger to the State--a danger,
however, which our Education Acts since 1870 must be steadily removing.
I happened, on one occasion, to meet Nicholson's home employer in
Liverpool. He had been foreman, if indeed so high as that, in a
warehouse. When he told his employer that he had made up his mind to go
to Port Phillip with his family, there was regret to part with so quiet
and trustworthy a servant, but, as he said to me, not the least idea
that the unpretending individual before him would, within a few years,
take a position considerably in advance of his own.
He set up a grocery shop in Melbourne, and was soon on the road to
success. Then he stood for the municipality, which was hardly yet out of
infancy, was duly elected councillor, and in a very few years became
Mayor of Melbourne. Then, gliding easily onwards and upwards, he entered
the young colonial Legislature of 1851, as member for the Metropolitan
County, North Bourke. He had previously, as I have told, tried
unsuccessfully for the capital itself, getting some compensation,
however, in the "next first." But with all this rising importance he was
ever the plain, unassuming William Nicholson, and when Mayor or M.L.C.
both he and his wife would be found in their shop as usual--so far, at
least, as the other crowding duties would permit.
When he formed his first and very brief Ministry, under Constitutional
Government, prior to my definitely leaving the colony in 1857, he did me
the honour to invite me to a place in his "Cabinet," if our young
colonies may use that grand Imperial term, as his Commissioner of
Customs. With regret I was compelled to decline; for, from experience a
few years before, I had found that if a man has business of his own
which he must attend to he cannot possibly at the same time attend to
that of everybody else.
Premiers came in thick and fast succession in those days, for there was
no small doing and undoing, and no little of general upturning when an
exclusively representative Assembly took the place of the "Crown"
system, in its preceding complete or subsequently still partial
condition. The Land Question was ever the chief difficulty, for, whereas
in previous times the people had been directed to conform themselves to
land laws, now the new fancy all was that the land laws should conform
to the needs of the people. Ministries rose and fell mainly on this
question. When the second time Premier, I think in 1860, Nicholson left
his name to a Land Act, as did O'Shanassy, Gavan Duffy, and others, and
there is a ringing of the changes even yet upon that fertile subject.
William Nicholson has passed to his rest, and Burns might have fitly
awarded him his high palm, "An honest man's the noblest work of God."