Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/84

 Works were 'called out,' and the city of Melbourne threatened with total darkness after 6

Then a volunteer corps of Mounted Rifles was summoned from the country. The city was saved from a disgraceful panic—perhaps from worse things. The Unionist mob quailed at the sight of the well-mounted, armed, and disciplined body of cavalry, whose leader showed no disposition to mince matters, and whose hardy troopers had apparently no democratic doubts which the word 'Charge ' could not dispel.

At the deserted Gas Works, aristocratic stokers kept the indispensable flame alight until the repentant, out-colonelled artisans returned to their work.

This was the crisis of the struggle—the turning-point of the fight; as far as the element of force was concerned, the battle was over. It showed, that with proper firmness, which should have been exhibited at the outset, the result is ever the same. The forces of the State, with law and justice behind them, must overawe any undisciplined body of men attempting to terrorise the body politic in defence of fancied rights or the redress of imaginary wrongs.

The rioting in the cities of Melbourne and Sydney was promptly abated when the citizen cavalry, 'armed and accoutred proper,' clanked along Collins Street in Melbourne, while Winston Darling led the sons of his old friends and school-fellows, who drove the high-piled wool waggons in procession down George Street in Sydney to the Darling Harbour Warehouses.

Much was threatened as to the latter demonstration, by blatant demagogues, who described it as 'a challenge; an insult to labour.' It was a challenge, doubtless—a reminder that Old New South Wales, with the founders of the Pastoral Industry—that great export now reaching the value of three hundred millions sterling was not to be tyrannised over by a misguided mob, swayed by self-seeking, irresponsible agitators.

No doubt can exist in the minds of impartial observers that if the Ministries of the different colonies over which this wave of industrial warfare passed, in the years following 1891, had acted with promptness and decision at the outset, the heavy losses and destructive damage which followed might have been averted.

But the labour vote was strong—was believed, indeed, to