It would be absurd to suppose that there was a person in the English-speaking world who did not know that the Australian Prime Minister-had hung up his Parliament, and left with a huge following of officials—civil, military and naval—for London.. As a result he has left the rest of his cabinet at a loose end. It never was a homogeneous cabinet. Half of it comprised representatives of the Country or "Hayseed" party—a newcomer in the field! of politics—and the other half the Nationalist party, which is the nearest thing we have to a combination of what at some time in the past the late Randolph Churchill called the Conservative Democrats. As in the old country, so in Australia, the Conservatives object to being the bedfellows of the Democrats, and it is probably not unfair to say that the Democrats count their cash every night before they lie down with the Conservatives. And there are' many, in Australia at least, who would not blame them. While Mr. Bruce, the Prime Minister, is on the wafer, Dr. Page,—his second-in-command and Treasurer—is travelling around the country explaining what a good! fellow he is, and how utterly he has got the ministry under his thumb. He keeps outside the cities, and tells the groups of country electors how he is really giving the dear country people the "spin of their lifetime." Some of Mr. Bruce's own breed of ministers seem to be taken with airy assurances of this "medicine-man"—in more senses than one. The protectionist Minister for Trade and Customs is saying that he is about to reform the tariff, and has in view a scheme by which "necessities," not necessaries, will be admitted at low rates, and Juxuries will have to pay. Hitherto luxuries have meant alcohol and tobacco, and these are taxed up to the very limit. What the Minister is trying to say is that a new principle of import duties will be applied. If Brown's job is to flay sheep. pelts, then Brown must get his knives in free; if Smith's business is to tan sheeps' pelts then Brown must not be allowed or encouraged to send them abroad, and so on. It is suggested that import duties should be relaxed, and that bounties should instead be given on local production. Tt is probably enough to say that bounties have always failed—even on a small scale. On a big scale they have been found to create an army of agents and middlemen, and to have caused an entire fack of confidence in a future, which might be changed by casual vote of either house of parliament. But, as it was expected by those having any political gumption, the Bruce Ministers, who foisted themselves into the ministry, in order to get rid of W. M. Hughes, are now, in the absence of their chief, having the time of their lives. Dr. Page is explaining how he on behalf of the country person is diddling the townsman, the Postmaster-General is trying to justify his maintenance of the highest postal rates in the British Empire on the grounds that they will prevent {he townsman getting a benefit which the farmer does not enjoy. That, in addition, the Minister for Trade and! Customs—a Nationalist—should be accompanying the Acting Prime Minister, Dr. Page, and making promises of great changes with a free-trade tendency, suggests that when Mr. Bruce returns from the Imperial Conferences in London he will find quite 2 number of matters requiring his immediate attention.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.