It was due to his efforts that Australia got National Service, an Officers’ School, ammunition factories, military training for schoolboys.  They were all part of the kindling campaign that he waged to the stirring slogan of “Defence, not Defiance.”

Always the friend and champion of Labour, he was in the thick of incessant controversy.  His enemies feared him:  his friends adored him.  He got a variety of names that ranged all the way from “Bush Robespierre” to the “Australian Abraham Lincoln.”

The Great War found Hughes the Strong Man of Australia, soon to be bound up in the larger Destiny of the Empire.

Even before the Mother Country sent her call for help to the Children beyond the seas, Hughes had offered the gallant contingent that made history at the Dardanelles.  Thanks to him, they were prepared.  It was Hughes who sped the Anzacs on to Gallipoli:  it was Hughes who, on his own responsibility, offered fifty thousand men more.  These men were not in sight at the moment, but the intrepid statesman went forth that very day and started the crusade that rallied them at once.

Hughes was moving fast, but faster moved the relentless course of the war.  Gallipoli’s splendid failure had been recorded, the Australians stood shoulder to shoulder with their British brothers in the French trenches when the opportunity which was to make him a world citizen knocked at his door.

In October, 1915, Andrew Fisher resigned the Premiership of Australia to become High Commissioner in London, and Hughes was named as his successor.  The puny lad who had landed at Brisbane thirty years before with half a crown in his pocket sat enthroned.  The reins of power were his and he lost no time in lashing them.

How he divorced the German from Australian trade:  how he broke the Teutonic monopoly of the Antipodean metal fields and established the Australian Metal Exchange and made of it an Imperial institution for Imperial revenue only:  how he swept England with a torrent of fervid oratory rousing the whole nation to its post-war commercial responsibilities, are all part of very recent history already woven into the fabric of this little volume.

“Reconstruct or decay” was his admonition.  Reluctantly the great mass of English people saw him leave their shores last summer.  Already the demand for his recall as unofficial Speeder-up of Patriotism is simmering.

What of the man behind this drama of almost unparalleled performance?

To see Hughes in action is to get the impression of a human dynamo suddenly let loose.  His face is keen and sharp:  his mouth thin:  his cheeks are shrunken:  his arms and legs are long and he has a curious way of stuffing his clenched fists into his trousers pockets.  Some one has called him the Mirabeau of the Australian Proletariat.  Certainly he looks it.  He has a nervous energy almost beyond belief.  By birth, temperament, experience and point of view he is a firebrand, but with this difference:  he is a Human Flame that reasons.