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The Australian Constitutional Framers and the Languages of Virtue
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The historiography of the political concept of virtue has been dominated by examinations of western European and North American sources. This article aims to widen the historical scope for our understanding of the influence of the concept of political virtue by examining how Anglophone conceptions of virtue were employed by the framers of the Australian Constitution during the Federation debates and the impact of those conceptions on the Constitution itself. It examines the strands of thought that provided the backdrop for the colonial adoption of the Victorian-era British conception of political virtue, subsequently showing how the Australian constitutional framers adopted these languages and concepts in their own writings and speeches. The Australian framers were concerned with the virtue of both the people and their political leaders, applying this concern in their contributions to legal and political discourse in the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, rather than a direct transfer of the more typical languages of republican virtue, the colonial context examined here offers evidence of a shift of emphasis from virtue into the concept of “character”. The framers demonstrated an interest in the question of character as they wrote and deliberated around the constitutional problems of political parties, bicameralism, and responsible government. So, too, they showed an acute concern for the importance of character in their institutional designs for a future federal commonwealth. This article demonstrates that the framers existed within the tradition of thought which held virtue, or character, to be central to the vitality of the polity, and that the framers adapted that language in their deliberations and the institutional design of the Constitution.

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Australian Framers and Languages 9 1893 National Life and Character proved inuential among the Australian constitutional framers.57 Pearson emphasised the language of character, warning of an inevitable decline of the Anglophone colonialists in the face of Asian immigration.58 His concern was not political domination by foreign power, but rather an alteration of the character of the higher races, undermining the possibilities of the emerging liberal state.59 Improved individual character, according to Pearson, creates a positive feedback loop for civic life, with the state benetting from [elevating] individual character which makes its citizens more perfect parts of the political machine.60 A degradation of character in the citizens adversely impacts the vitality of a polity.61
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The well-known jurist and politician James Bryce (18381922) provides further evidence that character was of central importance in late nineteenth-century thought. Bryces The American Commonwealth (1888), which is essentially an extended critique of American political culture and legal structures from a British constitutionalist perspective, exerted an extensive inuence on the Australian framers.62 In the course of The American Commonwealth, Bryce touches on questions related to the moral qualities of elected political representatives and the people. One defect of the American system that Bryce identied was that the best and brightest do not, on the whole, enter politics. This has unfortunate results, according to Bryce, in lowering the quality of governance and public service.63 It is an old maxim, he wrote in a passage that returns us to the language of virtue, that republics live by Virtuethat is, by the maintenance of a high level of public spirit and justice among the citizens.64 T
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65 This, coupled with the reality that America is a place where birth and education give a man little advantage in the [political] race and therefore little incentive to enter politics, means that American statesmen are not types of the highest or strongest American manhood.66
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