THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN AUSTRALIA.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8670, 12 September 1891, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE LABOUR MOVEMENT IN AUSTRALIA.

[from OUR ow.v correspondent.] 1 .ox lion, August S. Mr. Francis Adams, a gentleman who has spent seven years in Australia, with tho not unnatural consequence of changing all his preconceived notions about that country, contributes an article on the above subject to the current number of the Portnightly view. Air. Adams cultivates rhetoric somewhat at the expense of coherence and lucidity, and though his lucubration is most interesting reading, showing, as it does, no small powers of observation and reflection, it is not quite easy to see exactly what he means, or in what- way his arguments tend to establish the proposition which he lays down. Apparently lie desires to make three things clear: Firstly, that Australia will be the first colony to decide tho fate of our Empire ; secondly, that the fate of Australia is in tho hands of the labourers, and lastly, that without a radical and impossible alteration in the existing state of things, to dream of Imperial Federation is simply building cast in the air. Anyone coming frVsh to the study of the Australian labour question and trying to react it up in Mr. Adams' disquisition would find a difficulty in understanding how the fate of Australia could rest with her labourers, inasmuch as he devotes a great portion of his space to telling how labour has been worsted in its encounters with capital. But despite that, Air. Adams's reasoning is not quite so clear as the enunciation of a problem in Euclid, his literary merit is unquestionable, and he gives us a series of pictures of various phases of Australian life which, though perhaps a little highly coloured, are graphic and life like in the extreme, While the force and directness of his rhetoric amply atone for any little lack of coherence in his logic. In point of candour, too, he leaves little to be desired. Religion in Australia, he tells us, is utterly unspiritual. It is a business, a 'mere affair of ''running" a vested interest for dividends (or, as the Australians put it, " a screw"), and the dividends are so very mail that you cannot get Australians to venture upon it. He would very much like to know how many native-born Australianshad taken orders. Local bishops, he declares, have wailed into his sympathetic ears their utter failure to induce any native-born Australians to view the clerical career seriously at all. That wail deepened into a more agonised note when it treated of the low type—the mere clerical riffraff— which sheer compulsion drove the /episcopal recruiting sergeants to pass in England for colonial service. Nice, this, for the Australian clerics! Doubtless they will pray for Mr. Adams. At Sir Henry Parkes, too, lie has a pretty direct fling. Speaking of himself, he says ho went out to Australia seven years ago touched to the heart with the idea that as England had found men great enough to create this world-wide Empire, so (after the bitter and bloody lesson of 1770) she would find men great enough to preserve it. Three years showed him that it was a dream ; six left him with the conviction that Imperial Federation would spell "swindle" to every one but the. greedy English traders. An iniquity like that could not be tolerated. Lead and steel alone can force it on Australia, and it would not hold its own for a year even then. For it cannot be done by bribery. Vulgar and second-rate rhetoricians, on the verge of political extinction, may galvanise their senile aud greedy egotism to the bursting point, and try to force through a scheme of Australian Federation that shall be a a picd-a-terrc for Imperial Federation ; but what will it ultimately count for? For the miserable honours given as pourLoire,* to traitorous coachmen—for the instantaneous thrusting of the rascais oil" their seats, and for the perhaps deadly struggle that shall bring the coach back to the road and drive it full gallop away into the sunshine of utter freedom. Clearly Mr. Adams has no great admiration for the Premier of New South Wales, and does not share in the prevailing opinion of that statesman's qualities. Indeed, in another portion of his article, lie incidentally speaks of Sir Thomas Mcllwraith as "The one strong man of the continent." The labour classes of Australia, Mr. Adams divides into two kinds: the workman of tho Pacific slope and the workman of the Eastern interior, or bush. His sympathies are with the latter. The bush, ho declares, is the heart of the country, the real Australian Australia, and it is with the bushmen that the final fate of the nation and the race will lie. The West made and carried through the secession war in America. It saved the Union by giving it not only a western president and a western general, but the only troops who could crush the genius and passion of tho South. For the West was the real American America, the characteristic typo of the new democracy. There is but one absolutely new and characteristic type in Australia, arid that type is tho bushman. The bushman is sketched for us in the following words:-"Behold then, this nativeborn Australian of the interior, of the first and second generations, sullen and sombre-souled, everlastingly confronting a hostile sun, his digestion ruined with an endless stream of tannin (he calls it tea), a spare eater, a spare drinker, precociously and neurotically amorous, biliously and satanically proud, able to shoot rabbits and birds with a rifle, and to sit any horse yet born from morning till night. He cares so little for the curse of existence that on occasions he will grinningly throw away his life for a trifle. When he begins to " blow," otto swear, his drawling words, superhuman lies,or face-whipping curses eomo out of him in one long nervous spasm. The English condemnatory volubility is utterly gone. His generosity is reckless in its extremity. Touch his heart, and he tends you in your hour of sickness like a woman in love. It is not for nothing that one lives in desperate Droughtland on mutton, tannin, and unspeakable damper. Finally, it is wonderful how unknown he is. Of the capitals of Australia—Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Adelaide—Mr. Adams lias the poorest possible opinion. These are described as the "dumping ground" of the AngloAustralian, and can be taken by any superficial observer (as they have often been) for creditable transplantations of Glasgow, Liverpool, Southampton, Plymouth. Utterly devoid of all intellectual and spiritual significance, their conscious social life is either intolerably common, or intolerably pretentious. You choose between kindly hospitable folk, who have never got beyond parochialism, and the primal appetites and mincing, mouthing nonentities, aping English society at second hand. The only clever people are the more or less respectable journalists, who have never got beyond mental provincialism, and think Edgar Allen Poo one of the names of all time." Society is made up of more or less absurd little cliques in the colonial capitals, and there is no sign worth speaking about of the upper class being worth its salt as an exponent of either education or refinement to the lower. Indeed, it would be absolutely beneath contempt were it not for a handful of the better sort of capitalists, 'men liberal and progressive up to a certain point, but past that point resolutely Conservative. So much for Mr. Adams. Possibly the Australian public may feel a little surprised to learn that for seven long years they had so uncharitable a " chiel aiming them takin' notes."