I saw no more of my plain-clothes man for a month or two and then an odd circ.u.mstance threw us together again. My father, who was still carrying on business in West Bromwich, was a letterpress printer only, but he received an occasional order for copperplate and lithographic work which he handed over either to a Mr Storey in Livery Street, or to the firm of W. & B. Hunt in New Street. I had been over to call on him one evening and he had asked me to attend to some slight commission with either of these firms. I called first on the Livery Street man, whose establishment was just outside Snow Hill station, and found him looking at a queer copperplate impression which lay on the counter before him.
"There"s something uncommonly queer about this," he said, "and I don"t know that I ought to go on with it; it strikes me very forcibly that an attempt is being made to forge a Russian note and that this is a part of the process." The lines on the paper made a sort of hieroglyphic puzzle which it was quite impossible to decipher. I asked him what he intended to do with it and he answered that he would fulfil his order and set the police upon the track of the people who had given it. I went on to Messrs Hunt"s printing works in New Street and there I found one of the partners poring over what at first sight looked like a replica of the impression I had just seen. I said nothing about the matter and nothing was said to me, but when I had transacted my business and had got out into the street again the first man I encountered was my plain-clothes policeman. I told him that I thought I was on the track of a little bit of business in his line and I took him back into the office of the copperplate printer and introduced him. It had just occurred to me that if the two plates I had seen were accurately registered they might fit into each other and make out a consecutive doc.u.ment, and so in the sequel it proved to be. A gang of Polish forgers had conceived the idea that in a foreign country it would be possible to get two separate engravers to imitate each a portion of a fifty-rouble note and they had made arrangements to do their own printing when they had secured the plates. I made arrangements with my detective that he should bring me first hand and exclusive information with respect to the development of the case and within eight and forty hours he had effected his arrest and I was the only journalist in the town who was allowed to know anything about it. Had I stayed on in Birmingham I might have developed a sort of specialism in this direction, but circ.u.mstances drifted me away and it was not until some years later that I met my friend again and found him to be occupying a position on the detective staff at Scotland Yard.
He told me how he came there and, in its way, it is one of the most remarkable little stories I remember to have heard.
There was a manufacturing jeweller in Camberwell whose name was Whitehead, who had a showroom somewhere in the neighbourhood of St.
Paul"s Cathedral. Seventeen years there had been in his employ a commercial traveller in whom he reposed the completest confidence. This traveller had a very pretty turn for the invention of ornamental designs in fgold and precious stones and he was an accomplished draughtsman. In his journeys about the country he carried with him a tray of pinchbeck and of coloured gla.s.s, which represented in duplicate a tray of real jewellery and precious stones which was kept under lock and key at the showroom. It happened, whether by accident or design, that the one tray was subst.i.tuted for the other, the pinchbeck imitations being left in the jeweller"s safe and the real thing carried away by the commercial traveller. The fact of the subst.i.tution was not discovered for some days and by that time the traveller, following his ordinary route, should have been in Manchester or Liverpool. He was wired to at both places but no reply was received from him. Not a doubt of the man"s probity entered into his employer"s mind, but when all efforts to trace him had failed the jeweller became alarmed for the safety of his employe and communicated with the police.
