THE GREAT STRIKE
This is another chapter that some readers may like to skip. If talk
about a dog is too trivial for those who do not care for dogs, talk
about strikes and such politico-industrial matters--especially by one
unlearned in the subject--is calculated to bore intolerably the person
who merely seeks in these humble pages a little amusement for an idle
hour. But our great strike, which in point of time belongs to this
portion of my narrative, was part and parcel of my Australian life,
and no picture of that life can be made clear unless I sketch in a
line or two to indicate surrounding social circumstances of the larger
kind.
When our vice-regal lady, already spoken of, was about to leave us, it
was inevitably desired to make her a parting gift. Subscriptions were
invited, and I gladly accepted the privilege of contributing thereto.
That is to say, I calculated what I could afford and prepared my
cheque. Then I was stopped by a move on the part of the official
promoters; they notified that the names of all subscribers would be
published, obviously with the intention of stimulating them to
generosity, which it did in many instances. It had the opposite effect
on me. Since it was under the eyes of the receiver that this parade of
the givers was to be made, and since there were certain to be
sneers--though it was small-minded to care about them--at the
self-advertiser with social ambitions, I had not the courage to enroll
myself. And the money I had set aside I sent to the funds of the great
Dock Strike in England, which was going on at that time.
I mention this fact so that the poor working man and his friends may
not gather from any remarks I may make on the subject of Australian
labour conditions the mistaken idea that I am out of sympathy with his
cause. The contrary has ever been the case, and I hope always will be;
as a worker myself, I feel beyond measure for those who are unfairly
hampered in what is so stern a struggle at the best. It has been the
religion of my youth--poorly practised, I confess--to stand by the
down-trodden as against those who in their prosperity walk over them;
but whereas I was once fanatical in the matter, I am cooler-headed
now. Increasingly ignorant as I know myself to be, I understand many
things better than I did in 1889. And such enlightenment as I have
grown to in respect of the case of the working man has been given me
by himself.
One thing that I have learned is to pay no regard to popular
definitions. The working man at the London Docks is so entirely unlike
in his circumstances to the whole body of working men here that it
seems an absurdity to use the same name for both. The one is possibly
the poorest of his class; the other, I should think, is beyond
question the richest. And half our working men, so-called, are not
only misnamed but grotesquely named; they are no more working men than
Paul Kruger's republic was a republic.
A few facts may be adduced to show this. But indeed the one bare fact
that this great, rich continent is in possession of less than four
million people, who say they are not able to make a living in it, is
proof enough.
The "starving unemployed" are never out of our streets. Yet, to quote
newspaper comments on this chronic situation--words continually
repeated, consistently unheeded, although no one can contradict
them--"the country is languishing for the labour congested in the
Metropolis. Private enterprise is dying, being slowly killed by
Government competition. Dairymen are turning their farms into
sheep-runs because they cannot get labour; fruit in the orchards is
rotting on the trees or on the ground from the same cause. The
selectors in Gippsland especially are crippled; they find it
impossible to get their land cleared. But everywhere through the state
there is the same complaint of scarcity of labour.... The Government
has raised the rate of wages to seven shillings a day ... the labourer
naturally prefers the Government stroke, and can be tempted away from
that easy and pleasant way of passing his time only by an increased
rate of wages. That increased rate very few industries can afford to
pay; thus all enterprise is crushed." So that one sees where the main
responsibility lies. It is not all the fault of the spoiled children
when they turn out badly.
This one of several political Frankensteins now has its creator by the
throat. The "Organised Unemployed of the City" do their best to make
the life of the Government a burden to it. They will not leave the
city even for the Government stroke (synonym for work scamped and
shirked, the pretence of work) elsewhere--on account of their
families, they say, whom they cannot expose to the rigours of Bush
life. "What," cried a shocked deputationist to a courageous Minister
of Railways who had ventured to suggest that course as better for the
families than having their husbands doing nothing in town, "you don't
mean to say that a man should take his wife into the Mallee with him?
Well, any man who wishes a woman to live there in a tent with her
husband has no respect for humanity." The Mallee was "a hell upon
earth," and--on account of the ants that crawled upon the
sleepers--"the sleeping accommodation beastly."
