the Shipping Board that controlled it frankly confessed of late, 'for the purpose of disciplining the private shipowners and compelling them to charge only reasonable rates'; and its value to Australian shippers for that end was proved in 1923 and 1926, when proposed increases of 10 and 15 per cent. in freights to and from the Commonwealth were abandoned because the Government line refused to join in making them. On Oct. 3, a high official of the Board, giving details of its action with regard to freights since 1919, estimated that it had saved the primary producers at least two millions sterling a year, besides speeding up the time occupied in transit from 33 to 28-29 days. And Mr Bruce (whose commercial training has always inclined him towards the sale) has been compelled to demand from tenderers a guarantee (a) for a ten years' equivalent of the present service in regard to mails, passengers, etc.; (b) preference for the interests of Australian producers.

The quality which gives the Country party its present strength also makes its doom certain. It is not in any way a political party, if by that we mean a body of men concerned primarily with the public welfare. It is far more indubitably a class-war party than Labour at its worst ever was. It judges the value of legislation and of administration almost entirely by their effect on its own small-farmer class; and that class, important as it may be to the welfare of the community, is not so allimportant that the interests of the rest need be wholly subordinated to its particular interests. The existing party has cleverly identified itself with proposals to abolish the present States and redistribute Australia into a score or more of provinces, which have been before the public for a good twenty years and were at one time a cherished feature of Labour programmes; this absorption of a genuinely public-spirited policy, though its chief merit in the eyes of Dr Earle Page and his followers is that it would release them from the domination of the State capitals (each a seaport and each concentrating on itself the trade of its State's farthest recesses), gives an aspect of permanence and broadmindedness to a clique not really inspired by those qualities. Sooner or later the Country party will go the way of Kyabram, and its best constituents (who are

already more public-spirited than the bulk of the party and should not be confused with it) will seek more congenial work in the ranks of Mr Bruce's direct followers.

In view of the innate moderation of the Australian temper, as explained above, it may seem difficult to account for the constant succession of strikes and other forms of industrial trouble that occupy the cablecolumns of the press and the speeches of company directors. The explanation of these phenomena must be sought in another Australian characteristic-youthfulness. Every man has his youthful moments, whatever be his age; in Australia, where over 88 per cent. of the population is under fifty-five years of age, and where sunny skies and clear invigorating air are for every one's perpetual enjoyment, youthfulness, with all its concomitant virtues and defects, lasts well into what here would be middle age. More especially one notes in the Australian three qualities of youth-irresponsibility, comradeship, and an overmastering desire to 'play the game.' The two last-named are probably the chief factors in any great strike. What happens-what happened in the coal-miners' strike of 1909 and the tramways strike of 1912 and the railway strikes of 1917 and 1927, as well as on many minor occasions-is that extremists, having managed to secure control of the mechanism of some big union, for reasons of their own create a quarrel; the situation comes up to be dealt with at a union meeting, which is attended mainly by the younger and unmarried members (the married men have gone home for the evening and do not trouble to stir out again); the meeting, controlled by agitators and made up of men with few or no responsibilities, decides on a strike as the most sensational method of calling attention to its grievances. Then the married majority, which could have quashed the strike unborn had it taken the trouble to attend, is appealed to not to 'let down' its mates, to play for its side, to sink private misgivings and show a united front to the employers. The appeal is usually successful, and the strike proceeds until either a masterful leader with more sense than most expels the agitators from control (Mr W. M. Hughes was excellent at this operation) and brings their followers to reason, or the public grows tired of being sacrificed

to industrial disturbances and forces one or both sides to compromise. This explanation may sound farcical, but it is the true one; one of the strongest extremist objections to conscription in 1917 was that it would take away the young unmarried men first and so deprive the agitators of their most reliable supporters. One does not eulogise the pliable majority, or even excuse them, but within limits it is a virtue to play for your side; and young players would find it hard to fix the exact moment at which one must no longer obey the instructions of the team's appointed captain.

