political leader. And Labour in each State was handicapped by a double set of machinery; the parliamentary caucus, practically unchanging during the life of a Parliament, and guided by a set of resolutions (known as the 'fighting platform') passed at a triennial conference of Labour delegates; and the annual Conference of Trade Unions, with its annually elected executive, which was always inclined to tamper with the 'fighting platform,' and eager to impose on Labour members of Parliament fresh instructions inconsistent with their election pledges. The responsible parliamentary leaders could control the caucus, but were every year less and less in touch with the Conference and its executive; and year by year, between elections, the moderate and therefore less active majority of the Labour mass tended to regard public affairs with indifference, while the alert, embittered extremist minority drew more and more power into its own hands. The situation had been foreseen; so far back as 1909 several of the moderate leaders had contemplated a crisis in which the extremists would seize their machine, and they would be forced (but not very unwillingly) to take refuge with the independent Deakinite nucleus. It may be, indeed, that this was the chief damage done by Mr Deakin's 'fusion' with Mr Cook in 1909, that it left moderate Labour no friendly harbour of political refuge; the harbour sought when in 1916 the crisis actually came had, one might almost say, to be stormed first; and sojourn in it has been persistently embarrassing for Mr Hughes and his followers.

What happened was this. The Fisher Ministry of 1910-13 was unexpectedly dismissed from office by a single vote in the latter year, because the farming constituencies-which in 1910 had supported Labour to get the land-tax and the consequent opening of fertile lands for settlement-took alarm at a suggestion, made by irresponsibles, that rural industries should be governed by the arbitration system and the eight-hours' day. Though the Liberal (Cook) Ministry that followed managed, in its single year's administration, to alienate the electors completely, yet the defeat of 1913 weakened the position of moderate Labour with the Unions, and gave the intriguing extremists a chance to strengthen their position in the party outside Parliament. The

elections of September 1914 restored Labour to power; but by that time the war was on us, and all local disputes were promptly relegated to the background by Mr Fisher and his successor, Mr Hughes. The latter, as soon as he took office, abandoned for the time (as less important than unanimity of parties during the war) certain proposed amendments to the Federal Constitution which would have given more power to the Commonwealth and less to the comparatively undemocratic State legislatures. From that moment he was suspect of the Unions; for their advisers, now including many extremists and inspired with that fanatic parochialism which minor office in a small community frequently engenders, looked on him as a renegade who had sacrificed Union interests to a 'foreign' and 'Imperialistic' war. The best blood of the Unions, it must be remembered, was already being shed at Gallipoli; the small committees that controlled Union action were being replenished from young bachelors of the 'slacker' type and from the alien element, hitherto enforcedly quiet, that hated England even more than it loved internationalism. When the need of reinforcements brought conscription into the sphere of practical politics, these vindictive intriguers saw and used their opportunity. Mr Hughes unfortunately gave them six months' start by attacking them openly just before he left for England in 1916; he returned in August to find the Labour machine quite out of hand; and the subsequent failure of his conscription proposals (due to that among many other causes) ended in the permanent expulsion from the official Labour party of practically all its moderate elements.

This coup d'état, we must understand, was not merely an attempt to accentuate Labour's programme. The extremists, into whose hands the direction of Labour policy now fell, were not merely advanced socialists; they were also anti-British and anti-war propagandists. Their affiliations were with the Industrial Workers of the World-an American society which all born Americans despise as 'dago'-the Direct Actionists, the Bolsheviki (with whom they openly sympathised on several occasions); and under their auspices Labour received a considerable infusion of the pure Sinn Fein element. Official' Labour, while not forgetting to boast

of the party's very large contribution to the Australian army, became the home of all the pacificists and shoddy cosmopolitans in the Commonwealth, and still shelters them, despite certain slight modifications of attitude forced on it by the desire to reabsorb returned soldiers. Where it is in office, the war is officially tabu; war trophies are refused or neglected, war services disregarded or even held to be disqualifications; the fact that there was a war is something to be forgotten or at any rate left unmentioned. Not all the Labour leaders, of course, are aliens or Bolshevists. The great expulsion spared a few of the older and more thoughtful; and Labour's useful instinct for putting its most acceptable representatives into its most prominent positions still does it good service. Mr Tudor remains its leader in the Federal Parliament, Mr Storey heads the New South Wales Ministry. Against such men no reasonable critic has any grave charges to make. But, as in the case with Labour in Great Britain, the leaders are too often led.

