The Melbourne Corporation.

It is no use declaiming against the spread of our bloated city our Paris, our Babylon, our Tyre and Sidon. Fairfield Park, Grace Park, Black Rock, Sandringham, Gordon Park, Loch Park, and a hundred others, are chopped up from the aristocratic domain to the mincemeat of the villa and the cottage. The city grows quite out of hand. We feel more and more the necessity for a Metropolitan Board of Works, and those other measures which will give homogenity to the mass, composed of Melbourne's heart and the multifarious local bodies. There is a contour survey supposed to be in progress, with a view to comprehensive proceedings.

We seem to be constructing tentacles of the octopus, before the main body. One is the Harbour Trust, which may be congratulated on the work it has done, and is doing. The wharf extension has been enormous on both sides of the Yarra river, which will yet rival the glorious Clyde. It is only about a couple of years since the first full-rigged ship came up, and last year there was the triumph of seeing a four-master in hospital at one of the south docks, though, to be sure, it had to come up the river almost on its keel. The Trust is cutting away at Sir John Coode's Canal to the Bay. In ten years we ought to see the P. & O. and Orient steamers, and big clippers, right up to the city, as in Sydney.

Another important tentacle is the Tramway Trust. The wire system, Hallidie's, first tried in San Francisco, and which has since become known in Chicago and so many other American cities, will be used on the line from Melbourne to Richmond, with which we commence, and the trenches are being cut. The Melbourne Tramway Company has secured grand terms for its monopoly. Our Tramway Lords will be desperately rich men.

Another tentacle is the Gas. Here again there is one monopolising company doing pretty well as it pleases. The Gas Conference, supposed to control it, is a farce. The burgesses are handed over to the Metropolitan Gas Company, bound hand and foot. With the sympathy of the general consumer, we declare that Melbourne gas is habitually bad, and care not for fifteen-candle analysis. As for the meter, wet or dry, it invariably page 21 befriends the company. Gas bills are the greatest mystery going.

But really we did not start this article with an idea of working off the bile. We meant nothing but a genial chat on the city councillors.

Ex-Mayors of Melbourne never appear to regard the mayoralty as the apogee of their career, after which there is nothing municipal worth living for, and Fiji turtle-eating for. Glancing round the cosy benches of the Corporation, we see those Past Mayoral Grands—Amess, Bayles, C. Smith, Paterson. Monbray, Dodgshun, Meares, Ham, Pigdon, and O'Grady, still mingling in the fray, with expectants like Lee, Stewart, Wilks, Bowen, Zevenboom, and the gallant young levers, the junior member, who stands alone in representing the Young Man of Forty element, like Chamberlain in the English Cabinet. The ladies would plump for levers, as Mayor.

Well, these City Fathers do their business excellently, though some get demoralised on the word "Commytee." The late Mayor, Mr. C. Smith, took a wider view of his social responsibilities than usual, and retired with special expressions of goodwill on that score. In particular his Children's Fancy Dress Ball was completely new here, in emulation of the Lord Mayor of London. It achieved the most brilliant social success of the year. Four hundred photographs, in character, of the little guests, were presented to the Mayoress, Miss Smith, sister of the Mayor, and in years to come they will form a curious memento of citizens and citizenesses occupying responsible stations in society.

Among the heroes of the past, in Corporation history, John Thomas Smith, seven times Mayor of Melbourne, is pre-eminent. He was a singular type of the man who comes to the front in a gold-digging time, and doubtless San Francisco can turn up his parallel. They keep his bust at the Town Hall, but all the gloze of the artist cannot render it handsome. "Jacky Tommy," the vulgar called him; and he introduced the first donkey.

In writing of his free and easy manners, we should mention that he was in every way a most estimable and conscientious man, like his old friend, Mr. Coppin. But all the old friends of Mr. Smith will pardon us for embalming him in a little good-natured fun about those eccentricities which made a most unctuous comedian of him, while they did not impair in any way a character which stood as high as any in the community.

Mr. Smith was sent home to England, and had an interview with the Queen, who did not knight him, much to the indignation of Melbourne at large. Nevertheless, his loyalty remained unshaken, but we fancied we discerned a tinge of cynicism about him, on the last occasion when we travelled with him in the page 22 Prahran train. He had withdrawn from the rich cushions of the first-class to the second, where, in his inevitable white hat and white choker, he smoked a white clay pipe, about two inches long, and turned upside down. We have heard of the sensation he created among the masher officials of the Civil Service, when he was Minister of Mines, by going down into Collins-street in his shirt sleeves, on a hot day, for a quiet smoke.

A better, kinder, juster, and more acute magistrate never sat on the bench, but, like "Bendigo Mac," he would make incisive and original remarks. A Melbourne newspaper once reported him as saying to an astonished prisoner, "How do you make your living, eh? On the cross? Come, none of your tiddly-winking."

Yet, a more distinguished member of the Corporation was John O'Shanassy, and we cannot help regarding him as the most able man Australia has yet produced, even before Wentworth and Higinbotham. Above all, he was admirable for that firmness of principle, which would never waver a jot for any temptation of place or power.

About a dozen full length portraits, in oil, line the walls of the Council Chamber. There are fine ones of Governors Latrobe and Sir Chas. Hotham. Lord Malmesbury, in his recent memoirs, relates how unwillingly Hotham, the naval captain, accepted this Governorship. He was plunged into a fearful seething ocean of troubles. The goldfields broke out, and Government broke down, culminating in the rebellion of the Eureka Stockade, Ballarat. Citizens were killed, so were soldiers, and Hotham was worried to death at Toorak. He is kept in memory by the populous suburb of Hotham.