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 mu