Professor Dicey has attacked in the Times the conduct of
the- Victorian Government in refusing to allow the Irish informers to land at Melbourne, and the Agent-General for the Colony, Mr. Murray Smith, has replied, defending Mr. Service's action. The defence is complex, but on the whole conclusive. We now know on official authority that these men were sent to Melbourne by the Irish Executive in spite of a formal protest of the Victorian Government, communicated through the Colonial Office in ample time. No Government with any sense of self-respect could allow them to land after that. When the men them- selves became aware of the state of feeling in Australia, they wrote requesting not to be landed. On the question of technical legal right, of which Professor Dicey naturally makes much, there is a good deal said and to be said. During the furious agitation against transportation which nearly lost Australia to the Empire thirty years ago, it was seriously pro- posed, as a measure of retaliation, to charter a ship at Mel-
bourne, fill it with colonial convicts and jail-birds, and debark them in England. Does Professor Dicey hold that the English Government would be justified, from any regard for strict legal right, in allowing these men to land ? Surely there are rights of quarantine against crime, as well as against cholera.
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