upon the unexciting basis of compromise and conciliation, and because its efforts must be directed rather to the framing of organic measures of administration, in which only experts can take interest, than to the stirring issues of party politics.
But Sir Edmund Barton was also confronted by other difficulties peculiar to Australia.
His term of office synchronized with the most disastrous drought which has ever scourged the continent; and, as every politician knows, no Government is ever popular when times are bad.
Secondly, he had to work from the first without a Press support.
Now, the Press has great influence in Australia. The principal organs of the several States had deservedly occupied for many years a position of such exceptional authority that they could make and unmake Ministries almost at the whim of their proprietors. Yet none of them had much influence in other States, although the Australasian, which is the weekly edition of the Melbourne Argus, has always had a large continental circulation. Only the Sydney Bulletin, which is published weekly, has made any serious effort to reflect the popular opinion of Australia as a whole. Consequently, when federation was accomplished, the great daily newspapers suddenly found themselves deprived of their paramount political power. Their thunderbolts fell harmless on the heads of representatives from other States; and the Ministry prepared its measures and conducted its proceedings without preliminary conferences in editorial rooms. This might have been of less importance had there been any broad federal issue upon which the newspapers could have taken sides; but there was none. The States are even yet in such varying stages of development that the dividing-lines of party politics are with difficulty understood in other States even by the professional politicians; and the only possible federal issue, that upon the tariff, was rendered unavailable for effective party use, except in New South Wales, by
