I have said what I can to justify the dislike of England, but have by no means exhausted the explanations of the fact There are explanations which do not justify and the most important of all seems to me to come under that head. The greatest danger to the contented union of the Empire is the protecting of a selfishness so abnormal as to excite anger and impatience. But since anger and impatience are the worst weapons with which it is possible to fight, it will be wise to lay them by, and to discuss the question unemotionally. Australia is governed by the working man. The working man has got hold of a good thing in Australia, and he has resolved to keep it and, if he can, to make it better. He has got it into his head that the one thing to be afraid of is the influx of population. He takes no count of the fact that all the wisest men of the country admit the crying need of people—that labour everywhere is needed for the development of giant resources. His loaf is his, and he is quite righteously determined that no man shall take it from him. He is not in the least degree determined that he shall not take away another man's loaf; but that is a different question. England is the one country in the world which can, under existing circumstances, or under circumstances easily conceivable, seek to send any appreciable number of new people into the colony. Therefore England is to be feared and hated, and any scheme which may be promulgated in favour of further emigration is to be resisted to the uttermost. Men talk of war as the answer to an attempt to deplete by emigration the overcrowded labour markets of the home country. No public man who sets the least value upon his position dares discuss this question. The feeling is too deep-rooted and its manifestations are too passionate. The scheme propounded by General Booth afforded an opportunity for a striking manifestation of this fact. Long before the nature of the scheme was known or guessed at, before any of the safeguards surrounding it were hinted, it was denounced from one end of the country to the other. It is not my present business to express any opinion as to the feasibility of the plan. The point is that the mere mention of it was enough to excite an intense and spontaneous opposition. Australia will never, except under compulsion, allow any large body of Englishmen to enter into possession of any portion of her territories. The ports for emigration on a large scale are finally and definitely closed.
The population of Australia is 3,326,000. These people have an area of 3,050,000 square miles from which to draw the necessaries and luxuries of life. Suppose it be allowed that one half the entire country is not and will not be habitable by man. Australians themselves would resent this estimate as being shamelessly exaggerated, but the supposition is, so far as the argument goes, in their favour. Take away that imagined useless half and every man, woman and child in the community would still have very nearly half a square mile of land if the country were equally divided. It is evident that the populace is unequal to the proper exploitation of the continent Let them multiply as the human race never multiplied before and they must still remain unequal to the task before them for many centuries. The cry raised is that of “Australia for the Australians.” Well, who are the Australians? Are they the men of the old British stock who made the country what it is, or the men who had the luck to be born to the inheritance of a splendid position, for which they have not toiled? It is the honest simple truth, and no man ought to be angry at the statement of it—though many will be—that Australia was built up by British enterprise and British money. It is a British possession still, and without British protection, British gold, and the trade which exists between it and Britain, would be in a bad way. Looked at dispassionately, the cry of “Australia for the Australians” seems hardly reasonable. The mother country has a right to something of a share in the bargain.
The argument would be infinitely less strong if the Australians were using Australia. But they are not. The vast Melbourne, of which Victoria is so proud, holds half the population of the colony, and produces little or nothing. Melbourne is the city of brass plates. There are more brass-plates to the acre in the thoroughfares which diverge from Collins Street than could be found in any other city of the world. The brass-plate, as all the world knows, is the badge of the non-producer—the parasite, the middleman, agent, call him what you will—the man who wears a tall hat and black coat, and who lives in a villa, and lives on and by the products of the labour of others. As society is constituted he is an essential when he exists in reasonable numbers. In Melbourne his numbers are out of reason. For almost every producer in Victoria there is a non-producer in the capital. In the early days men went into the country and set themselves to clear and till the soil. That impulse of energy has died out and a new one has succeeded it which is infinitely less profitable and wholesome. The tendency is now towards the city. The one source of permanent wealth is neglected, and commerce and speculation occupy the minds of men who fifty years ago would have raised mutton and wool, corn and wine. With every increase of growth in the great city there is a cry for rural labour to preserve the necessary balance of things. The call is not listened to or answered, and Melbourne is a hundred times more abnormal than London. London deals with the trade of the world, and a good half of its population could not be dispensed with. Within its limits five and a half millions do the business of a hundred millions. In Melbourne half a million do the business of another half a million, and the country necessarily suffers. No student of social economy can deny the position, but the working man will have it otherwise. He is the ruler of Australia and the destinies of a people, pointed out by nature for greatness, are stationary in his hands. He is worth studying, however, and to convince him may mean the salvation of a continent. There, as here, the working man is the victim of a prodigious blunder—a mistake so