Page:Melbourne Riots (Andrade, 1892).djvu/48

42 you, deprived of all political or other privileged powers—you, with nothing but a precarious starvation wage—who are to create from yourselves both the power and the wealth necessary for your emancipation. Now you know that every time you work under the present system, you give your employer nearly the whole of your product, simply because he is your employer. That great philosopher, Adam Smith, tells you that the natural wages of labor are the whole product of labor; but then you don't read his famous Wealth of Nations, so you haven't been trying to secure those just wages that he shows you are yours, but have always allowed the capitalists to rob you of nearly the whole of them. Your fellow-workers in the United States of America realized from their statistics a few years ago the awful fact that every time they produce eight dollars, they only get one dollar returned them as wages. Now I want them to keep that other seven dollars, and to devote it to building up their own capital and assisting to find wealth and employment for their fellows. And I want you to show them how to do it (applause). I am going to ask you to club together your earnings to buy land and machinery and to employ each other. (A voice: “We never have any earnings.”) Yes you do, or you would all be dead long ago. If you got twenty shillings wages Iast week it shows you earned six pounds in that time, although you don't perhaps know where it went. At any rate you got the pound. And it is very apparent you didn't do any good with it, because you never get any better off with all your little earnings (“We get worse off.”) Just so and you will continue to do so while you waste your money as you have been doing. Now, how many of you can raise ten shillings to go towards freeing yourselves? You none seem to think you can, and yet you squander that every week over your rent. How many of you could afford to put a pound into the next Melbourne Cup, six months before it is run, if you knew it would win you a thousand pounds? (“Plenty of us.”) Certainly you could. You have but to realize the necessity of a thing, and you soon find a way of doing it. Now you all know that many attempts have been made, by communists, co-operators and others, to find a better way of living in society than we are now doing. You have heard of the experiments of Icaria, Brook Farm, Harmony, Bethel, and hundreds of others that have been made in different parts of the world; and you know they have all failed. But why have they failed? Was it because those who took part in them were unhappy under the new conditions? No; we know very well that many of them deplored bitterly the failure of many of those experiments, eagerly sought to take part in subsequent ones very often, and testified to the fact that the happiest days of their lives were those they spent in those communities, notwithstanding the many difficulties they had to contend against. Were they troubled with disputes over the use of their land as we are, and did they find the common use of land worse than our present system of buying, selling, and monopolizing it? No; we know their system of using their land proved far superior to our's, in most, if not in all, cases, and that it taught us a lesson we cannot soon forget. Did they find themselves inconvenienced for the want of money with which to transact the mutual