Now, as fortune would have it, the young Birmingham detective had been sent up to London at this time and, calling at Scotland Yard, he had put into his hands some copies of the doc.u.ment by which the police were circulating the news of the traveller"s disappearance, together with a woodcut reproducing a photograph which had been taken some years before and had willingly been surrendered to Mr. Whitehead by the traveller"s wife, who was naturally in great distress concerning him. It was the general impression at the time that he had been decoyed away and murdered for the sake of the valuable property he carried, which was of such a nature that it might easily have been disposed of by the criminal--the gold being melted down and the precious stones being disposed of in the ordinary way of business. At Euston Station that afternoon, on his way back to Birmingham, the provincial detective had one fellow-traveller to whom, but for one singular little circ.u.mstance, he would probably have paid no heed whatever. The fellow-traveller had one article of luggage only, but he seemed to be unusually anxious about it. It was a hat-box and when he had placed it on the rack overhead he appeared to be unwilling to leave it out of sight for more than an instant at a time. He arose a score of times to readjust it and when he was not occupied in that way he kept a constant eye upon it. "I"m no great Scripture reader," said the detective to me, in telling me the story, "but when I was a kid my mother used to read the Bible to me every day and one text came into my mind when I saw that cove so anxious about his hat-box: "Where the treasure is, there will the heart be also." It kept coming back into my mind and somehow I got to thinking that if it had not been for certain things about him the man in the carriage would have been very like the man whose portrait and description I had just been looking at. The man described had features of a marked Jewish cast and so had the man in the carriage, but the man described had red hair, thick red eyebrows and a beard and moustache of the same colour. The man in the carriage was clean shaved and his hair and eyebrows were as black as a crow"s back, but I had got the idea in my mind and I couldn"t get it out again, and when he turned his face sideways to look out of the window the light fell on his cheek and, though the whisker had only just begun to sprout after his last shave, I could see that by nature he was as rusty as a jot. I felt downright certain of him from that very minute. He got out at Rugby, taking his hat-box with him, and as I had no funds with me I was afraid I was going to lose him, but he only went into the refreshment room for a gla.s.s of beer and a sandwich and came back with me and travelled comfortably on to Birmingham. There he engaged a room at the Queen"s Hotel for the night, and having locked up his hat-box in it he went away to order a supply of clothes and linen, as I found out afterwards. I nipped down to Moor Street and told them what I had to say. I got my authority to act, and when my gentleman got back again, I was there all ready for him with a fellow-officer and we nabbed him at his bedroom door. He nipped out a revolver and tried to shoot himself, but we were too quick for him.
We made him give up the key of the hat-box and there, sure enough, was every one of the missing jewels. He had torn the velvet lining out of the case and had thrown everything into it pell-mell and wrapped it up in two or three towels so, I suppose, that the contents of the hat-box couldn"t jingle. My getting him was just an accident from start to finish, and if it had not been for that text of Scripture I should never have given the man a second thought, but it was reckoned a smartish capture and it ended in my promotion and my coming here."
CHAPTER XIII *
Eight Hours Day in Melbourne--The Australian Born-- Australians and the Mother Country--The Governor--_The Sydney Bulletin_--The Englishman in Australia--Australian Journalism--The Theatres--The Creed of Athleticism--The Future.
It is many years since I saw a sight which so p.r.i.c.ked and stirred my blood as the final episode of the procession of Eight Hours Day in Melbourne. The day was wintry and dismal. Early rains had threatened the dispersal of the patient crowds which lined the roads; the pavements were muddy and the sky was lowering. The march of the trades bodies did little to dispel the gloom of the day for the one onlooker concerning whose sentiments I am authorised to speak. The vast crowd gave each trade a reception as it pa.s.sed, and sometimes the marchers pa.s.sed below the Treasury windows and cheered the governor. There was plenty of noise and enthusiasm, but I was unawakened until the tail-end of the procession came. Two brakes drew up below the governor"s standing-place, and some score of grey-bearded men rose up in these vehicles and waved their hats with vigour, whilst the whole orderly mob roared applause at them and Lord Hopetoun himself clapped his hands like a pleased boy at the theatre. All the men in the two brakes were elderly and grey-headed, but as far as I could see, they were all stalwart and able-bodied, and the faces of a good many were bronzed with years of sun and wind. Over the leading vehicle was suspended a strip of white cloth, and on this was painted the words, "The Pioneers." These men were the makers of Victoria, the fathers of the proud and populous city which lay widespread about us. There is no need to be eloquent about Melbourne.
Too many people have sung its praises already. But it is one of the cities of the world; it has a population of over half a million; it has its churches, its chapels, its synagogues, its theatres, its hotels; it is as well furnished in most respects as any other city of its size; and these grey men yet staunch in body, bronzed and bright-eyed, were among the beginners of it. When I first visited Melbourne I was introduced to a man who, between the present site of the Roman Catholic Cathedral and the present site of the Town Hall, had been "bushed" for a whole day and lost in the virgin forest. I knew already how young the city was, how strangely rapid its growth had been; but I did not realise what I knew, and these elderly strangers" bodily presence made my thought concrete.
