whelming mass of Australians is of one mind; they need easy conditions of life and work, such as will give them full opportunity to improve their status within a reasonable time. They dislike and fear extremes. So the Commonwealth's party system, such as it is, presents to us a huge, comparatively inert bulk of what England would probably call 'lower middle-class' workers edged by a slightly more active body of reactionary extremists who cling to old class-distinctions and 'the right of every man to do what he likes with his own,' and on the other side by a very active but no bigger body of extremists-mainly recent importations from Europe or the United States-who use the irrelevant rhetoric of Moscow or Chicago (maybe of Poplar and Limehouse) to intoxicate themselves and their hearers into anti-social actions.

Since the fiscal issue disappeared from politics, there has been no clear-cut partisanship at Melbourne or at Canberra. Elections are won or lost not on definite issues but on the public attitude towards a particular politician or a particular proposal in full view at the moment; if, as often happens, no such personal issue is handy, the voting is apathetic-hence the enacting of measures that make voting compulsory, and irritate the voter against the powers that be. One thing alone is certain and universally predicable of an Australian election-that any party seeking votes on a markedly extremist platform will be defeated at the polls. Alfred Deakin, the greatest Prime Minister Australia has yet seen, mastered parliaments for many years and shaped the Commonwealth's future in nearly all essentials, not as the head of an important party, but as the leader of a constantly decreasing band of personal followers round whom gathered at every emergency the sober men from other sections of political feeling. They loved the man; they approved certain of his proposals; to that extentand it was all he desired-they were his party. When ill luck and failing health drove him to combine with the reactionary section in the hope of forming a real and permanent 'party' in the English sense of the word, the electors saw in it the possibility of reactionary extremism, and voted en masse for the more progressive but still sober wing of the Labour coalition. Similarly

the pronouncedly extreme views of prominent Labour leaders at the present time tend to perpetuate Mr Bruce's term of office; he will be defeated only for one of two reasons-that he seems to be leaning towards excessive Conservatism (the proposed sale of the Commonwealth Government line of steamers is some indication of this tendency in Australian eyes), or that Labour reverts to its pre-war sanity and offers the electors an alternative in sober government.

Students of recent Australian history, if they have been studying it at long range, may suggest at this point that Queensland has been for twelve years ruled by ministries verging on extremism in Labour, and shows no signs yet of repenting her choice. It happens that in State affairs (as opposed to Federal affairs) Queensland is exceptionally placed. In the first place, the earlier extremist ministries took care to strengthen their position by abolishing the second chamber (in spite of a vote by referendum which forbade this), by gerrymandering the electorates, and by providing for proxy voting in parliament. In the second place, the various sections which dislike Labour have never yet been able to find a common basis of action during elections, and have ruined their own cause by internal dissensions. But the true feeling of the Queensland voter can be ascertained from the Federal parliament, whose electorates are delimited as impartially and evenly as possible, so that the same body of voters that returns a Labour majority to the Brisbane legislature sends to Canberra an almost equal number supporting Mr Bruce.

Queensland, therefore-until the anti-Labour sections can compose their internal differences-will remain under 'left wing' control. But the trend of even 'left wing' opinion, so long as it is genuinely Australian, became evident in the late railway strike. For many years the railway unions of the northern State took reckless advantage of their close relationship to the party in power, and Premier after Labour Premier yielded to their arrogance or subjected it to very mild control. But when it swelled into defiance of the law and of Government orders, and began to involve flat mutiny within a Government industry, even a Labour Premier saw his way clear to discard any sympathy

with extremism, and to deal severely with his own supporters in parliament:

'When members entered this House they took an oath to abide by constitutional government. If they do not keep that oath there must be revolution. If a member gives allegiance to some body outside Parliament, the only result is revolution. . . . I will not allow a noisy minority to control the country.'

From that moment the end was certain. It was slow in coming, because Queensland resembles one of those animals that have, so men of science tell us, minor brains at intervals along the spine, and therefore do not die all at once. The State for practical purposes consists of a series of ports each associated closely with its own back-country and much less closely with the other ports and the seat of government; a strike may be crushed at one centre and linger on tediously at another farther away. In Brisbane railway-men were signing on under the Premier's conditions on Sept. 5, at Maryborough (167 miles north) on the ninth, and by the eleventh only the original strikers in the far north beyond Townsville were still recalcitrant. By his action Mr McCormack lost a few thousand Communist votes, but gained such favour with the great central section of voters that anti-Labour candidates are likely at the next election to be worse off than ever. Mr McCormack has justified himself as an antagonist of extremism, and the moderates will rally to him. This too may be noted that, had an avowedly anti-Labour ministry done what he did, it would have lost the next elections; for what in the Labour leader was a gesture of moderation would in his less progressive opponents have been regarded as a move towards extremism of the opposite kind.

Returning, then, to our view of the Commonwealth as a whole, we must note one genuine exception (probably soon to disappear) to the rule that there are no parties based on definite principles. There is onethe 'Country' party, based on the belief that the small farmer is the core of Australia's prosperity and should be treated better than any other section of the community. It is therefore what the Labour party is nota class-conscious body. It is not altogether a new

phenomenon. Twenty years ago the Kyabram movement in Victoria-a political league of small farmers in the Murray valley-terrorised the State legislature for a year or more into unwonted (and, as it happened, unwise) economy. In 1913 a revolt of small farmers, scared by the rumour that Mr Fisher's ministry was intending to bring rural workers under the Federal arbitration laws, found strength enough to expel Labour from office and give Joseph Cook a year's uneasy tenure of the Prime Ministership. But since the war the scattered electorates that are controlled by the smallfarmer vote have been judiciously organised into backing for a Country party, which by depriving the moderate 'Nationalist' ministries of several supporters has made itself the deciding factor in most parliamentary conflicts, and has thus managed to exact more than its share of the executive government. Mr Bruce's ministry is a coalition between his own 'Nationalist' * section of the moderates and the Country section represented by his Treasurer, Dr Earle Page; it is largely these allies who have urged him towards several apparently reactionary proceedings, such as the repeated attempts to get rid of the Government's line of steamers. It may seen perverse to use the word reactionary' of a measure so consonant with commercial opinion in London. To get rid of an enterprise that cost the Commonwealth over half a million sterling a year might well be counted sound business. But in Australia enterprises under public control exist not merely to pay commercially but to fulfil a definite service to the community. The State railways are not run primarily for profit but for the development of State resources and the aid of adventurous settlers; suburban residents in the Sydney area pay excessive fares in order that the up-country resident may enjoy low freight-costs to his only market, and on the whole the State benefits. Similarly the Government line of steamers exists, as

The lack of definite party boundaries is exemplified in the names which the various ephemeral sections choose for themselves. 'Labour' is a good election catchword, but means so little that some of its users would agree with Lord Apsley and others with Mr A. J. Cook. 'Nationalist' means nothing at all, but is a reminder that its users claim descent from the National coalition of war days.

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