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 good qualities, as distinguished from the male-vote tendency towards mere party qualities, in candidature. The collective female vote acted as a kind of Upper House of the franchise, whose calmer consideration ever tempered the storms of the Lower Chamber, the male vote.

Speaking colonially, we of the mother country were wont to complain or regret that what is called, or miscalled, "Protection" had re-arisen in some of the colonies, after argument and experience had finally disposed of it at home. And so might it have been said of the particular kind of trade-union crisis I am now to allude to; for the kind of event in question could still arise upon colonial soil, at a time of the twentieth century when it was deemed an impossibility upon the more advanced home ground. The scene in this colonial case was Australia, and the occasion of it was one of those great commercial reactions, which had not ceased to be a feature out there, in company with all the general forward advance, there as well as elsewhere, of the century. When employment fell off just at this time, and wages seriously dropped, the colonial unions most directly affected took up the cause of labour, and maintained that the Government should intervene, and, by means of public works or otherwise, continue the full employment and fair wages of the past. What was the use of a Government, they said, if not to help in a time of need the