From Boundary-Rider to Prime Minister: Hughes of Australia, the Man of the Hour

Front matter

“His speeches have been ringing through Europe, and have been a source of inspiration to the forces of the Allies,” said Mr. Lloyd George at Conway on May 6th.

FROM BOUNDARY-RIDER

TO

Introduction

INTRODUCTION

by

The Right Hon. Andrew Fisher,

High Commissioner for the Commonwealth of Australia. (Thrice Prime Minister of Australia.)

About thirty-two years ago, a youth of twenty, dreaming the dreams of his age and race, first made footprints on the great continent of Australia, which he now rules as first citizen of the Commonwealth.

William Morris Hughes did not begin his career over yonder with feather-bed experiences. He tackled jobs that fell short of his ideals; left them; shouldered his swag, and, with a mate, took a short cut through the bush in search of fairer fields and busier haunts of men; lost his way; was found; since when he has never looked back.

When he landed there, a Federated Australia was the vision of few, though the need of a Central Government to effectively deal with Australian matters was then urgent.

The lure of Sydney was too much for a Welsh Londoner. There he made his home. There he toiled variously, wrote brightly, and talked socialistically of Labour’s rights and in favour of a social policy which would divorce poverty and its crop of miseries from honest human industry for ever. Vested interests became alarmed and hit back. Victimization was visited upon the leaders of Labour.

“To the Ballot-box” was the rallying cry of the organized Unions. And with unionists in prison, Labour members poured into the State parliaments of New South Wales and Queensland. From that day the cause of Labour in Australia has never looked back. Amongst them was W. M. Hughes.

In 1894 Hughes won his first constituency of Lang in the Parliament of New South Wales. He held his seat until he became a member of the first Parliament of the Commonwealth in 1901.

His work in schemes of National Defence; in gathering the threads of the scattered waterside labour into one central control; in the establishment of legal Conciliation and Arbitration Courts for the prevention and settlement of industrial disputes; with an occasional excursion into the fiscal question, assured him a leading position in the Commonwealth Parliament.

In 1904 Mr. Hughes first attained Cabinet rank. He entered Mr. Watson’s Ministry as his chief lieutenant and Minister of External Affairs. Four years later he was with me as Attorney-General from 1908– 1909; again from 1910–1914; a sheet-anchor in Opposition throughout a brief period of heavy political weather, and a trusted colleague throughout that strenuous first year of the war. He has been Prime Minister of Australia since the 22nd of October, 1915.

Mr. Hughes possesses a bright and agile mind. At his best, he works with lightning speed. He has a lively wit, which he can as effectively use to destroy the argument of his opponents as to cover his own retreat when necessary. He is endowed, also, with that rarest of all talents, the perception of things which are material and the power to present in popular language intricate questions of public policy. Opponents dread his ridicule and fear his sarcasm. In debate, he is a veritable artist. His criticism is at once effective and stinging, yet the brilliance of his attack seldom leaves a sore in the vanquished.

The Prime Minister of the Commonwealth has never been under the illusion that war was a thing of the past. He sees too clearly that robbery of territory in the possession of brave races must mean first their destruction. Above all, he has made it plain as noon-day that in a democracy the first duty of every citizen fit to bear arms is to defend his country with his life; and to that end all should be so trained and equipped that no aggressor may profit by invasion.

My colleague of years has hewn for himself a pathway through endless difficulties to the office of Prime Minister of a great Commonwealth. He waited patiently for his opportunity. How well he has used it in the interests of the Empire is known to all who love our country and wish it success in the gigantic war struggle we are now engaged in. Australia has been honoured by his achievements in its own Parliaments, and by the unparalleled reputation he has won as an Imperial statesman during his official visit to the home of his fathers.

Andrew Fisher

Chapter 1

From Boundry-rider to Prime Minister

CHAPTER I

ADVANCE AUSTRALIA!

King Henry: “Though it appear a little out of fashion, There is much care and valour in this Welshman.”

