WHERE THE EVIL REALLY LIES.
Geisner was betimes at his appointment in the Domain. It was still the
dinner hour, and though it was Sunday there were few to be seen on the
grass or along the paths. So Ned saw him afar off, pacing up and down
before the Art Gallery like a sentinel, an ordinary looking man to a
casual passer-by, one whom you might pass a hundred times on the street
and not notice particularly, even though he was ugly. Perhaps because of
it.
Neither of them cared to stroll about, they found. Accordingly they
settled down at a shady patch on a grassy slope, the ground already dried
from the night's rain by the fierce summer sunshine of the morning.
Stretched out there, Geisner proceeded to roll a cigarette and Ned to
chew a blade of grass.
Below them a family were picnicking quietly. Dinner was over; pieces of
paper littered the ground by an open basket. The father lay on his side
smoking, the mother was giving a nursing baby its dinner, one little
child lay asleep under a tree and two or three wore were playing near at
hand.
"That reminds me of Paris," remarked Geisner, watching them.
"I suppose you are French?"
"No. I've been in France considerably."
"It's a beautiful country, isn't it?"
"All countries are beautiful in their way. Sydney Harbour is the most
beautiful spot I know. I hardly know where I was born. In Germany I
think."
"Things are pretty bad in those old countries, aren't they?"
"Things are pretty bad everywhere, aren't they?"
"Yes," answered Ned, meditatively. "They seem to be. They're bad enough
here and this is called the workingman's paradise. But a good many seem
glad enough to get here from other countries. It must be pretty bad where
they come from."
"So it is. It is what it is here, only more so. It is what things will be
in a very few years here if you let them go on. As a matter of fact the
old countries ought to be wore prosperous than the new ones, but our
social system has become so ill-balanced that in the countries where
there are most people at work those people are more wretched than where
there are comparatively few working."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, this way. The wealth production of thickly settled countries is
proportionately greater than that of thinly settled countries. Of course,
there would be a limit somewhere, but so far no country we know of has
reached it."
"You don't mean that a man working in England or France earns more than a
man working in Australia?" demanded Ned, sitting up. "I thought it was
the other way."
"I don't mean he gets more but I certainly mean that he produces more.
The appliances are so much better, and the sub-division of labour, that
is each man doing one thing until he becomes an expert at it, is carried
so much further by very virtue of the thicker population."
"That's to say they have things fixed so that they crush more to the ton
of work."
"About that. Taking the people all round, and throwing in kings and
queens and aristocrats and the parsons that Ford loves so, every average
Englishman produced yesterday more wealth--more boots, more tools, more
cloth, more anything of value--than every average Australian. And every
average Belgian produced yesterday, or any day, more wealth than every
average Englishman. These are facts you can see in any collection of
statistics. The conservative political economists don't deny them; they
only try to explain them away."
"But how does it come? Men produce more there than we do here and earn
less. How's that?"
"Simply because they're robbed more."
"Look here, Mr. Geisner!" said Ned, gathering his knees into his arms.
"That's what I want to know. I know we're robbed. Any fool can see that
those who work the least or don't work at all get pretty much everything,
but I don't quite see how they get it. We're only just beginning to think
of these things in the bush, and we don't know much yet. We only know
there's something wrong, but we don't know what to do except to get a
union and keep up wages."
"That's the first step, to get a union," said Geisner. "But unless
unionists understand what it's all about they'll only be able to keep up
wages for a little while. You see, Ned, this is the difficulty: a man
can't work when he likes."
"A man can't work when he likes!"
"No; not the average man and it's the average man who has to be
considered always. Let's take a case--yourself. You want to live.
Accordingly, you must work, that is you must produce what you need to
live upon from the earth by your labour or you must produce something
which other working men need and these other men will give you in
exchange for it something they have produced which you need. Now, let's
imagine you wanting to live and desiring to start to-morrow morning to
work for your living. What would you do?"
"I suppose I'd ask somebody."
"Ask what?"
"Well, I'd have to ask somebody or other if there was any work."
"What work?"
"Well, if they had a job they wanted me to do, that I could do, you
know."
"I don't 'You know' anything. I want you to explain. Now what would you
say?"
