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defending this country with the last man and the last shilling against anyone who would try and take it.’ 10
    â€˜But not with boys and youths!’ a lady calls out.
    â€˜I agree,’ Mr Fisher replies tightly in his thick Scottish brogue. His great moustache bristles, perhaps in the manner of a man stopping himself from saying that he had worked in the coal pits from the age of ten, and doing a man’s work had never hurt him . ‘I am with you,’ the master politician continues. ‘I want to train the boys at the best time so that they will be ready to fight.’
    A shudder moves through the room, together with many, mostly feminine, cries of protest. The horror. The horror of preparing young Australian boys to take lives and risk their own in the process. And these women will not be quietened by their menfolk.
    Rising to the occasion, Mr Fisher assures the men that it is all right, that he understands. ‘We must hear the ladies,’ he says graciously.
    â€˜Do you see straight-up boys returning from drill?’ an elderly lady cries excitedly, as she stands up. Before the Opposition Leader has time to respond, she answers her own question. ‘No,’ she says, now stooping down, as if under a great weight on her shoulders. ‘They are all bundled up like this. Don’t take the little boys. Take boys of 21, and I am with you …’
    Mr Fisher is not fussed. ‘I have seen about 15 different military systems,’ he replies, ‘and taking the soldiers man for man, and boy for boy, I have not seen boys better fitted for military service than the Australians … If the burden is too great for the youngsters, it is a matter for the surgeon or the medical man to adjust. Surely they can trust the surgeon!’
    â€˜Would you trust the surgeon?’ a voice cries out, amid much other rumbling and jeering.
    Mr Fisher moves to quell the dissent, still trying to be reasonable. ‘Then whom would you trust?’
    A determined-looking, elderly gentleman rises to his feet, and the meeting falls quiet to hear his words. ‘Whom would I trust? Their mothers !’
    The answer brings great applause and laughter before the meeting descends into accusations against Mr Fisher and recriminations against his party and all who would send young men to fight useless wars.
    It is so bad that a shaken Mr Fisher tells the reporter of Adelaide’s Daily Herald after the meeting, ‘I have never in my life met a deputation which made such imputations and suggestions of the vilest kind regarding certain men and myself in my life [ sic ].’ 11
    The Freedom League is not entirely alone, however, as there is rising disquiet, most particularly among the Irish Catholic working class, with their view put most eloquently by the newspaper of the Political Labor Council of Victoria, The Labor Call , which publishes a strong editorial with a pungent point:
    It is unthinkable to believe because an archduke and his missus were slain by a fanatic the whole of Europe should become a seething battlefield, and deplorable misery brought upon the people. But there is one thing certain, if such a catastrophe comes to pass that will be the end of war.
    It will assuredly end in revolution and the dethronement of monarchs. If the workers of the world federated, like those of this hemisphere, and said we will not fight, then war and swashbuckling is at an end. War is a horror made for the Krupps and Armstrongs of twentieth century civilisation. What glory is there in to-day’s warfare? None whatever; it is only slaughter and carnage … human beings massacred like grasshoppers in a farmer’s wheat field. The days of such antiquated ideas of killing one another to satisfy a king or a party are surely numbered. Let those who make war do the fighting.
    Without the soldier, where are the armies? 12
    But these are only the naysayers, while the broad mass of the community remains firmly