public life. He trusts no one, has few friends, a million enemies, yet he cuts and lashes his way through to the end.

In his high-pitched, rasping, almost quarrelsome voice Hughes briefly outlined for me just where Australia stood in regard to Japanese exclusion. We were seated in his private office in the Parliament House in Melbourne. A tiny black telephone-receiver was clapped to his ear, and a small six-bysix-inch-box mouthpiece on his desk was pointed in my direction.

"We must recognize absolutely that our several countries have certain fundamental, vital, individual principles that we cannot sacrifice, compromise, or even open for discussion to other peoples," he explained. "The white Australia policy is ours; the Monroe Doctrine is America's; the freedom of the seas is Great Britain's. These are outside the province of any league or association or any international conference. They must recognize the rights of any nation to protect their own vital interests."

His was the voice of Australia, of white Australia, not arguing, but simply laying down certain fundamental dogmas that it would fight for, die for if necessary.

Strangely enough, he and most Australians look to America for their greatest physical and moral support in this new belief.

"The same Pacific, with its same problems and questions, washes both our shores, giving America and Australia certain common interests," he went on. "We rejoice in the launching of each new American battle-ship: it is another brick in our citadel of defense."

Somehow there is a feeling generally about the country that England cannot and will not understand the neces

sity for a white Australia. On the tight little island itself there have never been any color lines. Australians point out how the rich young Oxford student from India is received in the best homes in England as an equal, yet when he returns to his own India his pride is trampled on and his heart is broken by every white underofficial in the Indian service.

Englishmen are liberal and democratic with themselves in their own country, but, once outside, they are Britishers, with all the weight of a great, far-flung empire and the "white man's burden" on their shoulders. Australia recognizes this. She expects no sympathetic understanding of her Australia by the whites of Downing Street.

Thus it is that she is looking to Canada and the United States. There is a certain amount of jealousy against powerful America, but it is smothered in the dream that America stands squarely between Australia and ambitious Japan. A score of men throughout Australia have explained to me how this "menace" of Japan has drawn them to America. "You could count on thousands of us enlisting in your armies if you should ever have trouble with Japan," I was told from one end of the continent to the other.

This fear of Japanese aggression amounts to almost an obsession. Men who submitted the same offer of military assistance in a possible war against Japan, would turn to me in sincere anxiety and ask if America would help them if they should be crowded to the wall by Japan.

Yet, strangely enough, the feeling of most white Australians is that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance is a safeguard for Australia. They argue that, with

Great Britain working inside an alliance, she can moderate and influence Japan much surer than where there is no alliance. However, Australians However, Australians always temper their remarks about the Anglo-Japanese Alliance with the postscript that they will never expect England to sympathize fully with their drastic anti-Asiatic immigration ideas.

This feeling that America better understands her Japanese problem than England ever can has severed more than one of the cords that bind the great daughter of the South to mother England. Yet to report quite honestly all that I found there, I must explain that I discovered very little desire to cut these ties.

Frankly, I had expected that in Australia I would see the first real evidence of the breaking up of the empire. I had thought that here at the end of the world there would be independence of thought and action, and a demand for full and complete freedom.

Instead I found that except in radical labor circles and among Irish Sinn Feiners Australia was closely tied to the apron-strings of Englandtied sentimentally, economically, nationally. Many great business enterprises, even the great ranches, were financed in London. And deeper than that, her thought still bore a pure British trade-mark.

Everywhere there was a vague, halfborn idea that by some magic the empire would suffer a transformation that would give complete freedom of action and an equal voice to the individual commonwealths and yet retain unity. The dominions will never en

gage in another war unless it is their several, individual wishes to do so, they argue, and yet, when pressed as to what their attitude would be if faced with another crisis like that of August, 1914, they invariably would answer, "Of course we must always stand by the empire when she needs us."

But not so the radical labor elements. They, with the Sinn Feiners, making up possibly fifty per cent. of the labor population, were frank in their determination to end all connection with the empire.

This mention of the stand of radical labor gets me from white Australia to pink Queensland. Choosing colors, after all, is a good deal like kissing; it goes by favor. In the friendly, hospitable, but extremely aristocratic, Queensland Club of Brisbane, where the great ranch-owners and bankers foregather, they told me that real red revolution was abroad in the land.

"All this business of state socialism is nothing but the vanguard of a real revolution," one earnest gentleman shouted at me in frightened tones.

In the old Trades Hall in the same city Tim Moroney, head of the Railway Union, called this same state socialism "cockroach capitalism." "These cheap labor politicians are just a lot of poor, penny office-holders, afraid of their own shadows. Red! Ugh!" he grunted.

For myself, I 'd call this most revolutionary of Australia's six states possibly a pale, sickly pink. As for being red, it simply fails to make good on its color reputation.

A year ago, when the Prince of Wales entered Queensland, his party came trembling in their boots. There was serious fear that the "red-raggers,"

Bolsheviki, or some low-browed radical laborites, would hoot the prince, bomb his train, or say nasty things to him. Instead, Jack Fihelly, their acting labor premier, wined, dined, and cheered him, and then trailed his departing train in a plane to say a final good-by.