"Oh! I'd kind of go down to the hut likely and see the boys if 'twas any
use staying about and then, perhaps, or it might be before I went to the
hut, that would be all according, I'd see the boss and sound him."
"How sound him?"
"Well, that would be all according, too. If I was pretty flush and didn't
care a stiver whether I got a job or not I'd waltz right up to him just
as I might to you to ask the time, and if he came any of his law-de-dah
squatter funny business on me I'd give him the straight wire, I promise
you. But it stands to reason--don't it?--that if I've been out of
graft for months and haven't got any money and my horses are played out
and there's no chance of another job, well, I'm going to humor him a bit
more than I'd like to, ain't I?"
Geisner laughed "You see it all right, Ned. Suppose the first man you
sounded said no?"
"I'd try another."
"And if the other said no?"
"Well, I'd have to keep on trying."
"And you'd get more inclined to humour the boss every time you had to try
again."
"Naturally. That's how they get at us. No man's a crawler who's sure of a
job."
"Then you might take lower wages, and work longer hours, after you'd been
out of work till you'd got thoroughly disheartened than you would now."
"I wouldn't. Not while there was--I might have to, though I say I'd
starve or steal first. There are lots who do, I suppose."
"Lots who wouldn't dream of doing it if there was plenty of work to be
had?"
"Of course. Who'd work for less than another man if he needn't, easily?
There isn't one man in a thousand who'd do another fellow out of a job
for pure meanness. The chaps who do the mischief are those who're so
afraid the boss'll sack them, and that another boss won't take them on,
that they'd almost lick his boots if they thought it would please him."
"Now we're coming to it. It is work being hard to get that lowers wages
and increases hours, and makes a workman, or workwoman either, put up
with what nobody would dream of putting up with if they could help it?"
"Of course that's it."
"Now! Is the day's work done by a poorly-paid man less than that done by
a highly-paid one?"
"No," answered Ned. "I've seen it more," he added.
"How's that?"
"Well, when a man's anxious to keep a job and afraid he won't get another
he'll often nearly break his back bullocking at it. When he feels
independent he'll do the fair thing, and sling the job up if the boss
tries to bullock him. It's the same thing all along the line, it seems to
me. When you can get work easily you get higher wages, shorter hours,
some civility, and only do the fair thing. When you can't, wages come
down, hours spin out, the boss puts on side, and you've got to work like
a nigger."
"Then, roughly speaking, the amount of work you do hasn't got very much
to do with the pay you get for it?"
"I suppose not. It's not likely a man ever gets more than his work is
worth. The boss would soon knock him off and let the work slide. I
suppose a man is only put on to a job when its worth more than the boss
has to pay for getting it done. And I reckon the less a man can be got to
do it for the better it is for the fellow who gets the job done."
"That's it. Suppose you can't get work no matter how often you ask, what
do you do?"
"Keep on looking. Live on rations that the squatters serve out to keep
men travelling the country so they can get them if they want them or on
mutton you manage to pick up or else your mates give you a bit of a lift.
You must live. It's beg or steal or else starve."
"I think men and women are beginning to starve in Australia. Many are
quite starving in the old countries and have been starving longer. That's
why the workers are somewhat worse off there than here. The gold rushes
gave things a lift here and raised the condition of the workers
wonderfully. But the same causes that have been working in the old
countries have been working here and are fast beating things down again."
"A gold rush!" exclaimed Ned. "That's the thing to make wages rise,
particularly if it's a poor man's digging."
"What's that?"
"Don't you know? An alluvial field is where you can dig out gold with a
pick and shovel and wash it out with a pannikin. You don't want any
machines, and everybody digs for himself, or mates with other fellows,
and if you want a man to do a job you've got to pay him as much as he
could dig for himself in the time."
"I see. 'Poor man's digging,' you call it, eh? You don't think much of a
reefing field?"
"Of course not," answered Ned, smiling at this apparent ignorance.
"Reefing fields employ men, and give a market, and a few strike it, but
the average man, as you call him, hasn't got a chance. It takes so much
capital for sinking and pumping and crushing, and things of that sort,
that companies have to be formed outside, and the miners mostly work just
for wages. And when a reefing field gets old it's as bad as a coal-field
or a factory town. You're just working for other people, and the bigger
the dividends the more anxious they seem to be to knock wages"
"Then this is what it all amounts to. If you aren't working for yourself
you're working for somebody else who pays as little as he can for as much
as he can get, and rubs the dirt in, often, into the bargain."
