Many of the employers who had loudly boasted that the jobs of those who enlisted would be kept waiting for them, had done practically nothing to keep their promise.
During the war, when they should have been busy keeping the wheels moving, they had lost confidence.
They had forgotten that the times called for the best in every man and woman; that the first duty of those who could not go to the fighting line of Europe was to get in the fighting line of business at home; that full speed at home was absolutely necessary not only to keep a level of prosperity that would, at the end of the war, find the country well prepared to meet the inevitable heavy taxation, but to keep business at full strength so that when our soldiers returned they would have found places ready to be filled.
They had forgotten that slump is often only a mental attitude, and that even bad times can be bettered by putting an extra ounce into every pound of business energy. They had forgotten that if everyone made a move business would shift along at a faster pace. But they had done nothing but talk; so trade slackened generally and lack of business made many other vacant places besides those vacated by the men who went to the Front.
Australia wanted a commercial Kitchener, to get together business managers and labor leaders, and talk them into a better business output.
Instead of uniting together for the one common end to speedily end the war with credit to the Empire, politicians still kept up their bitter contentious legislation.
Instead of concentrating the whole of Australia's political machinery on the defence of the Empire and heartening the men with the knowledge of whole-souled support and sympathy, Australian Labor Governments devoted most of their attention to paltry party politics.
Instead of inviting workers to put in a little extra vim in time of stress; in fact, to be a bit more generous in their output, the labor leaders urged the workers to be more militant, to grip bad times as a fitting occasion to demand more wages and less hours. So the employers sat entrenched behind their desks, watching the political moves of the workers, as the Allies peered at the Germans across the trench edges of the Aisne—sat there till the soldiers came home and found no work to do.
There were cheers for them when they went out and they got some more when they came back, but they did not get much else. And they kept on coming back. A foolish politician blurted out: "Those unemployed soldiers are becoming a public nuisance."
The Federal Prime Minister, by whose Ministry the military forces were controlled, was in a quandary.