crap. 1] THE COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA 779
in 1861 the commission to the Governor of New South Wales
as Governor ceased to be accompanied with one to make him
titular Governor-General. Tn the Colonies, however, Went-
worth in Australia until 1854, and later in England, Deas
Thomson in New South Wales, and Gavan Duffy in Victoria,
were anxious to secure some federal system of an elected
assembly for common purposes, a forerunner of the Federal
Council of Australasia, and from 1853 there was a good deal
of activity in this direction, but the Acts of 1855 giving
constitutions to New South Wales and Victoria contained no
federal provisions. In 1860 a Conference was arranged, but
a change of Ministry in New South Wales, and the reluctance
of the newly formed Colony of Queensland, ended its pros-
pects, and the Conference which considered tariff matters in
1863 declined, without instructions, to discuss federation.
Yet the tariff difficulties in Colonies with land frontiers were
very great; in 1855 an agreement was made between
Victoria and New South Wales to allow free transit over the
Murray, while goods paid duties at Adelaide for entry either
to New South Wales or Victoria, and the proceeds were
divided equally, but in 1864 New South Wales terminated
the agreement, which was renewed, but modified, in 1865-7,
and it ended in 1873. A proposal by South Australia in the
direction of internal free trade made in 1862 received prac-
tically no favour. In 1873 the Imperial Parliament removed
the legal bar which had hampered the introduction of a
Customs Union by allowing the Colonies to differentiate
against the rest of the world in favour of the other Colonies
or New Zealand, but by this time Victoria had gone far on
her career of high protection, and was only willing to come
into a scheme which gave her manufactures free entry into
the rest of Australia, and denied their agricultural products
free entry into that colony! and an Act of New South Wales
in 1876 to encourage border conventions remained fruitless.
1 See Parl. Pap., C. 576,703, and 36 & 37 Vict. ¢. 22. For the Murray
Acts, New South Wales, 19 Viet. No. 21; Victoria, 17 Vict. No. 17;
South Australia, No. 6 of 1856. The New South Wales tariff was applied
in 1857 to these goods.
