Sir Henry in his office library Raheen Kew. Vic.
The Australasian (Melbourne, Saturday 15 August 1903)
Sir Henry Wrixon's Novel.
Jacob Shumate
(Or The People's March, A Voice From The Ranks)
An author, whether he is concerned with social problems or his visit to throw his message into the form of fiction. Numbers of people will read a novel who would close the door to a more austere form.
Sir Henry Wrixon has elected to do this in order to bring before the community a picture of democracy and democratic public life as it has presented itself to him during his long career in Victoria, and his choice can be thoroughly justified.
To a large extent Jacob Shumate may be accepted as giving the real experiences of the writer, but had he confined himself to writing his reminiscences he would not have appealed to so large a body of readers as he is now likely to secure, and he would not have had the freedom which he enjoys when he attributes sentiments and opinions to different people.
Probably a just criticism would be that he has not trusted to fiction sufficiently. There is so little fiction, that from the standpoint of a novel the book is soon felt to be a make-believe.
But readers have to thank Sir Henry Wrixon for an interesting and often vivid narrative of the experiences of a candidate new to public life; of the incidents that befall him; of the difficulties that beset his path; of the people he meets with.
The whole gives us, what the author desires to set forth, a lively view of the working of democracy in a new country.
Of the people who are depicted, it may be said that every candidate comes across them, one and all. Very odd some of them are, and of the oddities we have careful studies.
Those who know anything of a political canvass will meet with familiar figures at every page, and will enjoy meeting them also.
"Among the many persons sketched in these pages," writes Sir Henry Wrixon, "there will be found neither great names nor great villains.
The only excuse that the writer can offer for the absence of characters so useful to the dramatic force of a story is that he has not, in fact, found either heroes or villains in his every-day experience of democratic institutions; and he has sought throughout to be above all things a truthful chronicler of what he has observed."
Sir Henry has good-naturedly closed his eyes to a few men who have had their day on the political stage; men who could easily have been posed for the wicked parts in the play; and, on the other hand, he finds a very complete hero in Edward Fairlie Frankfort, the young University professor, with whose political fortunes the book is concerned.
His ideas are exalted, his principles are those of the high-toned, philosophical, but cautious radical whom Sir Henry Wrixon has always dearly loved. The author has had evident delight in fashioning the character, and in no situation in which he is placed would Sir Henry Wrixon himself have desired to act differently from the Frankfort decision.
Frankfort is installed as professor of sociology in the city of Miranda, in the province of Excelsior, and it will be noted that the coincidence that occurs between Monmouth and Macedon repeats itself in Miranda and Melbourne.
He becomes known as an advanced and earnest social teacher, and he is invited to stand for the constituency of Brassville, the electors of which are utterly disgusted with the sitting member, Mr. Ebenezer Meeks, because the last loan bill was allowed to pass without any provision for the £250,000 reservoir to which the district considered itself entitled.
Ebenezer had also fairly enraged the local temperance party by voting for the transfer of a license from a bush shanty to a palace hotel. But all the communications from Brassville conclude, as did the letter from Frankfort's banker uncle, "Of course you go hammer and tongs for the reservoir."
That the candidate will work night and day to secure the expenditure of £250,000 in the district is assured us as a matter of course. Indeed, nothing is brought home to the reader more thoroughly than the perils that face our local democracy through the local scramble for public works, and through the electioneering power of the ever-growing mass of the public servants in their organised associations.
Sir Henry Wrixon bears willing witness to the patriotism and to the humanitarian aspirations of the people, and also to the personal honesty of the representatives as a body. But every district demands its share of the scramble, and its just share looms very large in the local imagination, and the member who will not, or cannot, strike log-rolling bargains, is apt to go to the wall.
Such is the fate that awaits poor Ebenezer Meeks. Meeks was very willing to log-roll, but he was jockeyed. The district can be corrupted in this way, and though the member does not pocket cheques, he often has to pocket his convictions.
If any innocent mortal should suppose that Sir Henry Wrixon has put too much "local works" colour into his picture, he may be reminded of the statement just made by the Premier of an adjacent state:—
"I am besieged for money wherever I go. This district has very little claim on the Government. Their member constantly votes against it." Sir Henry Wrixon could not make any one of his characters talk more plainly of a demoralising practice that borders on corruption.
The letters, appeals, and articles come as a shock to Frankfort. "Could it be, here, on the very threshold of his public career, his prospects of usefulness in public life depended on a reservoir?
All his knowledge, ability, aspirations, ideals, prospects mixed up in some way with the reservoir? No, that was too absurd." However, it is so.
Frankfort has to study the reservoir question, and he soon discovers that the work is a melancholy, palpable job; that it will never pay interest, and that it will be inevitably thrown on the hands of the Government.
However, he can canvass the constituency before making up his mind about the undue pressure. He goes on with his canvass because the opportune failure of the proposed £10,000,000 loan sets the reservoir question aside for the time being. The interest of the book lies in the people Frankfort meets, and in the demands they make.
Quiggle, the electioneering agent, is capitally drawn, with his cheery manner, his constant advice, "Keep her free, sir; keep her free," meaning that the candidate should never commit himself to a refusal, and his ready undertaking to give the pledges Frankfort could not.