An independent inquiry amongst a crowd of "starving unemployed"
outside the Government Labour Bureau had some curious results. One
"young fellow" who had been railway cutting, "finding, after a
fortnight's trial, that he could not earn more than thirty shillings a
week, left the job and came back to join" these mendicants. The
reporter of this instance added that "fifty others left at the same
time and for the same reason." Another had thrown up a job of eight
shillings a day on the familiar plea that his wife and family were in
Melbourne. Asked by the inquirer whether he could not have taken them
with him to Camperdown--one of the finest settled districts in the
state--he answered "Yes," but "he could not carry along a quarter-acre
allotment." Another "did not care where he worked, but he must have
twelve shillings a day."
The same issue of the paper which enlightened us in this way as to
what starving means to some folks, published the following:--
"The contractor for the supply of road metal to the Coburg Shire
Council has informed the Shire Engineer that he cannot obtain
sufficient stone-breakers for the necessary work under his contract.
At the meeting of the Council last evening the recommendation of the
engineer that the matter be brought under the notice of the local
parliamentary representatives was adopted." The only comment to make
upon this paragraph is that Coburg is not even country like
Camperdown, but a part of Melbourne. Stone-breaking, it is to be
inferred, is too much like hard work.
This also is public and uncontradicted testimony:--
"It has been represented that many of the men who are clamouring for
employment are unfitted for heavy navvying labour but are eager for
light work. Mr Andrew Rowan, proprietor of St Hubert's Vineyard, put
this desire to the test yesterday. He wanted twenty men to assist in
gathering grapes ... and he went to the Labour Bureau to obtain them.
They were offered a fortnight's work at nine shillings per week, with
good quarters and food, and free passes to the vineyard. Out of 150
men who were outside the Bureau, only eight promised to go, but
actually only four proceeded to St Hubert's by the appointed train."
Exactly the same result of a Government effort to make acceptable work
for a large body of the unemployed occurred a few days previous to
this present date of writing.
But I must hasten to say that these State-made drones--these spurious
workers, deliberately manufactured by Government out of material from
which the genuine article might have been made--are not all the family
of labour in this house of ours. They are not even all the
unemployed, worse luck!
What, I wonder, are the numbers of those who starve--really starve--in
secret because the law forbids them to work for less than seven
shillings a day, which they cannot earn with service not worth the
half of it--all the old and slow and weak, but yet self-respecting and
self-reliant, whose honest bread the Minimum Wage Act has taken out of
their mouths? One is sick of the continual begging of these victims to
inexorable inspectors and Boards to be allowed to work for thirty
shillings a week--for twenty-five--one poor tailoress, who had
supported herself with her needle for fifteen years, stood up in court
and begged with tears to be allowed to work for twelve shillings and
sixpence, which she said would "keep" her--and seeing the invariable
brutal verdict given against them. I cannot bear to talk about it.
And there are all those outside what may be called the official
working class, to which even these compulsorily-idle unfortunates
belong--salt amid the rottenness that wastes our young nation almost
before it has begun to live. How many of the fine young fellows who
went soldiering to South Africa have looked to that country for home
and work when soldiering was done? I could name a round dozen amongst
my own acquaintances. As a fact, they and their civilian comrades are
pouring thither as fast as they can get passage money and a hundred
pounds together; every ship that sails that way is packed with them.
"There is no opening for them here," say the fathers and mothers who,
when they were young, fared so differently; and they scrape and screw
to give their boys a chance. Well will they prove the quality of their
manhood if they get it, as the "contingenters" amongst them have
already done. But imagine going from a country like Australia to a
country like South Africa (as it is now) for a chance!
Take again the youths of our cricket-fields--who, however, are one and
the same. Hard, quick-witted, thorough, "playing the game" in every
sense of the term, there is no evidence about them of deterioration
from British standards; rather the contrary, indeed, for the generous
climate and comparative brightness of life have added buoyancy to the
hereditary temperament, the good that happy circumstances always bring
to the originally wholesome nature. And those young men are the
diluted second generation of the race I knew in the old days--the
pioneers, who feared blacks and bushrangers far less than the
"starving unemployed" fear ants.
