Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/57

 down at once and haughtily reminded that this was Moorara, the property of the Hon. Mr. M'Cormack, whose sheep shorn last year (this was one of his long list of stations) would total up to over a million!

Just calculate what so many fleeces come to, the average weight being eight or nine pounds, and the value per head rarely under as many shillings. Then, of course, there are the other stations, carrying six hundred thousand high-class merino sheep!

Now the woolshed to which Bill and his ten or twelve companions were bound was one of which the owner had 'stood out' from the first against the tyranny of the Shearers' Union.

As Bill and his companions journeyed down the river, rumour reached them of serious developments of the Great Strike. This protest against the alleged dictation of Capital had reached its culminating stage. The o'er-vaulting ambition of the State-school educated Mr. Stead, the originator and prime mover of the Civil War, which was now fully recognised, had struck a blow at the State itself—that State under which he had been bred and nurtured, fed, protected, and presented with a 'free, compulsory, and secular education.' He had justified the forebodings of old-fashioned Conservatives, who had always doubted the wisdom of educating the labouring classes at the expense of the ratepayers, of breeding up an army of enemies to Capital and to the settled order of the Government.

And now the long-threatened result had come to pass—a revolt against order and good government, a deliberate attempt to subvert the Constitution under the specious guise of federated labour. It had commenced with a quarrel between the cook's mate of a coasting steamer and the so-called 'delegate' of the crew, spreading with portentous rapidity, like the bush-fires of the land, until it enveloped the stock-riders of the Paroo and the teamsters of 'the Gulf.' It menaced life and property. It attempted to plunge cities into darkness by 'calling out' the gas-stokers. It essayed to paralyse commerce by intimidating the carriers, whom it forbade to convey the wool—the staple Australian export—to the wharves, by restraining the wharf labourers from loading the vessels.