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