See also the gallant Bushmen who go out into the wilds to "take up"
land, and who stay there, fighting with bare hands not only against
the forces of virgin Nature, but under fiscal burdens heavier than are
borne by any other class; who scorn to ask alms of the State which
they serve so well, and who bring up hardy children to the same fine
traditions of manly self-respect. Think of these men having to "turn
their farms into sheep-runs because they cannot get labour"--working
themselves so hard, early and late, as they do (for at least that is
allowed in their case)--while unworthy loafers are cockered up with
"Government works," often devised on purpose for them, and fancy wages
that they do not pretend to earn!
Above all, there are the women. In the old times the Bush wives, from
the highest to the lowest, made their homes, so to speak, with their
own hands. The squatter's wife, who later came to her town house and
her carriage, did "all her own work" cheerfully "when she had to do
it," and is rarely ashamed to acknowledge the fact--refers to it,
indeed, with a wistful tenderness of voice and heart that plainly
tells how she compares the hard times with the easy ones. And after
that cataclysm already described--the Bursting of the Boom--when the
revels of riches were so rudely interrupted, as if somebody had turned
the gas off suddenly, what did we see? The girls who had never had to
work, who had seemed to live entirely for pleasure, who appeared to us
eaten up with the frivolity of their luxurious lives, as soon as their
great houses fell, instead of sitting down to mourn and weep,
overwhelmed with the shame of such a tremendous social "come-down,"
turned to, like Britons indeed, to help their ruined fathers and to
support themselves. In no faddy, fine-lady fashion either. They took
the work that they could do, with no false pride about its being trade
or otherwise, and at this day you may see them still at it, calm and
business-like, never wanting favour on the score of having "seen
better days," never so much as reminding one that they have seen them.
They run many tea-rooms, or wait in them, or make cakes for them; they
keep various little shops, are milliners and dressmakers, typewriters,
dentists, all sorts of things.
It was significant that our great Labour War developed with the Boom,
and that the defeat of the insurgents coincided with the downfall of
the rotten edifice that had towered so high. They were correlating
forces, the Boomsters and the Strikers, and worked together to pull
our house about our ears, as effectually as if it had been their
conscious purpose to do so. When the fight began the aggressors had no
wrongs to right, no worthy cause to fight for; on the contrary, they
were in a position to make them the envy of their class throughout the
world. They had but eight hours' toil for a day's wage of eight
shillings to ten shillings and more; universal suffrage; payment of
members in a Parliament where the labour vote was paramount; and
behind them that immense trades-union organisation which embraced the
whole continent, and as a governing power had but a handful of troops
and a few hundreds of police against it. What was left for the working
man to claim? I have searched the records for a justifiable cause of
the effects that made our strike unique in the industrial history of
those times, and I cannot find any. The only ostensible grievance on
the pastoral side was that a few squatters proposed to reduce wages
when wool was "up" and cheated their men by selling them poor food at
high prices; on the maritime side that ships' officers found
themselves, not ill-paid, except as all sailors are ill-paid, but paid
less than the unionist (and therefore more privileged) seamen under
them. If there was any other ground for hostilities it nowhere
appears, and as a fact hostilities were in progress long before the
two grievances mentioned took shape.
We laughed at a funny little incident that occurred at the beginning
of the year, not realising all it signified. A baker in a poor suburb
had a faithful servant who did not belong to the Operative Bakers'
Society. Discovering this, the O.B.S. demanded his dismissal. The
baker refused to dismiss him. The O.B.S. then detailed two delegates
in a buggy to follow the baker's cart on its rounds, and to prevent
the delivery of his bread at every door. Upon which the baker armed
himself with a gun, and in another buggy followed the delegates,
threatening to shoot them at each attempt to interfere with his
business. The little procession was the delight of the streets for
some hours, I believe, when the delegates retired from the contest to
take out a summons. The baker was haled before justices and fined--but
only ten shillings, in consideration of his gun having been empty, and
of the "considerable provocation" that he had received. What became of
the baker's man I do not know, but I can guess.