"A man may not earn wages working for himself," answered Ned.
"You mean he may not produce for himself as much value as men around him
receive in wages for working for somebody else. Of course! You might
starve working on Mount Morgan or Broken Hill with a pick and pannikin,
though on an alluvial your pick and pannikin would be all you needed.
That's the kernel of the industrial question. Industry has passed out of
the alluvial stage into the reefing. We must have machinery to work with
or we may all starve in the midst of mountains of gold."
"I don't quite see how you mean."
"Just this. If every man could take his pick on his shoulders and work
for himself with reasonable prospect of what he regarded as a sufficient
return he wouldn't ask anybody else for work."
"Not often, anyway."
"But if he cannot so work for himself he must go round looking for the
man who has a shaft or a pump or a stamping mill and must bargain for the
owner of machinery to take the product of his labour for a certain price
which of course isn't it's full value at all but the price at which,
owing to his necessities, he is compelled to sell his labour.
"Things are getting so in all branches of industry, in squatting, in
manufacturing, in trading, in ship-owning, in everything, that it takes
more and more capital for a man to start for himself. This is a necessary
result of increasing mechanical powers and of the economy of big
businesses as compared to small ones. For example, if there is a great
advantage in machine clipping, as a friend of mine who understands such
things tells me there is, all wool will some day be clipped that way.
Then, the market being full of superior machine-clipped wool,
hand-clipped would have little sale and only at lower price. The result
would be that all wool-growers must have machines as part of their
capital, an additional expense, making it still harder for a man with a
small capital to start wool-growing.
"All this means," continued Geisner, "that more and more go round asking
for work as what we call civilisation progresses, that is as population
increases and the industrial life becomes more complicated. I don't mean
in Australia only. I'm speaking generally. They can only work when
another man thinks he can make a profit out of them, and there are so
many eager to be made a profit on that the owner of the machine has it
pretty well his own way. This system operates for the extension of its
own worst feature, the degradation of the working masses. You see, such a
vast amount of industrial work can be held over that employers, sometimes
unconsciously, sometimes deliberately, hold work over until times are
what they call 'more suitable,' that is when they can make bigger profits
by paying less in wages. This has a tendency to constantly keep wages
down, besides affording a stock argument against unionist agitations for
high wages. But, in any case, the fits of industrial briskness and
idleness which occur in all countries are enough to account for the
continual tendency of wages to a bare living amount for those working, as
many of those not working stand hungrily by to jump into their places if
they get rebellious or attempt to prevent wages going down."
"That's just how it is," said Ned. "But we're going to get all men into
unions, and then we'll keep wages up."
"Yes; there is no doubt that unions help to keep wages up. But, you see,
so long as industrial operations can be contracted, and men thrown out of
work, practically at the pleasure of those who employ, complete unionism
is almost impracticable if employers once begin to act in concert.
Besides, the unemployed are a menace to unionism always. Workmen can
never realise that too strongly."
"What are we to do then if we can't get what we want by unionism?"
"How can you get what you want by unionism? The evil is in having to ask
another man for work at all--in not being able to work for yourself.
Unionism, so far, only says that if this other man does employ you he
shall not take advantage of your necessity by paying you less than the
wage which you and your fellow workmen have agreed to hold out for. You
must destroy the system which makes it necessary for you to work for the
profit of another man, and keeps you idle when he can't get a profit out
of you. The whole wage system must be utterly done away with." And
Geisner rolled another cigarette as though it was the simplest idea in
the world.
"How? What will you do instead?"
"How! By having men understand what it is, and how there can be no true
happiness and no true manliness until they overthrow it! By preaching
socialistic ideas wherever men will listen, and forcing them upon them
where they do not want to listen! By appealing to all that is highest in
men and to all that is lowest--to their humanity and to their
selfishness! By the help of the education which is becoming general, by
the help of art and of science, and even of this vile press that is the
incarnation of all the villainies of the present system! By living for
the Cause, and by being ready to die for it! By having only one idea: to
destroy the Old Order and to bring in the New!" Geisner spoke quietly,
but in his voice was a ring that made Ned's blood tingle in his veins.