For almost two years the greatest war which was ever waged in the world has been beating at the gates of Germany. And the gates have remained barred, because the hosts which have been assembling to storm the stronghold of the bandit, whose ravages and outrages have been crying to Heaven, have been waiting for the man of the hour to wind his blast upon the bugle.

This little book sets forth my belief that the man has come in the person of the Rt. Hon. William Morris Hughes, the Prime Minister of Australia, who never, in his direst poverty, or in the days when he was the standard-bearer of revolt in the war of Labour for the greatest number’s greatest happiness, forgot that he was a citizen of no mean country, a co-heir of Britain’s achievements.

He had little enough to thank his country for. The horizon seemed closed to him; the climate was a menace to him. Yet when he found himself in a country which is a continent, both in the day of small things and when the ball was at length at his foot, he never took his eyes off the land which gave him birth.

He has always been a good patriot—to the Empire, to Australia, and to the People. The most democratic of all great democrats has never been anything anarchistic; he abhors syndicalism in all its guises, and has written against it. He is a true Socialist, an Utopian. But he is not, like many Utopians, a Simple Simon in judging the world in which his Utopia is placed. He is not the Christian type of Socialist who turns the other cheek to the smiter. Every man in his Utopia is to be trained in the use of arms, from eighteen to sixty years of age, so as to be able to defend the promised land from aggression. Mr. Hughes is for compulsory universal training, not compulsory universal service, but when we see the Australian army of today, which is the product of his universal training, we can see the difference which it would have made to the world if Lord Roberts’s scheme of universal training had been adopted for England at the same time as Mr. Hughes’s was adopted in Australia—viz., in 1910—in which case we should have had several millions of trained men ready to be turned into professional soldiers when the war broke out, if it ever had broken out. But, of course, it would not, for England, with a potential army larger than France’s, in addition to her Navy, would have been too serious a factor in Continental Politics.

It is interesting to call to mind in this context that he was once the chief speaker at a National Service Meeting in the Caxton Hall, over which Lord Roberts presided.

Hughes of Australia may be summed up in a single word—personality. Personality counts for as much now as it did in the days of ancient Egypt, where the immortal personality—the Ka—was so peculiarly honoured. The Pyramids were built to be the dwelling-places of these personalities of the dead Pharaohs, who inhabited mud-brick palaces in their lifetimes. We enshrine the great personalities of our day in pyramids of printed comment, and Mr. Hughes’s pyramid is already looming large on the horizon.

What are the chief impressions which you derive of his personality? The moment you meet him in action you are aware that you are in the presence of force—of one of the men who move mountains. But, if you catch him in repose, there is not much to show it outwardly to the unobservant. He has not the majestic manhood of a Steel-Maitland, standing up like a rock among his fellows. On the contrary, he is a slight man, wasted by ill-health; he has not, until his decks are cleared for action, the noli me tangere air of a champion. On the contrary, he is very affable and human—an alert man, who goes quite halfway in making an acquaintance, so as to learn the qualities of his questioner.

Yet you know at once that you are in the presence of a Nelson of politics, a man of extraordinary driving power, of extraordinary influence over his fellows, alike as a commander and as an intensely human being—a man who has already won his Battle of the Nile in politics by bringing the machinery of the Labour Party to such a pitch of efficiency that in twenty-five years from its foundation it has captured the Federal Government in Australia and all the State Governments, except a remnant like the remnant of the French fleet which escaped from the Nile.

This is the man who is now among us, waiting for the Allies to organize themselves to inflict a Trafalgar upon the German trade monopoly.

What is there, then, in his appearance to distinguish him from the rank and file of humanity? You notice first, if he is facing an audience, that he stands like a man accustomed to fight and command—lithe, muscular, watchful, intrepid—that if he is slight, he is mightily tough and enduring, as indeed he has shown by those tramps of hundreds of miles through the tropical bush, which he made when in search ot work in his first five years in Australia. He has the eagle features which have ever distinguished the masters of men from the days of the second Rameses, and he has the eyes of genius—the very dark eyes, with dilating pupils, which stamp the reformer, whose ardour is founded on philosophy, and fed on study, the type which in the Orient founds a religion or proclaims a jehad.