Another case, with nothing laughable about it, was that of a poor,
small farmer, who did all his own work. To him came the secretary of
the Slaughtermen's Union, demanding to be informed who killed his pigs
for market. When the farmer admitted doing it himself, he was told
that unless he joined the Union, and paid up all back fees, his pork
would not be allowed to be sold in the Melbourne markets. He wanted to
know whether the S.U. had leased the markets, or how else they
proposed to bar his pork. Simply, he was informed, by "calling out the
slaughtermen from the sheds of any salesman who dared to sell for
him." Thus this poor man had to join the Union, at a cost beyond his
means, to make himself liable for strikes and other things that he
disapproved of, or starve. And thus did Unionism, designed to
frustrate tyranny, play the licentious tyrant in its turn--not in
thoughtless passion but methodically and on principle, wresting the
liberty of the individual from him by brute force.
Instances of this kind multiplied daily, and slowly roused
us--long-suffering people as we are--to a perception of our case as
Britons who never would be slaves. This was slave-driving pure and
simple; a bit of the Middle Ages back again, when men were denied
their elementary rights and had no redress. The reign of ignorant
tyranny passed, as it was bound to pass, but it has left its mark on
the national character. The habit of the high hand comes out in all
sorts of ways--in our treatment of our Chinese fellow-citizens, in the
despotic attitude of our Federal Government, which regards foreign
nations as pirates and our coloured brothers as vermin unfit to live.
And how the habit of being bullied has demoralised us is shown by our
acquiescence in a state of political bondage that hardly leaves us
free to blow our own noses in our own way.
There was no limit to the extravagance of Unionist demands, most of
them ultimatums couched in Kruger-like terms. As, for instance, this
letter addressed to a ship captain who had dispensed with the services
of a misbehaving member of the crew who happened also to be a delegate
of the Seamen's Union:--"Dear Sir,--I am instructed by the members of
the above Society to state that we intend to have our delegate, ----
----, reinstated on board the ----. If he is not reinstated by the
return of the ship to Sydney, the crew will be given their twenty-four
hours' notice." The agents of the Company replied on behalf of the
captain that the man had been discharged "because a change was
considered advisable in the Company's interests," but that there was
"no objection to his joining one of the other vessels of the Company."
This mild and generous answer was of no avail. The Union called out
the crew, and forbade its members ever to ship under the offending
captain in any vessel whatever. It was the tone of voice in which the
"other side" was habitually addressed. The Mill Employes, who would
have all their managers--gentlemen with salaries of L300 and L400 a
year, not one of whom could have been replaced from their
ranks--forced to join their Union with them; the Stewards and Cooks,
who would have their members on ships exempted from the punitive
regulations attached to losses of plate, and so on; the Tinsmiths and
Ironworkers, who would abolish piecework--always hateful to the
political working man; the Implement-makers, who would make ten
shillings a day the minimum wage and required other privileges--all
formulated their demands in the terms of the Seamen's letter. Indeed,
the most painful part of the business was the callous rudeness of the
methods pursued, which openly made the redressing of wrongs of less
importance than the humiliating of the adversary on whom, as it were,
the tables had been turned. Of course, it is here that one must admit
the two sides to the question, and make allowances for the one that is
not one's own. Still--even if we would have done the same under the
same circumstances--the element of personal insult was deplorable.
That indignity put upon the captain who was not allowed to know his
own business, or do it, was repeated with others as often as occasion
offered. There was a member of the Engine-drivers' and Firemen's
Association who, being appointed a delegate to some meeting or other,
left his work and went off to attend it without troubling himself to
ask leave of absence. He returned after five days, and was dismissed
for his act of insubordination. Upon which his Union notified his
employers that if they did not reinstate him the workers at his trade
would be called out. No just-minded person, whatever his sympathies,
can condone such unfair and un-British tactics of war.
These, however, were but the sporadic skirmishes of the campaign. The
great engagements were two--they went on together and intermingled--the
Shearers' Strike and the Maritime Strike. I think the records establish
clearly that the Shearers began the trouble. Coincidently the Marine
Officers (not all the captains--at anyrate, not those of my
acquaintance--who do not desert their posts under any circumstances)
put themselves, which practically meant the ships as well, under the
"protection" of the Trades Hall--put themselves really under the
domination of the men they were supposed to govern, that they might
force the hands of their masters as the latter had done; but it was the
Shearers' announcement, already made, of their monstrous intentions
that showed the ship-owners what they were in for, and the necessity
for putting the foot down at this point. Having, as they expressed it,
"made concession after concession, for the sake of peace, until they
found that the ever-increasing requirements of the labour bodies
threatened to take the control of their business entirely from them,"
they now refused to treat with their officers as unionists, taking all
the consequences of so defiant an act. It was a fight for existence
that had come upon them and the Pastoralists, who between them
represented the staple interests of the country; and they combined
their forces and stood up to continue the argument with the weapons of
the other side. They too formed Unions.
