Yet, if you rose to-morrow morning with the resolve to dismiss the ministry or to reverse the policy of the country, to stop retrenchment or to recommence borrowing, that resolve would infallibly translate itself into fact in a few weeks.

In no country that I know of has any organ in the press so much influence as your paper.  It is practically the sole source of information for the majority of the people.  It has no competitors.  It can make any person or policy popular or unpopular.  It can fail to report any man or thing, and for four-fifths of the citizens it is as though that man or thing were not.  It can misrepresent any speech or movement, and the printed lie alone will reach the electors.  It could teach the people anything you choose.  It has ruled the country for a couple of decades.  It rules the country to-day.

Professor Jethro Brown shows himself alive to the danger of press domination in Australia.  In “The New Democracy” he writes:—­“The prestige of Parliament is destroyed when its deliberations and conclusions cease to be the determining factor in legislation.  The transfer of the real responsibility for legislation to a new power implies the discrediting of the old school for training leaders.”  And he quotes with approval the expression of opinion by the Honourable B.R.  Wise in the Federal Convention:—­

There may be, as Mr. David Syme suggests, no risk involved in the change of masters; but for my part I would sooner trust the destinies of the country to the worst Parliament the people of Australia would elect than to the best newspaper the mind of man has ever imagined.

It is little use, therefore, for the press to further degrade Parliament in the eyes of the people by railing at it in the following terms:—­

So it is that Parliament as a working machine is about the clumsiest and least effective that can be conceived of.  All our Parliaments are modelled on the necessities of bygone centuries.  We want a working Parliament improved up to date; but we lack political invention, and have to jog along with the old lumbering machine—­a sort of bullock dray trying to compete with an age of electric railways and motor cars.[3]

The remedy lies with the press itself.  Let it abandon all illegitimate influence, and use its power in a legitimate direction to give effect to the principles of organization and responsible leadership in Parliament.  But just as the Labour faction cannot altogether be blamed for the present disintegration of Parliament, so the press cannot be held responsible for its degradation.  In both eases cause and effect have been interrelated.  The mistake which the press has made has been in not perceiving that the more it interferes with the legitimate functions of Parliament, even although with the best intentions, the more it degrades Parliament.

We have now passed in review the two great dangers which assail the Commonwealth at the inception of federation.  We have shown how intimately related they are to the two great principles underlying representative government—­organization and leadership.  Nay, we have seen that all the varied phenomena presented by the great democracies of the world can be expressed in terms of the same two principles.