When he is in repose his voice is low and pleasant; when he is orating and debating it can be anything—sonorous or icy, cutting or persuasive; he is a master at rapping out interjections. He has wonderful histrionic powers, too; elocution, mockery, mimicry, scorn, enthusiasm and pathos are all called in when he is making one of his great speeches. And they are great, because they have carried hostile audiences. Even in the fragments which I have quoted in this book, the reader will catch the fire.

He is both a great orator and a great debater. It is as the latter that he is specially dreaded. For he has a lightning eye for the weak points in an opponent’s argument, and batters them with sarcasm, or demolishes them with clear, incontrovertible reasoning, according as his own case is weaker or stronger.

His greatest strength of all lies in the possession of the faith which moves mountains. It is a matter of religion with Mr. Hughes that the British Empire shall win the war and be unified; that Germany shall be defeated in her campaign against civilization and the rights of others; and that Australia shall be God’s country for all people of British descent.

And his faith is reflected in his enthusiasm and in his broad humanity.

This terrible fighter is a man born without the usual prejudices. Although (or, perhaps, because) he is one of the greatest Labour Leaders in history, he is able to see the defects in the programme of Labour, which have hampered its acceptance by thoughtful men. He has always set his face against anarchy and syndicalism. He is against the use of strikes generally, and altogether against the use of “general strikes.” He has settled some of the greatest strikes which have ever been. He has risked his life in defying the sentiment of turbulent strikers. The remedy which he has held out to the striker has been to use his vote; pointing out that since Australia has manhood suffrage, the working man has only to use his vote to return a majority of Labour Members, who will make what laws they think best.

As far as he could make it so, to use his own words, “the driving force behind the Australian Labour movement has been spiritual in its nature.” And in everything to which he has set his hand he has remembered the scriptural adage: “Whatsoever thou doest, do it with all thy might.”

He is as good a man of business, as he is a speaker. His handling of the Australian metal, sugar, wheat and freight questions has satisfied our business men of that.

No one could be so fit to stand and speak for the glorious name of Anzac as the lion-hearted Welshman, who is a Democrat in the largest and finest sense of the word.

No statesman has ever done so much for the man born without a spoon in his mouth as William Morris Hughes; no man has ever spoken and worked more passionately for the land to which he emigrated to get his chance. Yet no man has ever loved the nation of his birth more gallantly and faithfully.

Not many inches over five feet in height, not greatly over seven stone in weight, cursed with indigestion, not overstrong in health, born under the severest handicap of poverty, he has made himself one of the greatest men alive by sheer force of intellect and will.

Poverty, from which he had fled, haunted him for half a decade in Australia. It was not until he was nearly forty years of age that his extraordinary gifts were allowed to earn him any adequate freedom from pecuniary anxieties. He was so busy fighting the battles of the other poor that he had no time to be making a provision for his wife and children, though he had given hostages to fortune by marrying in his poorest days only two years after he landed in Australia.

The most endearing feature about a man who inspires deep affection as well as fierce enmities is his blazing courage. Times out of mind he has defied the worst crowds of Australia, at the risk of being torn to pieces. No Leader of Labour has ever been more courageous in declaring unpopular convictions in its councils, and winning others over to his views; and he has recently defied British Ministers and Judges, and the gigantic secret power of Germany, in rooting out the German control of the Australian metal industry.

Now he is faced by the sternest task of all—that of making England to herself be true—and put aside weak-kneed and hesitating counsels, respect for the false gods called conventions, Party shibboleths, and Party itself.

When the Chatham of Australia is making one of his great speeches, one instinctively thinks of the deathless words which Lord Macaulay, in his “Essay on Chatham,” wrote of Chatham’s monument in Westminster Abbey:

“His effigy graven by a cunning hand, seems still with eagle face and outstretched arm to bid England be of good cheer, and to hurl defiance at her foes.”

