“McGowan will no longer be able to complain of getting too little newspaper space. He will get enough; but the Lord help those who have to ‘take’ him, and preserve them from charges of misreporting. For McGowan is the most slovenly speaker in the world. If he’s not, I’d like to shoot the other. Half his sentences are never finished, and his remarks trail round and round his subject like a snake in a hen-coop looking for the exit. His constantly repeated gag is—‘The point I want to make, Mr. Speaker, is this.’ Then he suddenly discovers that he has mislaid the point, or left it at home, or in the tram, or somewhere, and while he is trying to recollect what he did with it, he fills in time by rounding off a flock of sentences which he left unfinished earlier in the evening.”
And again:
“The haste of the Fisher Government to do things lately moved Alfred Deakin to describe its proceeding as ‘quick-lunch legislation.’ Poor old Alfred’s variety was ‘fasting man’ or ‘dry-crust legislation.’ You sat down at the table and looked at Alfred’s political bill-of-fare. In about three years a dead waiter came, and you ordered chops. The waiter departed slowly in a state of decay, and fell into dust before he reached the door. Then you stayed around, through geological periods, till Judgment Day, and, looking down from the battlements of heaven, you saw Alfred’s cook still chasing the sheep through perdition. Truly there was no quick lunch about the Deakin methods! In his restaurant the dropped soup took six months to reach the floor, and, as likely as not, you saw Alexander the Great at the next table, for time didn’t matter there.”
One politician who reached the limit in the matter of political amenities, and who has died very recently, was Mr. J. H. Graves. The abuse, the satire, and the damning with faint praise, the awful disclosures, and the still more awful insinuations, that Mr. Graves indulged in, were a perfect nightmare to the House of his day, all the more to be dreaded from the fact that he never spoke at random, that all his shafts were at once winged and barbed by truth, and their course directed by a sure and certain knowledge of the tenderest portion of his writhing victim’s conscience. People said, and, I believe, with truth, that J. H. Graves kept a carefully compiled Doomsday Book, containing the history of every member of the House, with every possible detail of his every mistake and misdemeanour, and all the mistakes and misdemeanours, the scandals and family skeletons, of his progenitors. A speaker in the House cannot be summoned for libel; all that can happen is that he should be called upon to apologize for anything particularly insulting—and Mr. Graves was ready to apologize with cheerful alacrity. There was always plenty more in that fatal book. It is said that Mr. J. L. Purves, by whose death the Australian Bar has lately lost one of its most brilliant members, once got hold of the original book and burnt it; and that, though another was begun, it was so much less voluminous and comprehensive, members ceased, from that time onwards to feel cold shivers running down their backs when Graves’s glance fell upon them; and so much of his power was lost, though in a dispute with another man, who came from the same county as himself, this second book was actually produced in proof of its existence.
“I have never been guilty,” thundered a member recently, in a fine fury of indignation, “of going to the telephone and impersonating another man, and using the information obtained against him in Parliament under the cloak of privilege. But I must say the honourable member for — stands here self-convicted of that action.” I have not the faintest recollection of what it was all about, but it is characteristic; while the title “honourable,” as it is here used, strikes me as rather a meaningless survival in a democratic country. “Hi don’t call ’im the ’onourable,” I once heard an emphatic political opponent declare. “Hi calls ’im the ’orrible.”
“Cabbage-grower!” someone shouted at some public meeting where Mr. Bent was making a speech. “Well, there’s no question about that,” retorted the late Premier beamingly; “the question is, did I, or did I not, grow good cabbages?”
The odd thing is that out of all the schoolboy chaff, and the apparently hopeless babel of mere words, such good measures can be evoked. It is somehow like flinging a medley of unappetizing-looking scraps into a casserole, and, rather to one’s own surprise, evoking a good soup—when all the scum has been removed.
The State Governor, as the Victoria Year Book remarks bluntly, is only expected to exercise his judgment in assenting to, or dissenting from, or reserving of, any Bills passed by Parliament, and the granting or withholding of a dissolution—either of which measures will, for the time being, render him equally unpopular—or the appointment of a new Ministry. Apart from this, his whole duty consists in looking nice and behaving prettily, while by far the most arduous part of the position rests upon the shoulders of his wife. If I was going to choose a new Governor for Victoria—which somehow no one has even thought of asking me to do—I should not even want to see him, though my interview with his wife would be long and arduous. She must dress beautifully, for she is of little use unless she wears things that other women can copy; but she must give herself no airs, while the complete frankness of the criticism which she will meet with may be gathered, with some amusement, from the following description of a garden fête at Storrington, the State Government House:
“The visitors were so eager for the frivol that they arrived before schedule time (3.30). Motors and carriages were politely dissuaded from entering the gates, while Aides peeped unhappily round the pillars of the veranda, and sent agonized messages upstairs. But the Carmichaels were getting into party duds as fast as they could. They had been opening the motor-drive out to Toorak at 2.30, and the lady’s return home and quick change into a dream of a lilac gown had all to be compressed into the one brief hour. When at last the pair came out, the dress—a trailing circumstance of nonchalant coolness—was received with murmurs of admiration. Someone has been redrawing the lines of the Carmichael lady’s figure; it has the new slenderness necessary for the new dressing.”
The ideal Governor’s wife must be of the bluest possible blood—nothing insults a democratic country like playing down to it in the matter of nobodies—and yet she must forget all the class distinctions she has ever known. She must remember everybody, entertain royally, and spend lavishly. There was once a superlatively mean Governor, with a superlatively mean wife, in Victoria, and they will never be forgotten; it is a fault that the people here are not prone to themselves, and which they simply will not tolerate in those whom they consider handsomely paid to cut a dash. I never saw but one public-house called after that particular Governor, and this, in itself, is significant—besides, even it is in a mean back street.