From Our Special Correspondent: Alfred Deakin’s letters to the London Morning Post

The great majority of the members are of the same mind, and but for the grave consequences occasioned by the stoppage of public business and the uncertainty that would be imported into the treatment of the tariff, the tardiness of the Cabinet might cost its life. [...] The number, size, importance, and prospects of local industries of every kind, the hands they employ, the wages they give, the quality of their goods, and the prices they ask for them in and out of the home market, the freights they pay to the seaboard or interior, and what comparison they bear in all these particulars to the conditions of the same industries in Great Britain, the United States, a. [...] One of the features in the first year’s record of the Commonwealth has been the success of the Governor-General in his official capacity, and one of its good fortunes the gradual restoration of his physical health. [...] The exclusion of undesirable aliens and ultimately of the Kanakas, the Customs Bill, with its new impost on ships’ stores, and the Postal Department Bill, with its prohibition against the delivery of gambling correspondence and the letting of mail contracts to ships where black labour is employed, are all of them still the subject of heated controversy here and of suspicious examination abroad. [...] He and, indeed, every single representative who spoke or voted on the question endorsed with ardour that portion of the resolution which condemned with indignation the baseless charges which have been made against the honour of the people and the humanity and valour of the soldiers of the Empire.