The eagle face and outstretched arm must have struck every Australian who sat in the North Transept at the Anzac Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey.

In the hour of Britain’s needs, Mr. Hughes is, above all things, the patriot straining every nerve to throw the whole weight of the force which he commands into the scale against our enemies, and striving to move the rest of the Empire by his example.

But because in time of war he has broken away from the evil old example of Cleon and Aeschines—Cleon, the Classic model for the Syndicalist, Aeschines the Classic model for the lawyer—we must not forget that he is also one of the greatest industrial reformers in our history. No nation has ever carried Labour Legislation to a more logical conclusion than Australia under Hughes. Speaking as a property-owner in Australia, I think that he is right. No country can be called ideal in which Hughes’s formula is not observed—that every man who is able and willing to work should have a right to a sufficient wage to keep himself and his wife and family in comfort. In Australia the formula is embodied in Legislation, giving the courts the power to decide what a living wage is, and to enforce it. It now, I understand, begins at forty-eight shillings a week.

It may work a silent revolution in prices; it may make a serious difference to the income of capitalist and employer. But it is an essential preliminary to the foundation of any Utopia, and surely Australia is as fitted to be the Utopia of the future as any country on God’s earth? Everyone should be prepared to make some sacrifice for so desirable an end. Nor would the sacrifice be a permanent one. The full extent of the loss would be felt at once, but a recovery would certainly follow.

My uncle, who was one of the most Conservative men in Australia, and for many years the leader of the Constitutional Party in Victoria, often said to me that though he had to oppose it, the granting of manhood suffrage would in the long run benefit the Conservatives. “Liberals,” he said, “are always widening the franchise because the tendency of every electorate is to be for ever growing more Conservative. And since we are bound to have manhood suffrage in Australia, perhaps the best thing to do is to get it over, and begin climbing the hill again.”

I can fancy that Mr. Hughes is one of those great Democrats who would welcome Conservative tendencies when every man in the community had been properly provided for. He is already Conservative in his attitude towards the Germans—and perhaps he may feel as tolerant towards Conservative tendencies, when his Utopia is safely founded, as we of the opposite way of thinking can feel tolerant towards Socialism, where the principle of Nationality is safely guarded.

In the Government where Mr. Hughes is Prime Minister there are no dissensions, there is no hesitation in making decisions or applying them, as witness his smashing of the German metal control over Australia, and his rooting out of every German element from Australian trade. This way lies safety; Paris conference, please сору.

Chapter 2

CHAPTER II

MR. HUGHES’S POLICY FOR THE PARIS CONFERENCE

“Well, after this war, where are we going to get our sugar-from the Empire or from Germany and Austria? What new industries are we going to establish? What old ones are we going to develop? Where are we going to get the raw materials for our industries? What preparations are we going to make to cope with the great demand for ships, bridges, machinery, etc., after the war?

“These are questions that ought to be answered now. To wait until the end of the war is to play directly into the hands of our enemy, to help him to keep up his national spirits, to still the loud murmuring of the German people and the ever-increasing misgivings of the capitalists of Germany by the promise of brisk employment and good trade after the war. To delay the public declaration of what our trade policy is to be is to make the work of attempting to eradicate German influence in our midst infinitely more difficult, and to make any radical change after the war impossible. To pretend otherwise is to throw dust in the eyes of the people, to play the game of Germany, to prolong the war, indelibly to stamp Britain as a nation of men no longer fit to carry the great burden of Empire. This is our hour, our opportunity, which, being let slip, will pass for ever.

“Two things are certain: that if we are to have a change we must begin to prepare for it at once, and that the present declaration of our unalterable determination to make this change and our preparations towards that end will not only make easier our task of eradicating German influence here, but strike a vital blow at the very heart of our enemy, which would put him to more confusion than the loss of many battles. If our Allies follow our lead, as I believe they would, German credit and German confidence in ultimate victory would topple like a house of cards. For, if once the financiers, manufacturers, and the people of Germany realized that the markets of the British Empire and France and Russia were permanently closed against them, the bubble of their hopes would be burst, and confusion and dismay would spread through the land, dissensions would honeycomb their political structure, and the spectre of revolution rear his sinister head. Let us then do this obvious, sensible, and necessary thing without any further delay.