In putting forward adverse criticism of a big political party, it is essential to check personal judgments by others that may be less liable to bias. Alongside the estimate just given of the personnel of Labour's new directorate may therefore be set that of the Sydney 'Bulletin,' a journal which no one will suspect of violent conservatism:

'With the new control a new sort arrived, naturally, to fill up the Labour ranks. All manner of wild-eyed, wild-haired revolutionaries came in. The useless, unproductive nonlabouring "pony "* element arrived. So did the baser sort of drink-selling interest. So did a new sectarian force. And with that force a surprising number of men who have become rich without doing anything hard or useful men who no doubt argue that it is safer for a rich man to be inside than out, for then he can help to so arrange matters that laws for the destruction of capital shall pass by his kind of capital. . . . Naturally these men have low ethical standards; so that, whenever any dubious job is suggested, it is almost taken for granted that a New Labourite invented it; and that is about the last thing that would have been suspected of Old Labour, which was the most transparently

I.e. the lower type of racecourse hanger-on, always prominent at pony race-meetings.

honest and sincere body that the world has seen since the days of the Apostles.'

There is, by the by, no need to assume the existence of any pro-German propaganda in this connexion. In actual fact Australia seems to have been exceptionally free from enemy intrigue. The transformation of the Labour party from one dominated by love for Australia to one obsessed by hatred for Britain is sufficiently accounted for without dragging in Germans; the alien strain was rather American-Irish, strengthened by an influx of fugitives from nearly every country to the one refuge where conscription could not touch them.

The Labour disruption of course necessitated a complete reorganisation of Federal parties. For three months (including the Christmas holidays) Mr Hughes held on with a Ministry chosen from the expelled section of Labour. But in February 1917, seeing that the chasm was impassable and that without a machine of any sort he must inevitably lose the coming elections, he effected a coalition with the old 'Liberal' party and formed a 'National War Government' in which he as Prime Minister had only four colleagues of his own way of thinking, while Mr Cook had five. The Prime Minister's section, however, was united, while Mr Cook's included three former Deakinites, a personal rival (Lord Forrest) and a detached philosopher (Mr Glynn); so that the Government suffered less from internal troubles than might have been expected. After the second Conscription Referendum this Ministry was enlarged by taking in another supporter of Mr Cook and the only prominent Deakinite who had not followed his leader into the fusion of 1909. By this time, however, Mr Hughes' marked superiority to all his colleagues had produced its effect, and both in Parliament and in the country he was the only man who counted. Probably he was (and is) as much detested by many of his supporters as by most of his opponents; and persistent efforts have been made ever since to replace him, sometimes with Mr Watt (who flatly refused to countenance them), sometimes with an unknown' who was never selected; but his own genius and the utter lack of anything like genius among other members of Parliament have so far made him indispensable.

In such a situation-on the one side, a party torn and discredited, its machine at a standstill because the extremists in control of the mechanism are at loggerheads with the mass of unionists who supply, or will not supply, the fuel; on the other, a coalition which has lost its reason for coalition (the war) and is constrained to follow the leader of its minority simply because its majority cannot provide a leader worth following-one finds some difficulty in describing the policy of either party. They are differentiated, as regards most of the immediately offered legislation, rather by methods than by objects. Both, that is, are avowedly hostile to profiteering, to delays in arbitration, to excessive expenditure; both promise (at election times) further bounty to returned soldiers; both propose to use Governmental instruments in the development of public and private wealth. Apart from the attempts of a certain section of Labour to substitute its own cliques and organisers for Parliament and its Ministries as the governing force in the Commonwealth, the most notable feature of the new Labour policy is its determination (on paper, at least) to isolate and unify Australia. The Senate,' said Mr Tudor in a recent policy speech,

case.

'and the State Parliaments and Governorships shall be abolished. Local governmental powers shall be exercised by provincial legislatures and municipalities, constituted by and subordinate to the Commonwealth Parliament. The High Court shall become the final court of appeal in any Australian All Bills passed by the Australian Parliament must receive assent on the advice of Australian Ministers only.' As for defence, he went on-having previously regretted that the terms of the recent Peace Treaty did not provide for the total disarmament of all nations'-a Labour Ministry would in its first session repeal all classes of the Defence Act providing for compulsory service and compulsory training, and enact that, except in pursuance of an expressed vote of the people, no force to take part in an oversea war should be raised within the Commonwealth. This is the moderate leader speaking; the views of his more extreme followers may be judged from the latest utterance of a 'president of the Labour Council'-'The Navy does not produce anything