That beautifully appropriate and dramatic finish struck the same chord of wonder, but with a fuller sound.
* These Antipodean notes, dealing with the conditions of some twenty years ago, have lost nothing of their vivid interest by the lapse of time, and ill.u.s.trate in a remarkable manner the process of history being made for the world, while it hardly has time to wait.
The city is commonplace enough in itself, but the Victorian, quite justifiably, refuses to think so. Men come back from London, and Paris, and Vienna, and New York, and think Melbourne the finer for the contrast. In reality, it is very very far from being so; but it is useless to reason with patriotism and its convictions. The men of Victoria run devotion to their soil to an extreme. I was told an exquisite story, for the truth of which I had a solemn voucher, though it carries its evidences of veracity and needs no bolstering from without. An Australian-born--he came of course from that Gascony of the Antipodes which has Melbourne for its capital--visited the home country.
An old friend of his father was his cicerone in London and took him, amongst other places, to Westminster Abbey, and "There, my young friend," said the Englishman, when they had explored the n.o.ble old building, "you have nothing like that in Australia." "My word," said the colonial export, "no fear! You should just see the Scotch church at Ballarat!"
The tale is typical. I would tell it, in the hope that he would find it an _open-sesame_ to many things, to any fair-minded and observant man who was going out to Victoria. It is a little outrageous to the stranger, but in it the general public sentiment is drawn in grand oudines, magnified many times, but not in the least caricatured. The patriotic prejudice goes everywhere. It lives at the very roots of life.
Truthful men will tell you that London is vilely supplied with cabs in comparison with Melbourne. They believe it. They will tell you that the flavours of English meats, game, fruits and vegetables are vastly inferior to those they know at home. And they believe it. To the unprejudiced observer Melbourne is the worst cabbed city in the world, or amongst the worst. A gourmet would find a residence in Australia a purgatory. For my own part, I have learned in a variety of rough schools at whatsoever meat I sit therewith to be content. In matters of gourmandise I am content wi" little and cantie wi" mair.
But, Shade of Savarin! How I relish my morning sole, after two years banishment from that delicious creature! How I savour my saddle of mutton! What a delightful thing I now know my English strawberry to be!
But to the New South Welshman my doctrine is a stumbling-block and to the Victorian it is foolishness. Mr Sala preached it years ago and the connoisseurs of the Greater Britain of the south have never forgiven him.
Another patriotic delusion is the glorious climate. The plain fact is that there is no such thing as a climate. They take their weather in laminae, set on end. You walk from the tropics to the pole in five minutes. A meteorological astonishment lies in wait at every corner of the street. It blows hot, it blows cold, it scorches, it freezes, it rains, it shines, and all within the compa.s.s of an hour. Yet these wonderful Australians love their weather. Other people would endure it. They brag about it. I think they must be the happiest people in the world.
By the way, I must qualify, before I forget to do so, the judgment expressed above with respect to the Australian table. I tasted in Adelaide a favourable specimen of the wild turkey, and I believe it to be the n.o.blest of game birds. Its flavour is exquisite and you may carve at its bounteous breast for quite a little army of diners. And the remembrance of one friendly feast puts me in mind of many. Is there anywhere else on the surface of our planet a hospitality so generous, so free and boundless, as that extended to the stranger in Australia? If there be I have not known it. They meet you with so complete a welcome.
They envelop you with kindness. There is no _arriere pensee_ in their cordiality, no touch lacking in sincerity. This is a characteristic of the country. The native born Australian differs in many respects from the original stock, but in this particular he remains unchanged. You present a letter of introduction and this makes you the immediate friend of its recipient. He spares no pains to learn what you desire and then his whole aim and business in life for the moment is to fulfil your wishes. Your host will probably be less polished than an Englishman living in a like house and boasting an equal income, but his _bonhomie_ is unsurpa.s.sed. I used to think there was nothing like an English welcome. Australia has killed that bit of English prejudice.
This very openness of welcome, the sincerity of heart in which your host stands before you, is the means whereby the traveller first learns to be dissatisfied. He has come out with his own judgment of things raying from him in all directions--a very porcupine of pre-conception. He is not merely persuaded that the colonies are loyal but he is certain they are loyal after his own conceptions of loyalty.
