Mercredie & Drew, manufacturers, were robbed of fifty thousand dollars by employé's; F. Coxon, merchant, was robbed by an employé of a large sum. Three young women succeeded in passing a number of counterfeit checks. Charles Graham, a postoffice clerk, embezzled two hundred dollars from the postoffice.
The government's claim is that the unemployed problem is too complicated to solve. In Sydney five hundred dollars each week is spent in aiding five hundred families. Five thousand men in South Australia asked the Governor to call a special session of Parliament to discuss means to aid them. The Governor refused. Then they waited on Premier Kingston, but the Premier would promise nothing. He told them that though they were in want of food, they had refused to break a yard and a half of rock per week for rations, and he could do no more. The delegation said that they would not break rock for food alone.
Thousands are sleeping in the open air and several have starved to death. At Bourke Afghans and Europeans quarreled over a division of labor, and a bloody row occurred. The most tragic suicides out of ninety-eight in one week, directly the result of hard times, are: F. W. Wilson, the biscuit manufacturer of Brisbane, shot himself; William O'Connor, lodger in the European Hotel, Melbourne, jumped from the fourth story and dashed his brains out on the pavement; Kate Brooks, a pretty English girl, starving, got drunk and killed herself with poison; Joseph Bancroft, a miner, out of work, said good-bye to his family and exploded a cartridge in his mouth.
As Coin closed the reading of the extract from the San Francisco Chronicle, Mr. Joel Bigelow asked him to read an extract from a paper published in London called "The Colonies and India" which Mr. Bigelow then had in his hand. Coin consenting, Mr. Bigelow came forward with the paper, and Coin read the extract as follows:
