f the
husky stevedores for leader. He became the Great Restrainer. Never was
influence of lip and brain over muscle and temper better demonstrated.
The wild men of the wharves--the roughest crowd in all labour--were
under his spell. This nimble-footed shopkeeper flouted them with his
wit: ruled with his mind.

On a certain occasion five hundred of them were crowded into a building
at Sydney yelling bloody murder and clamouring for violence. Suddenly
the tiny figure of Hughes appeared on the platform before them. At
first they yelled him down, but he stood smiling, resolute, undaunted.
He began to talk: the tumult subsided: he stepped forward, stamped his
foot and said in a voice that reached to every corner:

"You shall not strike." And they did not. David had defied the Goliaths.

From that time on Hughes was the Brains of Australian Labour. He
organised his industrial rough riders into a powerful and constructive
union. With it he drove a wedge into the New South Wales Legislature and
gave industry, for the first time, a seat in its Councils. He became its
Parliamentary Voice. He was only thirty.

Having got his foot in the doorway of public life, he now jammed the
portal wide open. As trade union official he forged ahead. He became the
Father Confessor of the Worker. His advice always was: "Avoid violence:
put your faith in the ballot box." With this creed he tamed the Labour
Jungle: through it he built up an industrial legislative group that
acknowledged him as chief.

Though he was rising to fame the struggle for existence was hard. No
matter how late he toiled in legislative hall or union assembly, he
read law when he got home. He was admitted to the bar, and despite his
deafness he became an able advocate. When he had to appear in court he
used a special apparatus with wire attachments that ran to the witness
box and the bench and enabled him to hear everything that was going on.

He became a journalist and contributed a weekly article to the Sydney
_Telegraph_. An amusing thing happened. He noticed that remarkable
statements began to creep into his articles when published. When he
complained to the editor he discovered that the linotype operator who
set up his almost indecipherable copy injected his own ideas when he
could not make out the stuff.

The limitation of a State Legislature irked Hughes. He beheld the vision
of an Australian Commonwealth that would federate all those Overseas
States. When the