Five Years Under the Southern Cross: Experiences and Impressions

by Frederic C. Spurr

In the year 1913 Messrs. Fred. B. Smith and Raymond Robins, the leaders of the “Men and Religion Movement” in America, paid a visit to Australia. They were received with open arms, and everywhere they gathered immense audiences of men to listen to their remarkable message. Mr. Smith has, since his tour, given his impressions of the conditions in Australia with singularly clear penetration. He says:

“Here we found that from the law-making end about everything that could be dreamed of for the good of the people has been done. Raymond Robins was simply overwhelmed with the magnitude of their legislation upon these questions. They have an eight-hour day universal labour law. They have a minimum wage law. They have an old-age pension Act. They have stringent laws concerning the operation of dangerous machinery without adequate protection for the workmen. There is not another land on earth with so little poverty in it. From the material standpoint they have reached a very high standard.”

This is true photography. Mr. Smith kept his eyes open during his stay in the Commonwealth. But he was not blind to the other side of the picture. He continues:

“The striking thing is that while these men have been engaged in passing the most arbitrary industrial laws they have permitted, in many cases, the loosest ones to exist upon the great moral questions. The public bars are loosely run. Gambling is permitted at race tracks and cricket matches. A people may pass laws until Doomsday, and they alone will not make people good, righteous, nor happy. There is no other such final evidence upon this point as that given in Australia.”

This is the problem the churches in Australia have to face. The growth of freedom has not meant the growth of morals. On every hand we perceive the perversion of this wonderful liberty. In this Garden of Eden the snake has already appeared.

Thus I have learned in five years that a perfect climate, a perfect social environment, and an almost perfect social and industrial legislation, together fail to produce morality. When the law was passed forbidding all work in shops, warehouses, and factories after midday on Saturday, it was thought that the Sunday morning services in the churches might gain as the result. At least, the ancient plea, “too tired because of hard work until late on Saturday night,” would be impossible. But the increased facilities for pleasure have led, in many instances, to the entire secularisation of the Sunday. Much wanted more, more demanded the most. And so, for very many, the Christian Sunday has gone, being replaced by a day of pleasure, sometimes pure, and often riotous. It is not that the people who spend the Sunday on the Bay, or in the gully, or at the seaside, or on the golf course, or at the picture show, have any intellectual hostility to religion—many of them never dream of cultivating their intellectual life in any direction whatever; they simply do not care.

This problem, newly worked out amidst ideal conditions of living, affords food for thought for those persons who imagine that a Garden of Eden alone can make a man what he ought to be. Australia is the place to annihilate illusions of that kind.

Mr. Smith has put his finger upon another of Australia’s sore places thus:

“We are all agreed that in Australia, in a larger sense than in any other place we have ever worked, ‘Labour’ and the Church seemed estranged. To speak of one man as a ‘Labour’ man and another as a ‘Liberal’ is almost synonymous with saying that one is an anti-Church and the other a Church man.”

The fact is, generally speaking, undoubted, but why it should be so is difficult to understand. The common statement made by Labour leaders is that the Church is wholly pledged to capitalism and to the classes. No statement is more completely false. As a matter of fact, one of the radical causes of many troubles and injustices in our social system (I should not be far astray if I said it was the radical cause) is the iniquitous gamble in land which Australia deliberately allowed, and even fostered, in its early days. The vicious system of the Old World was transferred to the new soil, with the result that the present generation is paying usurious interest for the social sins of the fathers. House rents are wickedly high. Many commodities cost four times their real value because shopkeepers are compelled to pay absurd rents for their premises.