bitants
consider desirable.

There remains that part of the program which has attracted the most
attention, namely, the labor reforms: workingmen's insurance, an
eight-hour day, and an increase of the powers of the compulsory
arbitration courts. Already in fixing wages it has been necessary for
the court to decide what is a fair profit to the employers, so profits
are already to some degree being regulated. It has been found that
prices and the cost of living are rising still more rapidly than wages;
it is proposed that prices should also be regulated by withdrawing the
protection of the customs tariff from those industries that charge an
unduly high price.

I have mentioned the labor element of the program last, for the
Australian Labour Party is a democratic rather than merely a labor
movement. The Worker's Union, and the Sheep Shearer's Society of the
Eastern States, enrolled from the first all classes of ranch employees,
and "even common country storekeepers and small farmers."[80] Some of
the miners' organizations have been built on similarly broad lines, and
these two unions constitute the backbone of the Labour Party. The
original program of the New South Wales Labour Electoral League, which
formed the nucleus of the Labour Party in 1891, proposed to bring
together "all electors in favor of democratic and progressive
legislation," and was nearly as broad as the present program; that is to
say, it was by no means confined to labor reforms.

But are there any other features in the Australian situation, besides
the dominating importance of the land question, that rob this program of
its significance for the rest of the world? It cannot be denied that
there are. In the first place, it is only this recent social reform
movement that has begun to put New Zealand and Australia under real
democratic government, and this democratization is scarcely yet
complete, since the constitutions of some of the separate Australian
States and Tasmania contain extremely undemocratic elements; while the
federal government is dominated by a Supreme Court, as in the United
States. Consequently it is only a few years in some of the States since
such elementary democratic institutions as free schools were instituted.
It is evident, on the other hand, that countries establishing democratic
or semidemocratic institutions under the conditions prevailing in the
world as late as 1890, when the great change took place in New Zealand,
or duri