“I hope that we shall be told from one end of this great Empire to the other by a plain statement from the Government that this policy is to be the policy of Great Britain after the war.”—Speech to the City Carlton Club.

“And here I come to the point which, I believe, you are much interested in. We have not stopped here, but have waged against Germany with all the power at our disposal an economic war. We have, I venture to assert, destroyed utterly that hold over the industries and trade of Australia which existed before the war. We have done this because, in our opinion, this would not only seriously injure our enemy’s position, but greatly benefit our own. Against such a power as Germany, to whom the most sacred obligations are but scraps of paper; to whom international law is but a web of gossamer to be swept contemptuously aside whenever self-interest demands it; to whom wholesale murder and the foulest outrages are parts of a settled and deliberate policy—to neglect one weapon in the armoury of civilized nations is the supremest folly, inviting disaster, and earning the contempt of an enemy who understands but one argument, that of force.

“But we have not been content, and I hope the Empire generally will not be content, to destroy. We have endeavoured to build up. (Cheers.) Having freed ourselves from the octopus grip of our enemy, we sought without delay to lay the foundations of a great national policy worthy of our race and of a truly civilized people. The benefits of this policy must not be confined to any one section, but must extend to all. It must not only secure our national safety, but the economic and social welfare of the whole body politic. It will involve a change of the present fiscal policy of Britain.

“If you ask how far that change will go and by what means it will achieve its purpose, my reply is that it will go as far as is necessary to do at least three things: to ensure our national safety; to conserve and extend our trade and industries; to lift up the masses of the people to a level which will ensure to every worker—using that term in its very widest meaning—such remuneration and conditions of labour as are necessary to enable a man to marry and bring up a family in reasonable comfort and with those surroundings that freemen in a civilized country ought to have. (Cheers.) It must do all these things and not merely one of them. Its effects will be no doubt almost revolutionary in character, yet it is so obviously not only the proper, but the necessary, thing to do, that it will, when understood, be welcomed by all save those whom self-interest or false doctrine have made blind.”—From Mr. Hughes’s address at the dinner given to him by the Representatives of Organized Labour in the House of Commons, April 19th, 1916.

Chapter 3

CHATPER III

WHAT AUSTRALIA THINKS OF MR. HUGHES IN JEST AND EARNEST

The finest picture of Mr. Hughes is given by Mr. Keith Murdoch, the well-known Australian journalist, who is in London now representing the Australian Press. It appeared in The British Australasian, 9th March, 1916.

“In 1894, a thin, delicate, nervous little man, shabbily garbed, looking hunted, forlorn and miserable, passed in and out of the New South Wales Parliament, and nobody said, ‘That’s Billy Hughes.’ He was only one of a small party of trades unionists who had won constituencies that year—the first political effect of the great maritime strike—and formed the first Labour Party. Joseph Cook was another, and I think J. C. Watson was a third.

“Men who saw William Morris Hughes that year, and during the years in which he and Watson founded the caucus system, and Joseph Cook and others left their infant party for that of George Reid, tell how the little WelshAustralian showed himself a hundred ways the product of his hard career. He was a tender plant at birth, and the world had been rough with him. First a schoolmaster at Liverpool, then in Sydney, then deafness, then years in which he kept his family going by manual work of extraordinary diversity—rough station work, wharf lumping, odd mending, even cooking, painting, saw-setting—he had been ground on the roughest wheel the world provides. One cannot tell in brief space his many adventures, but Australians are not ashamed to picture the Hughes of that day, poor—sometimes as poor as man can be—weak in body, a thin little man, bearing a true man’s load of family responsibility, and finding society friendless, cold and hateful. As such, he began in politics.

