WILLIAM NICHOLSON, MAYOR OF MELBOURNE, AND PREMIER OF THE COLONY.
"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."