n 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 veg