But it was the Shearers who began it. Long before the shearing
season, the squatters had been commanded to employ none but Union men,
and had continued to employ non-unionists, although sparely, just to
show their independence. The squatters, with the farmers, and indeed
all the country dwellers who have settled homes, are the steady-going
Conservatives of the community, some good reasons for which will be
obvious to the thoughtful reader. Country interests seem always--which
is a great pity--opposed to town interests. There is a "country party"
in every parliament, and in the navigation of public affairs it
generally makes bad weather of it; but this is not due to the quality
of its representatives so much as to their deficient quantity, to the
fact that it is too busy at home to take such part in politics as
would qualify it to meet the other side on equal terms. But it is a
tough-fibred, stout-hearted breed of men, that has not accustomed
itself to being bullied. And it said--and stuck to it with truly
splendid gallantry--that no men or body of men could be allowed to
abrogate "the right of all to work peaceably under the laws of their
country." Very well, said the Shearers' Union in the inevitable
manifesto, then "not an ounce of non-union wool shall go unfought from
Australasia." "All right," rejoined the Pastoralists, in effect, "do
your worst."
Consider for a moment the Pastoralists' case. They too were men
working for their living--we have no leisured class here--and few of
them but had suffered from droughts and bad times, and depended on
their clip to ease financial embarrassments. "A ring of capitalists
conspiring to crush labour" was how they were constantly described by
the strike leaders, but nothing was further from their intentions than
to ruin themselves if they could help it--the patent result of
hostile action at this time. They only accepted that risk because
there was a higher thing than money at stake. The Shearers, on the
other hand, were exceedingly well off. Good men could get L30 for a
few weeks' work, and then have the bulk of the year for other
avocations, or go on earning at that rate for months together. And the
shearing was not only the sheep farmer's harvest, it was the country's
as well, and all the interests of the country were bound up with it.
But the strike leaders said that every ounce of wool that came from a
station on which so much as one non-unionist (a Chinese gardener was
sufficient in one case) was employed, was to be boycotted by the whole
strength of the federated labour organisations, and they
light-heartedly set out to do it. Very soon after the commencement of
active hostilities they claimed "the aid of the labour unions of
England, whom in their hour of need Australia aided so well"--as to
which it may be said that of the L20,887 sent to the London dockers up
to 20th November 1889, only L5817 was contributed by the trade
societies; the rest was the gift of soft-hearted non-unionists like
myself, who did not bestow it to ask it back again.
The great shipping companies--I think the British India was the
first--were ordered to refuse non-union wool as cargo. When they
protested that they were mere public carriers for the world, and that
such a local matter was no concern of theirs, the Wharf Labourers were
called upon to refuse to load it or "come out" in a body. Bakers,
butchers, and other trades were not to supply those vessels which
touched the forbidden thing. When clerks and other non-professional
persons took up the abandoned work, the usual picketing and
persecution ensued--the conventional routine of strikes in all
countries. The odds just here seemed hopelessly against the defenders,
the sheer force of numbers overwhelming. The Seamen's Unions, with
which the Marine Officers had cast in their lot, had cast in theirs
with the Shearers and others, or, rather, their leaders had done so
for them; and the crews came out, officers and all, at a few hours'
notice, as they were "called" one after another, although the
passengers might be on board and perishable cargoes doomed. "Wharves
deserted" was a flaring headline in our morning papers, and the number
of vessels named as compulsorily "laid up" rose daily. The campaign,
from the unionist point of view, progressed without a hitch.
Until the gas-works went on strike. "All the men at the works come
out," was announced to us one morning, and night brought an uncertain
dimness to the streets and a realisation of what was happening--the
plunging of our great city into darkness, while flooded with this
dangerous element of mob rule.
