etables. 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 unio