In 1841 Lowe moved to London to read for the Bar, but his eyesight showed signs of serious weakness, and, acting on medical advice, he sailed to Sydney in the colony of New South Wales, where he set to work in the law courts.

[5][6] Owing to a difference of opinion with Gipps, Lowe resigned from the council on 9 September 1844,[6][7] but was elected in April 1845 for Counties of St Vincent and Auckland.

[6] Lowe soon made his mark in the political world by his clever speeches, particularly on finance and education; and besides obtaining a large legal practice, he was involved with the founding and was one of the principal writers for the Atlas newspaper.

[4] In 1844, Lowe defended a Royal Navy captain, John Knatchbull, on a charge of murdering a widowed shopkeeper named Ellen Jamieson;[8] he was one of the earliest to raise in a British court the plea of moral insanity (unsuccessfully).

[4] Lowe's previous university reputation and connections combined with his colonial experience stood him in good stead; The Times was glad to employ him, and, as one of its ablest leader-writers, he made his influence widely felt.

He felt then, and still more after the Reform Act of 1867, that "we must educate our masters," and he rather scandalized his old university friends by the stress he laid on physical science as opposed to classical studies.

Considerable opposition was aroused by the new regime at the Education Office, and, in 1864, Lowe was driven to resign by an adverse vote in Parliament with reference to the way in which inspectors' reports were "edited."

Lowe retired into what Bright called the "Cave of Adullam", and with other Liberals and Whig peers (known collectively as the 'Adullamites' ) opposed the bill in a series of brilliant speeches, which raised his reputation as an orator to its highest point and helped to cause government's downfall.

As he said in the third reading of the Bill, Lowe thought any step towards democracy was bad because it engendered "a right existing in the individual as opposed to general expediency… numbers as against wealth and intellect".

It was only necessary that you should give them the franchise, to make those trades unions the most dangerous political agencies that could be conceived; because they were in the hands, not of individual members, but of designing men, able to launch them in solid mass against the institutions of the country.

As it was the case that participation in Parliament was also only possible through possession of property, Lowe was fearful that a change in one part of the world he understood would lead to another, ending in unforeseeable chaos.

When you have once taught the people to entertain the notion of the individual rights of every citizen to share in the Government, and the doctrine of popular supremacy, you impose on yourselves the task of re-modelling the whole of your institutions, in reference to the principles that you have set up...[14]Lowe concluded his speech with considerable flair.

Sir, I was looking to-day at the head of the lion which was sculptured in Greece during her last agony after the battle of Chaeronea, to commemorate that event, and I admired the power and the spirit which portrayed in the face of that noble beast the rage, the disappointment, and the scorn of a perishing nation and of a down-trodden civilization, and I said to myself, "O for an orator, O for an historian, O for a poet, who would do the same thing for us!"

that a man would rise in order that he might set forth in words that could not die, the shame, the rage, the scorn, the indignation, and the despair with which this measure is viewed by every cultivated Englishman who is not a slave to the trammels of party, or who is not dazzled by the glare of a temporary and ignoble success!

Lowe was a rather cut-and-dried economist, who prided himself that during his four years of office he took twelve millions off taxation; but later opinion has hardly accepted his removal of the shilling registration duty on corn (1869) as good statesmanship, and his failures are remembered rather than his successes.

His proposed tax of a halfpenny a box on Lucifer matches in 1871 (for which he suggested the epigram ex luce lucellum, "out of light a little profit") roused a storm of opposition, and had to be dropped.

Lowe was delighted with this, and promptly translated it into Latin, as follows: Continentur hac in fossa Humilis Roberti ossa; Si ad coelum evolabit, Pax in coelo non restabit; Sin in inferis jacebit, Diabolum ejus poenitebit.