AN ERA OF CONSTITUTIONAL STRUGGLE, 1864-1868 117 



whose desperate strike for a living wage had evoked sympathy and 

 assistance even in Melbourne. Processions of the unemployed 

 deranged the traffic of the streets ; their orators denounced the 

 Government as the cause of their distress, and demanded that the 

 Government should provide the remedy. It was not easy; for 

 in lieu of the helpful and resourceful men of the fifties, a new 

 generation of town-bred factory operatives had been nurtured into 

 existence, whose training and environment tended to the pro- 

 duction of cramped minds and debilitated frames. Thousands of 

 young women had flocked into this kind of employ, that gave them 

 the scantiest of remuneration, the minimum of useful instruction, 

 and absolutely unfitted them for the capable discharge of the duties 

 which should make home life attractive to the industrious artisan. 

 At the date of the census of 1891, after twenty-five years of State 

 aid in the nursing of manufactories, 43 per cent, of the entire 

 population of the colony had gravitated into Melbourne and suburbs, 

 and preferred to live there in intermittent employment, on the 

 verge of starvation, rather than face the hard life that follows 

 the plough or delves in the mine. The number of miners at 

 the same date had fallen to 21,000. Many of the more energetic, 

 whom Victoria could ill spare, had been lured away by the attrac- 

 tions of the little known Western Australia, the glamour of the 

 " far away hills ". The less enterprising contented themselves with 

 petitioning Parliament to bear the cost of fitting out and maintaining 

 prospecting parties to search for gold, which undoubtedly existed 

 in scores of untrodden gullies within their own borders. 



Finally, the Government, finding that free railway passes, liberally 

 distributed, only relieved them of the presence of the impecunious 

 for a brief holiday, took up their alleged responsibilities and pro- 

 duced Factory Acts, Wages Boards, Anti-sweating Boards, and 

 promised Courts of Arbitration and other devices for which the 

 working man clamoured, because he began to realise that it was 

 he, and not the manufacturer, who had most need of Protection. 



Of course, it is not assumed that Protection alone was directly 

 responsible for all these changes. It simply means that Govern- 

 ment took the initiative by stepping outside the definite principles 

 upon which nearly all economists are agreed, that the functions of 



