CHAPTEE X. 



DAYS OP TRIAL THE LEAN YEARS THAT CLOSED THE 

 CENTURY. 



THE annals of the final decade of the colony of Victoria open under 

 gloomy auspices. Throughout the whole continent of Australia 

 confidence in business prospects had been rudely shaken. Men 

 who by industry and capacity had achieved a deserved success in 

 their calling realised with alarm how combinations of labour, cap- 

 tained by those who had every chance of gain by agitation, and 

 nothing to lose by defeat, could wreck the most carefully planned 

 enterprise. Capital, where it could be disentangled from industrial 

 use, was being gathered into portable form ready for flight, though 

 the time was sadly inopportune for such a movement. The company 

 promoter, with his insidious wiles and brazen mendacity, lurked in 

 every office and store, and he was too often successful in protecting 

 that capital from the assaults of the strikers by simply conducting 

 it into the fathomless sea of liquidation. And while the capitalist 

 was frightened, the masses, with the sacrifice of some millions of 

 rejected wages, were beginning to feel the unwonted pinch of poverty, 

 and were sullenly resentful alike against their unsuccessful leaders 

 and the employers who had paid so heavily for their victory. Not 

 alone at the door of the labourer's dwelling, however, did chill penury 

 sit down. 



By the beginning of 1891 a financial spectre began to haunt a 

 large section of the community ; to fill the days of the land specu- 

 lator and share jobber with a depressing dread of the Insolvent 

 Court; to diminish the expenditure everywhere, and hence to so 

 attenuate the profits of the retail trader that he in turn had to 

 succumb. The unwonted sight of scores of shops to let in the 

 best business streets of the Metropolis must have convinced the 



most thoughtless that there was something serious in the position. 



291 19* 



