“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.