So long as he encounters only the old folks he will find his pre-conceptions flattered, but he will not go long before he meets a member of the A.N.A. (which letters being interpreted signify the Australian Natives a.s.sociation), and then he must be prepared to be astonished beyond measure. In a while, if he be a man of sense, he will begin to see how natural the position of the Australian native is, and then he will cease to be astonished, though he may still be grieved.
The society is large and powerful. It includes within its ranks a great number of the most capable of the rising men and the younger of those already risen. Speaking broadly, its aspiration is for a separate national life. It will "cut the painter"--that is the phrase--which ties it to the old ship of state. In its ranks are many who love the old country and reverence its history and traditions, and these an Englishman only remarks with a readier excuse for what he must esteem an error. But there are others, and the melancholy fact, too long concealed or slighted, is that they are many and growing in numbers, who hate England and all things English. There are many, not stigmatised as dullards or as fools, who publicly oppose the teaching of English history in the State schools. The feeling against England is not a fantastical crank, it is a movement growing yearly in strength. I have seen men keeping their seats in serious protesting silence when the health of the Queen has been drunk at public banquets, and have found in private converse that hundreds approve their action but do not follow it because they dislike to be thought singular. The out-and-out journalistic supporters of the country vilify the mother country as a whole. They belittle its history and besmirch its rulers. Loyal Australians pooh-pooh these prints and entreat the stranger within their gates to believe that they are despised and without influence.
The stranger has only to travel to learn better than this. The strongest current of Australian feeling is setting with the tide of growing power against the mother country.
That this statement will excite anger and derision in the minds of many Australians is certain. They live entrenched in the flutters of their own opinion, and are blind to the fact of the power which is mustering against them. They are as little instructed as to what is going on around them as we are at home, and our ignorance of our great dependencies is shameful and criminal. Our colonial governors, from some of whom we are supposed ourselves to learn something, and many of whom have been men of especial capacity, do not come in contact with the crowd. Lord Carrington saw more of the people amongst whom he lived than any governor before him, and I had from him a single story of a man of the country who expressed in drunken Saxon his opinion of existing forms of government; but the tale was jocularly told and was not supposed to have any importance. It could have had no importance to one who found it a single instance, as a governor would be likely to do. A governor sees smooth things. All sorts of people (except the working sort) frequent his receptions--the fashionable cla.s.ses, who are far more loyal to England for the most part than the English themselves, their fringe, and then the wealthier of the tradespeople. It is proven every day that a democracy is the happiest hunting ground for a man with a t.i.tle. The very rarity of the distinction makes it more precious to those who value it, and the t.i.tled governors of one of our great colonies occupies a position which is vastly higher in public esteem than that of his fellow-n.o.blemen at home. He is the local fount of honour. To sit at his table, and to be on terms of friendship with him is to gratify the highest social ambition. He is the direct representative of the Crown, and the people who desire to a.s.sociate with him must not have views which are inimical to existing forms of government, or, if they hold them, they must keep them carefully concealed. The governor responds to the toast of his own health and talks of those ties which bind and must bind the mother country to her children. His hearers are at one with him, and cheer him with hearty vigour. Absence from the dear old land has made their hearts grow fonder. Their loyalty is perfervid. Everybody goes home in a sentimental glow and the native born working-man reads his _Sydney Bulletin_ over a long-sleever and execrates the name of the country which bore his father and mother.
The journal just named is very capably written and edited. The brightest Australian verse and the best Australian stories find their way into its columns. Its ill.u.s.trations are sometimes brilliant, though the high standard is not always maintained. And having thus spoken an honest mind in its favour I leave myself at liberty to say that it is probably the wrongest-headed and most mischievous journal in the world. People try to treat it as a negligible quant.i.ty when they disagree with it. But I have seen as much of the surface of the country and as much of its people as most men, and I have found the pestilent print everywhere, and everywhere have found it influential. For some time past it has been telling blood-curdling stories of the iniquities of prison rule in Tasmania, with the tacit conclusion that nothing but the power of the working cla.s.ses makes a repet.i.tion of these atrocities impossible.