This did seem a little too much, and the worm turned. There were
meetings of the Cabinet, and a wholesale creation of special
constables. It was announced by Authority that "order must be
maintained at all hazards," and that it was resolved "to bring 100
members of the Mounted Rifles, with their horses, and 100 members of
the Rangers from the country districts into Melbourne without delay."
It was ordered that these troops "be kept on duty at the Military
Barracks, St. Kilda Road, and not brought into the city unless
occasion should demand it." But the Governor issued a proclamation
which warned all concerned that a state of legal "riot" had arrived,
which called for legal measures.
The strikers were nonplussed. First, they did not believe in it; then
they felt furiously insulted; then they "went for" revenge headlong.
That is to say, the strike leaders did so, not only because such was
the natural course for them to take, as enemies of society who had had
soldiers set at them, but because it would have been as much as their
places were worth to admit that they had over-reached themselves.
Powerful they must remain at any cost, or, as far as they were
personally concerned, the game was up; and for the remainder of the
fight, as we saw it, they used all that splendid loyalty and
confidence which was, as it were, trust-money in their hands, to this
one end. If the gas-works could not be taken by assault, they could by
mining. The order went forth that "no more coal ships owned by the
Victorian steamship owners be loaded." The ship-owners being to a
large extent the coal-owners, the wide-reaching effects of this move
can be imagined; every poor family felt them. With a stroke of the pen
the Labour Congress in Sydney called out not only "all the miners from
the Western mines," but "all shearers, rouseabouts, carriers and
others _in any way connected with the wool industry_"--plain wool now,
and never mind who took it from the sheeps' backs. This was the last
card of those desperate gamblers--to destroy the wool industry bodily,
L20,000,000 of the "living" of 4,000,000 people--and it finished the
game they had already thrown away, so far, at anyrate, as Victoria was
concerned. During the following year, 1891, there was a tough struggle
in Queensland, where shearing began with the first month. The
Amalgamated Shearers had hoped that Pastoralists (now amalgamated too)
would "yet see their foolhardiness, and come to some satisfactory
arrangement in favour of the portion of their new rules, which are
obnoxious to the Shearers;" but the Pastoralists did not. Freedom!
Freedom! was still their cry, and they had more strength to back it
now. And when the disappointed ones took to riding about the immense
colony in armed bands, firing grass and wool-sheds, turning (at
anyrate, threatening to turn) out rabbits, and laying obstructions on
the railway lines that carried non-union workmen, then troops and guns
were sent to all the endangered places as far as they would go round,
so that at last the defence was passed on to the Queensland Government
itself, which had to end the duel. But it was in November 1890 that
the Trades of our colony, in meeting assembled, were informed by their
leaders that the strike was at an end, and they must make the best
terms they could with the employers. And our soldiers had not to be
sent anywhere. The moral effect of their known proximity and purpose,
the disgrace of it, was enough to calm the disorder of the town.
Strike leaders took care to give them a wide berth, and the men, who
were not cowards, showed by their attitude of insulted dignity how
this strong measure on the part of Government brought home to them the
lengths to which they had gone. The captain of a mail steamer once
sketched for me the comical picture of his big ship lying off a
certain hostile shore, under the protection of a British gun-boat that
he could have "put into his pocket"; so this handful of
uniforms--militia at that--sufficed to check that mighty organisation
of tens of thousands which so far had stuck at nothing. They did it
by merely "keeping on duty at the Military Barracks," without showing
a nose outside the barrack gates.
I do not know whether they were disappointed that no more was required
of them, but I think they were, for it was their first chance of
service in the field--as much as they would ever get, it appeared at
the time. Certainly they responded with alacrity to the call for them,
and "stood by" for action with the air of men enjoying themselves.