“Mr. Hughes was not born with self-assurance, and his early career did not encourage what little he had. I think he still lacks it to some extent, and to understand him fully and worthily you must see how courage has to be invoked to carry him through many situations which to men trained in a different school are easy and natural. Sensitiveness carries its handicaps, though it brings its exquisite moments. Mr. Hughes is a bundle of nerves. Those who have watched the flash of his rapier in the Federal Parliament would not have him otherwise, and they have learned to pay him a special meed of respect for his conquest of this and other physical difficulties.

“I know no man in Australian public life whose intellect is so clear and expansive, whose instincts are so truly Australian, who is so charming and human a companion, and yet whose career has been so slow and toilful. He became a brilliant member of the old New South Wales Parliament, but he kept the spirit of the rebel alight, and suffered the hard knocks which those in possession can always shower upon the reformer. He had perpetual fights to maintain among his trades unions—sometimes fights against them, sometimes fights for them, always fights in their good interest. He had in those days the same dynamic energy which characterizes him now, and he galvanized every body he entered. Out of raw and difficult material he formed the Waterside Workers’ Federation, extended its influence over Australia, fought down strike after strike, facing sometimes in the Sydney Trades Hall a mass of angry men who howled at him as a traitor, and who ended by cheering him as their saviour. The way he held these men in hand, nursing them as they only can understand, beating them with words until men of great brawn have grovelled at his feet and asked for any service they can do for him—the way, above all, he pertinaciously hammered at legislation, although for many years without more power than the parliamentary intrigues of a third party could obtain, and the way he secured through this legislation wharf-lumpers’ wages that seemed impossible, all this is the greatest romance of trades-unionism.”

“Those elections brought the Labour Party sweeping back to office, and gave Mr. Hughes the chance to show his qualities. All Australia, and particularly his own stronghold of Sydney, is saying to-day that those qualities are the qualities of true greatness. In war administration he has shown the spirit of a fighting man, an uncompromising hatred of our enemies, a relentless determination to hit our enemies wherever they can legitimately be hit, and a fine and perhaps rare concentration of effort upon what alone can win the war—the development of strength in our arm and weight in our weapon. What has most endeared him during these days has been his unflinching Australianism, his true appreciation of the young and dauntless spirit of our armies, his recognition of the future now opening for our country and countrymen.

“It is as the apostle of this spirit that Mr. Hughes has come to London.”

The following are extracts from the Melbourne Punch of June 23rd, 1904, the year when Mr. Hughes first entered the Cabinet:

“Mirabeau in the Mirror

“A man of middle height, of frail build, with very long legs—their length being exaggerated by a habit of stuffing his hands into his trouser-pockets—and very long arms and very long fingers, a Scotch face, the prominent thin nose, the straight dry mouth, with a whirlpool screw at one corner, the long, lean chin and sucked-in cheeks of the student, even the skull just cased in skin, long and well-shaped and weather-beaten—this is Mr. Hughes in repose. In the Chamber it is another man one sees—the Mirabeau of the Australian proletariat even to that orator’s description of himself, ‘A tiger pitted with the small-pox.’ The figure is æsthetic, emaciated. It might be that of a hermit chastening an unruly spirit by fasting, after the example of Elijah, or of a champion thin man, or of a convalescent from a severe illness. It is the form of a man wasted by life-long dyspepsia, and the suggestion of fragility is deceptive. It is not the coarse, thickly-set man who hits the hardest blow. A kick from a racehorse is more dangerous than a heavy lunge by a carthorse. Mr. Hughes is endowed with nervous, physical strength beyond belief. He is tough as whipcord, has the endurance of a camel, and the pluck of a prize-fighter. All day long he is chewing, chewing, chewing, not the cud of reflection, but a special preparation to persuade his food not to quarrel with the process of assimilation. There are several members in the Federal and State Parliaments who have to ponder over their diet. But Mr. Hughes has the heaviest cross to bear.”