"What do you call the Old Order?" asked Ned, lying back and looking up at
the sky through the leaves.
"Everything that is inhuman, everything that is brutal, everything which
relies upon the taking advantage of a fellow-man, which leads to the
degradation of a woman or to the unhappiness of a child. Everything which
is opposed to the idea of human brotherhood. That which produces
scrofulous kings, and lying priests, and greasy millionaires, and
powdered prostitutes, and ferret-faced thieves. That which makes the
honest man a pauper and a beggar, and sets the clever swindler in
parliament. That which makes you what you are at 24, a man without a
home, with hardly a future. That which tries to condemn those who protest
to starvation, and will yet condemn them to prison here in Australia as
readily as ever it did in Europe or Russia.
"You want to know what makes this," he went on. "Well, it is what we have
been talking of, that you should have to ask another man for work so that
you may live. It doesn't matter what part of the world you are in or
under what form of government, it is the same everywhere. So long as you
can't work without asking another man for permission you are exposed to
all the ills that attend poverty and all the tyranny that attends
inordinate power and luxury. When you grip that, you understand half the
industrial problem."
"And the other half, what's that?" asked Ned.
"This, that we've got over the alluvial days, if they ever did exist
industrially, and are in the thick of reefing fields and syndicates. So
much machinery is necessary now that no ordinary single man can own the
machinery he needs to work with as he could in the old pick and pannikin
days. This makes him the slave of those who do own it for he has to work
to live. Men must all join together to own the machinery they must have
to work with, so that they may use it to produce what they need as they
need it and will not have to starve unless some private owner of
machinery can make a profit out of their labour. They must pull together
as mates and work for what is best for all, not each man be trying only
for himself and caring little whether others live or die. We must own all
machinery co-operatively and work it co-operatively."
"How about the land? Oughtn't that to be owned by the people too?"
"Why, of course. The land is a part of the machinery of production. Henry
George separates it but in reality it is simply one of the means by which
we live, nowadays, for no man but an absolute savage can support himself
on the bare land. In the free land days which Henry George quotes, the
free old German days when we were all barbarians and didn't know what a
thief was, not only was the land held in common but the cattle also.
Without its cattle a German tribe would have starved on the richest
pastureland in Europe, and without our machinery we would starve were the
land nationalised to-morrow. At least I think so. George's is a scheme by
which it is proposed to make employers compete so fiercely among one
another that the workman will have it all his own way. It works this way.
You tax the landowner until it doesn't pay him to have unused land. He
must either throw it up or get it used somehow and the demand for labour
thus created is to lift wages and put the actual workers in what George
evidently considers a satisfactory position. That's George's Single Tax
scheme."
"You don't agree with it?" asked Ned.
"I am a Socialist. Between all Socialists and all who favour competition
in industry, as the Single Tax scheme does, there is a great gulf fixed.
Economically, I consider it fallacious, for the very simple reason that
capitalism continues competition, not to selling at cost price but to
monopoly, and I have never met an intelligent Single Taxer, and I have
met many, who could logically deny the possibility of the Single Tax
breaking down in an extension of this very monopoly power. Roughly,
machinery is necessary to work land most profitably, profitably enough
even to get a living off it. Suppose machine holders, that is
capitalists, extend their organisation a little and 'pool' their
interests as land users, that is refuse to compete against one another
for the use of land! Nellie was telling me that at one land sale on the
Darling Downs in Queensland the selectors about arranged matters among
themselves beforehand. The land sold, owing to its situation, was only
valuable to those having other land near and so was all knocked down at
the upset price though worth four times as much. It seems to me that in
just the same way the capitalists, who alone can really use land
remember, for the farmer, the squatter, the shopkeeper, the manufacturer,
the merchant, are nowadays really only managers for banks and mortgage
companies, will soon arrange a way of fixing the values of land to suit
themselves. But apart from that, I object to the Single Tax idea from the
social point of view. It is competitive. It means that we are still to go
on buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest. It is tinged
with that hideous Free Trade spirit of England, by which cotton kings
became millionaires while cotton spinners were treated far worse than any
chattel slaves. There are other things to be considered besides
cheapness, though unfortunately, with things as they are we seem
compelled to consider cheapness first."
They lay for some time without speaking.