Tents were pitched in the Barrack Square, and the little camp seethed
with the excitement of its sudden importance. This feature of the
great strike was one of much personal interest to me, because the
barracks were a haunt of mine at this period. A beloved friend, now in
her grave, was there, the wife of the colonel who created the Mounted
Rifles, who commanded the Second Victorian Contingent in South Africa,
a fine soldier of a race of soldiers, and now a C.B. in Imperial
recognition of the fact. Since the breaking-up of my town home at
Toorak, on the death of its head, whose daughter she was, her official
quarters had been its substitute; and many indeed are the happy
memories that flood back upon my mind when now I ride past the massive
granite pile without stopping as I used to do. As a family residence
it was not considered a success. The Barrack Square, seemingly walled
off, was not walled off enough for officers' little boys; the tall
rectangular rooms were gloomy, the stone stairs cold and prison-like,
the back-yard a mere well in the masonry--although the colonel kept
his shooting dogs there, and tried to keep a cow; the basement a haunt
of rats that ate our boots and shoes while they were down to be
cleaned, and one of those public stenches that Melbourne still keeps
amongst her institutions (though this particular one has been
eliminated) so close under the windows that it was necessary to shut
them when the wind blew a certain way. But it was an interesting place
to visit at, apart from the friendship that has hallowed it to me. The
bugle of a morning sent thrills through my waking senses, with its
associations of the past. The stately bustle of military business,
trampings and clankings, and the omnipotent word of command--the
pleasant officers dropping in so often, the reviews, the tattoos--all
had their charm for me, because then I knew only the picturesque
features of soldiering, the romantic side, which I think now it will
never wear again for anybody.
And there never was a more interesting time at the barracks than that
which saw these country troops massed on the parade ground, waiting to
be summoned to so new and strange a duty. Their colonel was a man
notorious for plain speaking as for plain acting; the straight word
and the swift blow (if necessary) were his, and a perfect scorn of
consequences. In military affairs especially there was no mincing
matters. Business was strictly business. So he told the men, who might
at any time be called out to suppress civilian rioters, what they were
to do in the terms that they were accustomed to. An orderly patience
was to be maintained up to that point where the line had to be drawn;
if that were passed, then, said he, simply, "Fire low and lay 'em
out."
To "fire low" was, I believe, enjoined under the given circumstances
by the regulations, and to "lay 'em out' is a colonial expression
covering a wide field. His men understood him perfectly, and nobody
within barrack walls had an idea of the potential sensationalism of
his words. But somebody repeated them outside; the exasperated
unionists got hold of them and found a plausible grievance in them,
and they seem to have been immortalised by the tremendous rumpus that
ensued. Here were poor innocent working men, and here was this
bloodthirsty swash-buckler inciting their own brothers to slay them.
Was the country going to allow such an outrage to pass? Not if they
knew it. The colonel had to stand a sort of military trial for his
offence before the avengers could be appeased. It came to nothing, but
gave him as a scapegoat to the revilings of those with whom soldiers
had become so unpopular. They hissed him in public places. They
soothed the soreness of their other reverses by trying to make his
life a burden to him. But it only hurt him through his wife, whose
bright, good life it saddened deeply for a time. "Fire-low" or "Lay
'em out" took the place of his Christian name in the public mouth, and
they keep it still, only that now the bitter nicknames have come to
sound almost like terms of endearment.
For when the South African struggle came to widen our outlook in so
many directions, there was such a unanimous call for him all over the
country that it cannot be supposed that his one-time enemies did not
join in it. He was not chosen to lead the First Contingent, and the
crowds through which it passed from us loudly voiced their sympathy
with him in the untoward circumstance. I saw him go with the Second,
and the cheers that followed him from the barracks to the ship were
heart-stirring to listen to. It was thought that he was riding his own
charger, which was safe on board, and his borrowed mount was almost
denuded of its mane and tail by the enthusiasts who wanted a hair as a
memento of him; he was nearly dragged from the saddle by the press of
parting hand-shakers. It was the same when he came back, only more so.
Every returned soldier was mobbed by his friends, but the frenzied
"There he is!" and "That's him!" when the big colonel turned a corner
into view, and the resultant roar of welcome, proclaimed the popular
as well as the peculiar hero.
The military intervention in the struggle of the strike appeared
decisive, but to deeper causes must be ascribed the modifications in
the situation that remained after the dust of combat was cleared away.
Labour Unions in this country were taught to "play the game" as
soldiers would never have taught them. It was the civilians who
manfully refused to knuckle under, who risked all for honour and the
public good, to whom, more than to any other cause whatever, we owe a
dozen years of industrial peace. And if that same wholesome spirit of
true patriotism would arise again to put down a form of tyranny that
has become quite as oppressive and ruinous as the Unionism of old....
But we shall see that too, some day.