Smoko-Ho.

*THE WORKER*

BRISBANE APRIL 13, 1895.

Smoke-Ho.

THE Sydney Bulletin says the only persons able to take Archibald Meston seriously are himself and his photographer.

WOMEN tramp through the country districts in Victoria with “bluey” up. “Woman! Last at the cross and earliest at the grave.”

LIARS are the cause of all the sins and crimes in the world. - EPICTETUS. (This quotation is not intended for Horace Tozer).

TEACH your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom, and makes the heroic virtues hereditary. - MAHOMET.

COURTESY is often sooner found in lowly sheds with smoky rafters than in tapestry halls and courts of princes where it was first named. - Milton.

FEW things are impracticable in themselves, and it is from want of application rather than want of means that men fail of success.

THE devil's Brigade in Sydney is increasing in numbers. Ah To Kong lately joined the noble profession of fleecers, and is practising as a solicitor.

LIBERTY of thinking and expressing our thoughts is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds on which it is commonly founded. - HUME, celebrated English historian and philosophical writer.

Mr. Albert F. Woolf, a New York electrician, has discovered a new disinfectant and universal cure called electrozone, or electrified sea water. It cures typhoid, toothache, diarrhoea, diphtheria, and many other ailments.

THE N.S.W. Keystone of the Democratic Arch says he does not care a continental condemnation for newspapers. What really vexes the O-sool-'em-on is that the newspapers don't care a continental condemnation for him.

COMPS, will be pleased to learn that, according to the London Labour Gazette, all branches of the printing trade show an improvement. In one month (November to December) the percentage of unemployed members of unions fell from 5.1 to 3.7.

CLEMENT Wragge notifies that there is a tropical disturbance somewhere about Cooktown and blames “Rio” for it. “Rho” may have a little to do with it, but that Government party in the Lucinda is bound to blow as fast and furious as any hurricane that ever happened in the tropics.

AT Mr. Barrett's first election meeting Mr. John Hancock, M.L.A., announced that he had become the leader of the Labour Party. His late leader, Mr. Trenwith, M.L.A., was present, and seemed to take this sudden announcement of his deposition in good grace. What has led to this change in the leadership of the party has not yet been made public. - The Melbourne Beacon.

SMITH-BARRY, ex-union prisoner, and late of Paraguay, is in Brisbane. He intends to go out West very shortly to look for employment. Smith-barry, who worked his passage from Monte Video to Newcastle, considers it is no use going in for Communism yet; that we shall have to go through the stages of State and Municipal Socialism before people will be ripe for the Communistic ideal.

New Zealand occasionally has some queer cases before her Benevolent Trustees for help. Here is one who evidently does more than ask for bread – she takes the cake! A woman was described as having lived on charity for 15 years, and having during that period made three trips to England ostensibly to look for her husband or sons. She had just returned by the Tainui from one of these trips.

THE Darling Downs Democrat is the title of a new weekly publication, which made its first appearance in Toowoomba last Saturday. Its aim and purpose is to voice the aspirations of Democracy among the residents of the garden of Queensland. If its future efforts are as good as its first then it should serve its purpose well and become an important factor at the next elections. The WORKER wishes it a long and prosperous career.

ACCORDING to Sidney Webb, the corporation of Birmingham is going far beyond the London County Council. To use the words employed by a great authority, it “enters into direct competition with private industry, and undertakes work which individuals are equally able to perform; it has become its own builder, its own engineer, its own manufacturer, and positively, too, its own shopkeeper.” How's this for “Socialism in our time.”

NUMBER 24 of the “Bellamy Library” series is to be George Black's “Bygone Agitators.” The West Sydney labour member has also completed arrangements for the publication of his “Organisations of the Discontented” as a later number of the same popular publications, and has now in hand two other works, entitled “Upper Houses; Whence and Where?” and “Low wages, the Source of Pauperism and Commercial Crises.”

QUESTIONED by an interviewer with regard to his alleged description of Chicago as a “pocket edition of hell,” John Burns gave this version of the incident: “A gentleman in America asked me what I thought of Chicago's municipality. I replied, 'Do you think that description quite fair?' I said at once, 'No, I don't think it is. On second thoughts I think hell is a pocket edition of Chicago.'”

WHEN Mrs. Navaro (Miss Mary Anderson), first called on Cardinal Manning it was just as she was about to leave the stage; “You have long been an obstacle to me,” he said; “your very goodness has worked against me when I have advised my penitents to keep away from the theatre, and when I have counselled some young women against choosing the career of a player.” He was pleased to hear that she had turned her back on the drama. - N.Z. Tablet.

THE word squatter, now used all over Australia as a name for the pastoral tenants or those who live by flocks and herds, had originally an entirely different meaning. From 1833 to the year 1842 it was used to describe a dishonest class of people who lived chiefly by stealing and branding the cattle of the station owners. In 1839 there was actually an “Act to Suppress Squatters” introduced into the Legislative Council of New South Wales.- ARCHIBALD MESTON.

ROBERT P. Blatchford, editor of the Clarion and author of one of the smartest labour Books of the century, “Merrie England,” is the son of English father and Italian mother. In 1891 he was adopted as parliamentary candidate for East Bradford, but, preferring journalism to politics, subsequently withdrew. He originated what is known as the “Fourth Clause,” which practically laid the foundation of the Independent Labour Party, and reads as follows; “That all members of the I.L.P. Pledge themselves to abstain from voting for any candidate for election to any representative body who is in anyway a nominee of the Liberal, Liberal Unionist, Irish Nationalist, or Conservative parties.”