Any demand made by an elector Quiggle can explain is right, and one that really ought to be granted. On outside subjects there is a bewildering if charming variety of opinion.
In every hut and shanty, in every homestead men and women are to be found, thinking and theorising, spinning out devices of the brain, to cope with the questions of life.
"Thinking has become democratised. It used to be the privilege of the few. Now it is the recreation of the many. If our civilisation fails it will not be for want of advice."
Frankfort visits Mother Dole, who keeps a refreshment shanty, "because," as Quiggle explains, "though she can't vote herself she makes the others vote, and as she tells them, too." Mother Dole is emphatic on the woman's right question.
"If I've got to get my dray along the bog road there I put a team of bullocks till't. If I mixed them, half heifers and half steers, the dray would get stuck there, stuck there, well, till I'd begun to say my prayers."
A delightful conversation follows on these lines. But Mrs. Quiggle—for the agent has a wife as bright as himself—puts the issue this way.
"Only married women should have the franchise. What a single woman wants is not a vote but a husband. She ain't a real woman if she is satisfied with a vote."
While a third speaker declares, "You and your friends quite overlook the obvious fact that if every woman is entitled to one vote, the woman who is a mother is entitled to two. She has performed a service, perhaps at the risk of her life, which is not only useful to the community, but essential to its existence. Is she to get nothing for this from the state that she builds up?"
Jacob Shumate, whose name, oddly enough, is given to the book, is known to all politicians. He is disappointed in life, he has been fed by the radical press. He is shrewd, lean, and discontented.
His fixed idea is that the people have been robbed of the land, though the land laws are the direct making of the people.
He strongly objects to the Government helping to extirpate the rabbits:—"Fifty-three families in this district are supported by trapping rabbits, and others are employed by the wire-fencing; but surely, Mr. Shumate, you would not preserve the rabbits merely to bleed the land-owners?"
"Why not, sir? If you will only count all the value grasped by the land-owner on the unearned increment, as was set out by John Stuart Mill, you will see that the rabbits make a very moderate levy indeed on behalf of the community at large."
"Still, as a thinking man, you will not say that the prosperity of the country would be increased by the destruction of any kind of wealth." "Pardon me, sir, but I do say it," Jacob Shumate replied.
And he proceeds to argue the proposition in the terms with which our local radicals have been duly supplied. What Shumate argues for is a Government grant to the Red Parrot Exportation Company, for the catching of the parrots will employ thousands, and the industry will be novel and honest.
A kindred spirit is Karl Brumm, the German selector:—"Quiggle tells me that you favour the decimal system?" "What intelligent man does not? Only there, too, people will miss the point. It should be a duodecimal system. You can take an even quarter, half, or three-fourths of twelve, but you cannot of ten. Yet people do not notice these simple fundamental things.
"The selector who gives his vote to the member who will help to get him his title deeds without his complying with the conditions, and the local land officer who touts for sham testimonials, the railway guard who is a political boss as local president of the Train and Rail Workers' Association, Mr. Seeker, the secretary of the great State Workers' Association itself, and his mode of operation, all appear on the scene.
And the volumes are studded with valuable obiter dicta. Thus we have the opinion of Ernest Hooper, the state school teacher, on religion in schools. He insists on opening with a devout prayer, in which all sane men can join, and an inspiriting hymn. But he holds that "religious teaching by a state teacher would be of little value.
This teaching is a very difficult matter in our times. The danger is obvious. When children grow up and find that some things taught them by rote as facts are not really facts, they are very apt to think that all they have learned is much the same, and that religion generally is a make-believe.
"The curious can make many guesses at the political characters introduced. Some of them are sufficiently obvious. Two of them — Mr. Dorland, the founder of the University in which Frankfort is a professor, and Jortin, a large manufacturer, are avowedly American types, and they and the University and currency episodes in which they figure might have been omitted with great advantage as irrelevant, and as unduly swelling the size of a work, the huge proportions of which are its great drawback.
The author's friends, who will wish the book to be the success its merits deserve, must regret that it was not cut down by some judicious editor by at least one half.
After a failure in Parliament and a defeat at an election, when he repudiates the reservoir, Frankfort marries the daughter of the big local land-owner, and settles down in life and becomes the local member again.
But the individual fictional part of the work, as we have said, is very small. There is a final chapter, in which the future of the province of Excelsior is sketched.
The most important paragraph reads:—"The problem of combining state industries with political independence, it was not given to the present generation of Excelsior to solve. They tried experiments.
The more the Government drifted under the Socialist impulse into industrial undertakings, the more helpless it got politically, and the more true political life withered.
How it will ultimately work out experience, not speculation, must reveal. Either it will result in the full Socialist ideal, with the loss of political independence, or the individuality of the people will assert itself, and private enterprise and self-reliance will live again. "No doubt this is a true statement; no doubt also we are at the parting of the ways.
Link to:
Sir Henry Wrixon Colonial Conference 1895
Sir Henry Wrixon "Socialism: being Notes on a Political Tour" 1897
Sir Henry Wrixon Pattern Nation 1906
Sir Henry Wrixon. The religion of the common man 1909.
