six months previously he had promised his electors to repeal These conditions seemed reasonable enough to Mr. Reid! He accepted office with a light heart, and set to work at once to get into recess. A large section of the Liberals under Mr. Isaacs refused to follow Mr. Deakin, and, going with the Labour Party, left the Ministry dependent on the single vote of an ingenuous legislator from Tasmania, who excused his support of the Ministry upon the plea that to withdraw it meant a dissolution! Mr. Reid, however, undismayed by this close voting, pressed gallantly towards recess. Events have proved that his instinct was not at fault, for within a week of the meeting of Parliament (July, 1905), he was left in a minority of seventeen. Anxious to divert attention from the pressing questions of Preferential Trade and Tariff Reform, and mindful of many provincial successes as a stirrer-up of strife, Mr. Reid had employed the recess in the familiar tactics of setting class against class by raising the bogey of 'anti-Socialism.'
In vain Mr. Deakin asked for definitions and explanations: to define and explain would have exposed the fraud, which in time, like other scarecrows, ceased to frighten. Forced thus to meet the House without the support of Mr. Deakin, Mr. Reid, in desperation, abandoned all attempts to legislate, and, staking everything upon the hope of dissolution, proposed a scheme of electoral redistribution as the only measure of the session. Mr. Deakin promptly moved an amendment to the Address that the House was anxious to proceed with business; and Lord Northcote, upon this being carried, properly refused Mr. Reid a dissolution. Mr. Deakin is now Prime Minister with a Cabinet of Liberals, and having the support of the Labour Party.
Thus the second Parliament has, in eighteen months, unmade three Ministries and passed one Act. It is not a pretty story, but the time has not been wasted if the Progressives have learnt discipline and cohesion.
