THE working-man in Australia is being made a demigod of, with all sorts of frills added, so that the fact of his possessing feet of clay, like the rest of us, may be hidden, even from himself. He does not really care about it all. He wants—if he is a real working-man—to do his job, and smoke his pipe in peace, while all he asks for is fair play, or all he has asked for in the past; because now, like all spoilt children, he has come to a state of mind when he really does not know what he wants. He is like a boy, naturally brim full of the spirit of adventure, of pluck and endurance, who has been kept at home and pampered by an over-fond mother. It is not his fault that he has missed the bracing atmosphere of that greatest of all schools—the adverse world. The wonder really is that the Australian working-man has kept his head as he has done and gone on with his job at all; that trees are being felled, bricks laid, roads made, and mines worked by these men, who—from the way their supporters talk—ought to be living on the unearned increment of the landowners; ought to be seething in revolt at the inequalities of life, “protesting and demanding,” and doing little else, instead of going plodding off to work each morning; with their lunch done up in a red pocket-handkerchief, that might be so much more effectively contrived into a cap of freedom. Luckily, the working-man, for the most part, regards his political supporters as any normal John Bull regards his womenkind. They are all very well in their way, but they are not, for a single moment, to be taken seriously—and so he refuses to be made a fool of. After all, what is there for him to fuss about? Usually he has grandparents, or ancient relatives or friends, who remember what the life of the working-man in England was like in their young days; at the present time he has newspapers, and probably knows as well as you or I do of the number of out-of-works and paupers, and deaths from starvation in England—125 dying from sheer want of food alone in 1909. Of course, he is sometimes out of work himself, and masters are mean, or wages low. I remember one case brought against a manufacturer of food-stuffs—porridge, oats, flour, pickles, etc.—where the awful fact came to light that the wives of some of the employés could not afford to spend more than 5s. a week on meat, this—with the best chops at 5d. per pound, and good joints at 3d. or 4d., and commoner sorts at 2d.—being equal to at least 10s. in England, where, in the country districts, meat more than once a week is very rarely seen on a workman’s table. Melbourne was terribly shaken over the disclosure; but still the workmen went on working for that particular manufacturer just as they did for any other. There was no bloodshed, no real boycott, no particular agitation—there seldom is among the _bona fide_ workpeople; they know when they are well off. It is the agitators who agitate for them, who insist on treating them like _enfants