In exactly the same degree in everything else does Queensland fail to hold up its red reputation. Briefly, here is what I found in this alleged radical state, with its sprawling 670,500 square miles occupied by only 700,000 inhabitants: a labor government firmly in power, with fortyseven seats to the combined opposition's twenty-five; seven great state enterprises being worked fairly successfully; more than five thousand miles of state-owned railroads, stretching through little settled country, operated at small profit; a government insurance bureau that has lowered insurance charges twenty-five per cent.; a state Court of Industrial Arbitration that unquestionably has averted many labor difficulties, and a Fair-Rents Court that is actually benefiting the renter; a general forty-four-hour week, and a minimum wage that at least keeps the wolf from the door; and certain weakness for red-tape, favoritism, and a degree of inefficiency that comes with all government departments.

Of all these points probably Queensland's state enterprises are being most closely watched by the world. During the last six years that the present labor government has been in power the state has entered into seven lines of direct competition: cattle-ranches, butcher-shops, railway refreshmentrooms, produce agencies, sawmills, fish-shops, and a single hotel. For the

past these seven show a total net profit to the state of 94,638 pounds sterling, or about $425,000 at the rate of exchange of that time, only one, the fishmarkets showing a loss of ten thousand pounds sterling for the year.

The state cattle-ranches are sixteen in number, cover 32,000 square miles, and graze 200,000 head of cattle. For the year they showed a net profit of $198,000. The state management pays the same state rent as any private lessee, but it pays no income tax.

The fifty state butcher-shops-sixteen in the city of Brisbane and thirtyfour scattered throughout the rest of the state-returned a net profit of $164,000 for the year, but, far more important than that, they kept the price of meat down. These state shops, with their low prices, have saved thousands of pounds sterling to the ordinary consumers. Their turnover for the year amounted to $2,836,000 and they handled 26,254,893 pounds of meat.

According to W. H. Austin, the nonpolitical commissioner for trade for the state, the people of Queensland have been saved more than $2,000,000 annually through the state enterprises. My own observations were that by and large they were being run as carefully and efficiently as the ordinary government bureau. At least they were actually keeping prices down.

The state railways were able to show a profit of .77 per cent., a decrease over former years. From a financial point of view, however, Queensland is over-railroaded, with its 5469 miles, serving a bare 700,000 people.

The Court of Industrial Arbitration, while failing to stop strikes, at least has greatly decreased the number. There are two judges, appointed for

seven-year terms, and they make their awards on the basis of a general forty-four-hour week, and a basic wage for unskilled work of three pounds, seventeen shillings per week, or about fifteen dollars at the present rate of exchange. The court may impose fines up to a hundred pounds and six months in jail, but the hold the court has over labor lies in the fact that if its decisions are not obeyed, the union loses its standing in the court and its wage award. Its function, after all, is really to get the two factions together, and then to deal fairly and squarely with the case.

The Fair Rents Court is really doing business. All formality is hewn off, and the court is an informal place where the renter can go for protection against a profiteering landlord. The judge simply asks two questions,neither side may be represented by a lawyer and must appear in person,How much does the renter pay and how much did the property cost? If the annual rental figures more than ten per cent. of the property cost, then the rent is actually brought down to that figure; if the rent is less than ten per cent., then it is brought up to

that amount. That's all there is to it; and it works.

All in all, it's only a pale, sickly pink Queensland. But Queensland labor, like the labor of all the rest of Australia, is on the move toward the left. In June the first All-Australian Congress of Trade-Unions was held in Melbourne, and the three hundred delegates laid down a broad, progressive policy that labor would point toward.

This goal was frankly for the ultimate socialization of industry, production, distribution, and exchange. To achieve it, both industrial and parliamentary machinery was to be utilized.

All of this means that Australian labor is out to turn this great Southern continent into a socialistic state, to turn it by use of a political party and a tightly organized industrial organization. If it's revolution, then it 's evolutionary revolution; and if it's evolution, it 's revolutionary evolution. You can take your choice.

In the meantime, it 's white Australia that really counts-white Australia that may act as an unfriendly, echoless sounding-board to the cry of Japan for racial equality.

NE of the intellectual tragedies of our national life is that multiplied thousands of Americans rarely read anything save the daily newspaper. That this should be an intellectual tragedy is due less to the newspaper editor than to the newspaper reader. Despite its manifold shortcomings and occasional venalities, the American newspaper might make of us a richly informed people if we could only turn ourselves from a nation of head-line skimmers into a nation of honest readers of the despatches and special articles that the newspaper editors daily provide for us. Few of us, at the end of a year, have any appreciation of the enormous amount of information that our daily newspaper has afforded us on the basic interests of international affairs, business, labor, education, science, art, music, literature, and the like. Few of us carry over from day to day and from week to week a sense of the accumulating information that our newspaper has given us in any field of interest. Nothing is as dead as yesterday's newspaper. Our newspaper reading is desultory and disconnected. This amounts to an intellectual tragedy because the newspaper is about the only instrument of communication that can

flash an idea or a fact to our whole people in twenty-four hours. Our very bigness is a handicap to our intellectual life. It is next to impossible to set this whole nation to thinking about the same thing at the same time.

I am not seeking to pose as the ideal newspaper reader and to lecture my fellows upon the sin of skimming. I have been moved to this comment by an incident that has to-day dramatized for me my own inveterate habit of superficial newspaper reading. I read the newspapers of my city each day in the hasty and helter-skelter fashion that we so readily fall into in the midst of the hurry and distractions of modern urban life. But each day the important newspapers of the country are clipped for me and filed in classified fashion in a cabinet that stands next to my desk. To-day I happened to be thumbing through this file and my attention was attracted to a particularly fat folder marked "education." Now, I had, during the last six months, glanced at all the papers that had been clipped for this file, but I had no realization that these newspapers had provided for me any particularly vital or voluminous information about education. Save for the device of this file, the newspapers