It compares the Russian Government with the English, and compares it favourably. It loses no opportunity of degrading all things English as English. England and the Englishman are as red rags to its bull-headed rage. Of course, its readers are not all sincere, though doubtless some of them are. Vast numbers of people who do not agree with it read it for its stage and social gossip; but there is a cla.s.s of working-men who take its absurdities for gospel, and it is one of the factors in the growing contempt for the mother country which is noticeable amongst uninstructed Australians.
Another and more potent factor is supplied by Englishmen themselves. I have never in my life known anything more offensively insolent than the patronising tolerance which I have seen the travelling c.o.c.kney extend to men of the colonies, who were worth a thousand of him. I have seen an Englishman unintentionally insult a host at his own table, and set everybody on tenterhooks by his blundering a.s.sumption that the colonists are necessarily inferior to home-bred people. n.o.body likes this sort of thing. n.o.body finds himself feeling more kindly to the race which sends out that intolerable kind of man.
"Met a girl the other day," says the eye-gla.s.sed idiot, beaming fatuously round the table, "little colonial girl, don"t you know. She"d read George Eliot. Never was more surprised in my life." And this to a company of Australian ladies and gentlemen bred and born.
This kind of person has his influence, and on that ground he is to be regretted. The students of men and manners find him as good as meat and drink; but we cannot all be Touchstones, and perhaps, on the whole, it would be well if he were buried.
Yet another and a still more potent factor is found in the habit which prevails amongst English fathers and guardians of sending out their incurable failures to the Colonies. "You shall have one more chance, sir, and it shall be the last. You shall have 100 and your pa.s.sage out to Australia. This is the last I shall do for you. Now go and never let me see your face again." So the whisky-bitten _vaurien_ goes out to Melbourne, has an attack of delirium tremens aboard ship, finds his alcoholic allowance thenceforward stopped by the doctor"s orders, swaggers his brief on the block in Collins Street, hangs about the bars, cursing the colonies and all men and all things colonial in a loud and masterful voice, to the great and natural contentment of the people of the country, p.a.w.ns his belongings bit by bit, loafs in search of the eleemosynary half-crown or sixpence, and finally goes up country to be loathed and despised as a tenderfoot, and to swell the statistics of insanity and disease. The most loyal and friendly of Australians resent this importation. The uninstructed and untravelled native accepts him as a pattern Englishman, and the satirical prints help out that conclusion in his mind. There is no signboard on the Australian continent that rubbish of this sort may be shot there, and the English tendency to throw its waste in that direction has never been regarded in a friendly spirit. We gave them our convicts for a start and now we give them our most dangerous incapables. They do not like this and will never be got to like it. At the Bluff in New Zealand people show the stranger the southernmost gas-lamp in the world. It is the correct thing for the stranger to touch this in order that he may tell of the fact thereafter.
The traveller may take the spirit of Sheridan"s excellent advice to his son, and _say_ he has touched it, but as a rule he takes the trouble to go down and do it. I was escorted for this festal ceremony by a resident, and leaning against that southernmost lamp-post was a Scot in an abject state of drunkeness, and as Stevenson says of a similar personage, "radiating dirt and humbug." Nigh at hand was another drunkard, sitting pipe in mouth on an upturned petroleum-tin, and the two were conversing. "Et"s a nice letde coal"ny," said the man against the lamp-post, "a very nice lettle coal"ny, but it wants inergy, and it wants interprise, and it wants (hie) sobriety." He spoke with a face of immeasurable gravity, and I laughed so that I forgot to touch the lamp-post.
There are countless little matters which help the growing distaste for English people in the Australian mind. Our London journals for the most part leave us in profound ignorance of the colonies. We see now and again a telegram which is Greek to most of us, but we get no consecutive information about our kindred over seas.