obvious that the on-looker wonders at his blindness. A month or two ago he was in the thick of a struggle which was everywhere called a fight with capital. The real battle, however, was never with capital for a moment. The one engagement—and it ranged all along the line for months—was between organised and unorganised labour, between the unionists and non-unionists. Wherever a working man of the union declared against the conditions imposed by the employer, a working man outside the union accepted those conditions. The capitalist changed his staff—that was all. The unionists were thrown permanently out of employment in large numbers, and when at last the strike fizzled out, their leaders made a melancholy proclamation of victory, which deceived nobody, not even themselves. The unionist clock in Australia has been put back a year or two. It is probable that the men will know with whom they have to fight before they are again lured into conflict. It is an old adage that much will have more. The Australian working man is the best fed, the best paid, the best housed, and the least worked of all the workers of the world. In the great towns house rent is dear, much dearer than it has a right to be in so new and so wide a country. This is the consequence of the rush for secularisation and the ensuing neglect of the resources of the land. Clothing is dear as the consequence of protective imposts. The Australian working man is a staunch protectionist, being somehow persuaded that it is essential to his interests that he should suffer for the benefit of his only enemy, the middleman. There are hundreds of restaurants in the second-rate streets of colonial towns where you may see painted up a legend, “All Meals—6d.” For that small sum a man may have a sufficiency of hot or cold beef or mutton, bread, tea and a choice of vegetables. I can testify from personal knowledge that the meals are well cooked, well served and plentiful. I have eaten a worse luncheon in a London club or restaurant than I found at one of these eating-houses in Sydney and have paid five times the price, although it has to be confessed that for five times the price one can get a finer meal. More wholesome or more plentiful fare no man need ask for.
Well, as I have said, much will have more. The working man has got his whole programme filled up. There is one vote for one man, and about that fact almost the whole land is jubilant—though the practical good of it may as yet be a problem. The aspiration expressed in the old quatrain is fulfilled.
“Eight hours work,
Eight hours play,
Eight hours sleep,
And eight 'bob' a day.”
The Eight Hours movement has been crowned with success, and there is a magnificent annual procession to commemorate it. It is announced that a movement is to be set on foot for the further reduction of the hours of labour. Six hours a day has to be the limit of the future. The comic journals, or to speak by the card, the journals which study to be comic, prophesy four hours, two hours, and then no hours at all; but these celestial visions are out of the working man's eyeshot.
Here and there an individual may be found who, being entrusted with an irresponsible power, would not desire to use it tyrannically. But since corporations are never so moral, so high-thinking so forbearing as individuals, corporate bodies tend always and everywhere to the misuse of their powers, and demand constantly to be held in check by some influence outside their own. The working man of the Antipodes is told so often that all the power (as well as all the freedom and the honour) lies in his hands, that he is disposed to do strange things.
But a mere glance at the history of two phases of the great strikes which have lately shaken Australian society may be of service.
In New Zealand, where, under conditions similar to those of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, the labourer has grown to think himself more worthy of his hire than anybody else could possibly be, the fight between unionists and non-unionists, with capital as an interested spectator, began on a curiously trivial question. A firm of printers and stationers in Christchurch were ordered to reinstate or discharge an employee. The firm declined to obey the mandate of the union, and an order went forth from the representatives of the latter body to the effect that no one belonging to any of its branches should handle the goods of the obdurate company. This was all very well in its way, until the order touched the railway hands, who are in the employ of the government. The union appealed to the railway commissioners to remain “neutral” and not to carry the goods of the offending firm. The commissioners responded that they were the servants of the public; that it was not part of their business to recognise the quarrel, but that it was their business to carry for any and every citizen who did not infringe their rules. The representatives of the union renewed their appeal for “neutrality.” Why should these domineering commissioners take the side of capital and fight in its interests? The commissioners again wrote that they were the public carriers, that they had no right to refuse to work for any law-abiding citizen, that they had no place or part in the quarrel, and intended simply and merely to do the duty for which they were appointed. The din which arose on this final declaration was at once melancholy and comic.
Here was the government lending all its power to crush the working man. Here was the old class tyranny which had created class hatreds in the old country! This was what we were coming to after having emancipated ourselves from the trammels of a dead or effete superstition! Here was a government so crassly wicked and purposely blind as to profess neutrality and yet refuse to fight our battles! What had we—the working men of New Zealand—asked for? We asked that the government should hold our enemy while we punched him; and while they traitorously proclaimed their neutrality, they refused this simple request for fair play. Therefore are we, the working men of New Zealand, naturally incensed, and at the next election we will shake these worthless people out of office, and we will elect men like Fish, who know what neutrality really means!