Still, there is in Australia a system of arbitration courts and similar tribunals specially designed to abolish strikes and defeat the agitator's devices. Unfortunately there are several systems, some overlapping and few with unquestionable authority behind them. Again one notes the emergence of youth's characteristics - its impatience and its lack of reverence for law as such. For grown men at this end of the world a law, like an official, has a definite status of its own; the official is treated with respect just because he holds an office, the law must be obeyed just because it has been duly enacted. It takes centuries to make a law of Britain obsolete, and even then our instinct is to evade it rather than ignore it. In a young country-certainly in Australia-an official is merely a fellow-man set to some public task, to be judged as a man like any other; a law is the latest device for overcoming some difficulty or regulating some lack of order, useful so long as it fulfils its makers' intentions and no longer. Now the device known as compulsory arbitration, intended to eliminate strikes as industrial weapons, has had many successes and has been for many years respected accordingly; but the weakness of the Commonwealth Constitution (which represents not the best thought of its makers but the best terms they could secure from six reluctant and illinformed colonial legislatures) lies in its vague and awkward distribution of powers between Federal and State authorities. Every State has the right to set up its own arbitration courts; the Commonwealth superposes on them courts with jurisdiction over disputes extending beyond the bounds of a single State; workmen in one State find themselves bound by awards

less favourable than obtain next door, and forthwith arrange that a dispute shall occur in both localities simultaneously; the legal machine is promptly clogged with arguments about jurisdiction; and the law incurs natural if unmerited contempt. The instrument designed to bring peace has failed in its task; not being sacrosanct, but merely a means to an end, it is put on one side until a new instrument is devised, or the old one patched up into renewed efficiency.

Two

Now, just as recent Federal ministries have recognised the unique physical conditions prevalent in the continent they govern, and have set on foot attempts to master those conditions, so they have at last recognised and attempted to improve the state of things just described. proposals especially deserve notice as possible remedies. To counteract the methods by which a few agitators and a body of young irresponsibles can impose a strike on a mass of reluctant comrades, it has been officially proposed that no strike may be declared until it has been approved of by a secret ballot of the union concerned. To simplify and reorganise the machinery of arbitration a commission has been set up to report on amendments in the Constitution that may bring about a reasonable redistribution of powers between the States and the Commonwealth. In those two measures lies the hope of an orderly and prospering community.

In view of recent complaints by prominent British leaders of commerce about the Commonwealth's protective tariffs, and the suggestions-apparently put forward in good faith-for an Imperial Customs Union involving the abolition of fiscal barriers in the Dominions, it may be useful to make yet another explanation. Tariffs are for the normally thoughtful Australian mainly a weapon of defence. Even during the last war, when British fleets more or less safeguarded the ocean trade-routes, the mechanism of ordinary life was in Australia seriously disturbed and hampered by the lack of necessaries previously imported from Britain. This had been foreseen by Alfred Deakin and his immediate followers, who constructed the tariff of 1908 with a view to minimising the disturbance. Actual war experience stressed the lesson; and it is now common ground among the mass of politicians and publicists that the

Commonwealth must as quickly as possible be made self-supporting in all things necessary for a simple civilised existence. Australia should not be a limb of the Empire, bound to draw the nourishing blood from the central heart and to die when that supply is cut off. She must be envisaged and discussed as a separate organism, providing not only her own sustenance but also the material framework of her everyday life. Many other influences, no doubt, go to the construction of a tariff-those may be combated by the interests they affect, and may undergo modification. But the duties on material essential to civilised life which can be, at whatever cost, produced within the Commonwealth, and the duties on luxuries whose yield will help to pay for the admittedly unprofitable financing of that production, have come to stay; they are precautions against war, and will not disappear until war disappears for ever.

Such, then, is the Australian and such his habitat. There is no question of praise or blame, of allotting his motives and beliefs a higher or lower rank in the scale of British civilisation. Nor need it be suggested that all Australians, taken individually, are influenced by those motives and beliefs; notable exceptions may be discovered any day among Australian residents in Britain, Australian visitors who proclaim themselves such to all whom they may meet here, and the merchants of the chief Australian seaports (merchants and seaports are much the same all the world over). But it may be taken as a certainty that the Australian people, acting as a whole in face of any particular situation, will act in accordance with those beliefs and be guided mainly by those motives. It takes all sorts to make an Empire! and the unquestioned loyalty of the Commonwealth to the existing Imperial régime can be turned to best account for the good of the whole community of Britons if its idiosyncrasies, its prejudices, and its normal attitude towards the scheme of things, are comprehended and accepted without querulous or contemptuous criticism.

ARTHUR JOSE.