The colonists are perhaps curiously tender to the feeling of the mother country and they resent this indifference. It is difficult to express the varying sentiments of a community, but in many respects the Australia of to-day resembles the America which Charles d.i.c.kens saw on his first visit. There is an eager desire to ascertain the opinion of the pa.s.sing English visitor, and this exists inexplicably enough even amongst the people who despise the visitor, and the land from which he comes. They ask for candour, but they are angry if you do not praise. A good many of them, whilst just as eager for judgment as the rest, resent praise as patronage. It is certain that, in a very little while, this raw sensitiveness will die away, and leave a feeling of national security, which will not need to be sh.o.r.ed up by every wanderer"s opinion. At present the curiosity for the traveller"s opinion is a litde embarra.s.sing, and more than once I was reminded of a drawing of Du Maurier"s in _Punch_ where a big man standing over a little one declares: "If any man told me that was not a t.i.tian I would knock him down, and I want your candid opinion."
There is a stage of national hobbledehoyhood and Australia has not yet grown out of it. Vanity, shyness, an intermingling of tenderness and contempt for outside opinion, a determination to exact consideration before yielding it--all these are characteristics. The working man is surly to the man who is better dressed than himself, not because he is naturally a surly fellow, but because he has not yet found a less repellent fashion of a.s.serting independence. I shall come to the consideration of the great colonial labour question by-and-by, but the att.i.tude of the working man is curiously consonant with the monetary characteristics of the land he lives in. Labour is growing towards such a manhood of freedom as has never been achieved elsewhere. It, too, has reached the hobbledehoy height and has all the signs which mark that elevation, the brief aspirations, the splendid unformed hopes, and the touchy irascibility.
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 circ.u.mstances, or under circ.u.mstances 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 pa.s.sionate. 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 dispa.s.sionately, 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 bra.s.s plates. There are more bra.s.s-plates to the acre in the thoroughfares which diverge from Collins Street than could be found in any other city of the world.
The bra.s.s-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 const.i.tuted 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 n.o.body, 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 cla.s.s tyranny which had created cla.s.s hatreds in the old country! This was what we were coming to after having emanc.i.p.ated ourselves from the trammels of a dead or effete superst.i.tion! Here was a government so cra.s.sly 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!
The Hon. Mr Fish was one of the labourers" faithful. The palpable interference of the Commissioners wounded him profoundly.
The more recent strike of the Queensland shearers has afforded opportunity for a display of an equal faculty of logic and reasonableness. The shearers, at loggerheads with the squatters, proposed to arrange their differences by arson. They threatened openly to fire the gra.s.s upon those vast northern plains where fire is the thing most to be dreaded amongst many and terrible enemies. They not only threatened but they carried their threats into effect in many places; and but for the exceptional rains, which mercifully interfered between them and their purpose, they would have created scenes of boundless desolation. Here again a government has no sense of fair-play.
Troops were sent to watch the shearers" camps and to prevent active hostilities. A natural thrill of horror ran through the country at this autocratic and unwarrantable act. Here at the Antipodes we have founded a democracy, and in a democracy the government motto should be nonintervention. The unionist workmen roared with indignation at countless meetings. Why were not the shearers allowed to settle the dispute their own way? Why were the poor men to be threatened, intimidated, bullied by armed force? A continent cried shame. When, in that eight hours" procession to which I have already twice referred the shearers" deputation rode by, they were received with rolling applause all along the line, and a free people cheered the victims of oppression.
In the middle of all this madness it was good to see that the greatest of the democratic journals had the courage of honesty and spoke its mind plainly. The _Melbourne Age_ is a very wealthy and powerful journal, but it risked much, for the moment at least, in opposing the mingled voices of the populace. Excited leaders of the people denounced it in unmeasured epithets, and the crowd boo-hooed outside its offices in Collins Street, but the writers of the journal went their way unmoved, as British journalists have a knack of doing.
I find here an opportunity of saying the most favourable word I can anywhere speak for the Australian Colonies. The Press is amongst the best and most notable in the world. The great journals of Melbourne and Sydney are models of newspaper conduct, and are nowhere to be surpa.s.sed for extent and variety of information, for enterprise, liberality, and sound adhesion to principle, or for excellence of sub-editorial arrangement, or for force, justice, and exactness in expression. It is not only in the greater centres that the Press owns and displays these admirable characteristics. Adelaide, Brisbane, Dunedin, Christchurch, Auckland, Wellington have each journals of which no city in the world need be ashamed; and when the limitations which surround them are taken into consideration their excellence appears all the more remarkable and praiseworthy.