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.”