LETTER XI.

SOCIALISM-A TASMANIAN CORRESPONDENTTHE UNEMPLOYED IN SYDNEY-VILLAGE SETTLEMENTS IN ADELAIDE AND VICTORIA -EMERSON.

January 27, 1898.

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"WE are all Socialists now is the verdict of a high political authority; and although I try to nourish a healthy prejudice against anything that is fashionable, yet I suppose I must not refuse the "Socialist " label which appears now and again attached to my name. Whilst I heartily welcome all criticism, I should be grateful if any one who cares to form accurate ideas as to what my "Socialism" really is will be good enough to learn it by direct appeal to what I have written, rather than from the quotations supplied by many-tongued rumour, or even by "A Tasmanian Correspondent " in your last week's issue.

In 1891 I said in a paper on "Socialism and Personal Character":

An Englishman who had spent some time in Australia said to me, What the colonies want, what Australia wants, is a true and human ideal! They are vulgarised by their passion for wealth. Nothing will save them but a pure and unselfish ideal.

To the words of that witness I added:

Collectiveness has the promise of this gain, by quenching the modern passion for inordinate accumulation, freeing men from the tyranny of things seen and temporal, and opening the gates for the higher culture of the individual and for the fuller service of men.

What I quoted from a distinguished preacher who had spent years in Australia is treated by "A Tasmanian Correspondent" as though it were a verdict of my own; and where I merely suggest that Collectivism contains a promise of good, I am treated as though I had described an indisputable and completed result.

Now it will be allowed by any one who knows anything of the Collectivist working of the Post Office telegraphic and telephonic departments of State, or of the municipalisation of water, gas, and tramways (not to mention other pertinent facts), that Collectivism contains at least a promise of good for other departments of our industrial life, though, of course, it is only experience, full and manifold, that can prove to us whether the promise is another addition to the great host of human illusions, or a gain to a smaller company of reproductive facts.

"A Tasmanian Correspondent" has stepped into the witness-box, and told us his judgment on the experience of the colonies so far as it has gone in this direction. He speaks as an Australian farmer, and has opportunities of knowing the truth; and certainly, as his

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evidence is not encouraging, so his tone is not particularly hopeful. To be sure, his evidence is weakened by the circumstance that he does not mention definite places, or enable us to cross-examine him as to his "facts," or to test his assertions by public documents; but, according to his observation, Australasian "working men" (that "select few being excepted which prove the rule") "are idle, and will not work without a taskmaster." They are boisterously healthy and riotously merry so long as they have no work to do. To their idleness they add selfishness, and to both theft. They have no care for others, and are as greedy as they are indolent. Their workingday is only eight hours now, and yet they are already demanding that it shall be reduced to six, whilst a farmer is obliged to work sixteen hours, and then can hardly make both ends meet. Meanwhile the Australian Governments are "coddling" the working man, wasting thousands of pounds on "village settlements," building houses for them; and yet, though they have "beautiful houses" and plenty of "sunshine,” and are "alive to the finger-tips," they not only do not "seek work," but "will not work either for their families or themselves." It is a gloomy picture of our young colonial life, and I am not surprised that the painter should become a lamenting prophet, and tell us "the end is not yet seen."

But let me canvass a few of these statements in the light of facts I saw, and authoritative papers I have accumulated, during my recent visit to Australasia. And, first, I must say that the Australians I saw in Melbourne and Adelaide, Sydney and Hobart will be astonished to learn that the Australasian lands are, as this witness says, "nationalised," in any fair sense attributable to that term. I heard it declared, with some indignation, that the private ownership of land was "one of the chief causes of their social troubles, the parent of almost all monopolies," and "by far the fiercest lion in the path of all reform." I was told that the best lands in South Australia and Victoria are in the hands of a few; that ground rents in Melbourne are portentously high; and that the "unearned increment" in the great cities of Australasia is going, like the unearned increment of London, into the pockets of a small number of individuals instead of being devoted to the welfare of the whole of the people of the State.

Certainly, the complaint of high rents was abundant in Melbourne, and I have figures before me showing that in South Australia, which has an area of more than 900,000 square miles, and is thus larger than France, Germany, Austria and Italy together, yet half of this vast territory is owned by 703 land taxpayers, some of them, of course, representing companies, bankers and absentees. Indeed, it is most

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"We have

inaccurate for an Australian to say, nationalised our magnificent countries," because some portions have been offered to purchasers at a low rate. That ignores the main element in the situation. Governments may start by making land cheap, so cheap in fact "that anybody can get his freehold who proves himself worthy of it," but when once Governments have parted with the property of the people other forces come into play which soon make it dear-forces that, in the absence of better words, I may call "the forces of the social organism," those forces which have made London

and Launceston, Manchester and Melbourne what they are, begin to act; and so the land that was very cheap becomes extremely costly, and the gains which are not due to the owner's action in the least, go to the enriching of the one or two fortunate people who were the first to buy, whilst the poorer people have to be huddled into one or two rooms at an almost impossible rent. The Australasian Governments have done many wise things; but they cannot be said to have "nationalised" the land. wish we might hope that from the beginning of the next century they would not alienate another yard from the ownership of the people.

I

The next question raised by your correspondent, that of the "unemployed," was the first sociological inquiry I conducted in Sydney, and in some form or other this "Labour