whole of you have been absorbed in it, and not one of you remains in Melbourne to struggle with each other for a bare crust of bread.”
“I would like to ask the lecturer what chance there is of a body of men succeeding as he has so graphically described when we know very well that individual farmers, with far greater means, are always coming to grief. If these pioneers got fairly started, there is no doubt they might succeed as he says. But the thing is for them to start. Many a farmer might make a successful start; but when the crops fail him, or a drought comes, or his goods do not realise sufficient in the market to pay him, he is compelled to mortgage his little farm to raise sufficient money to tide over his difficulties with. But even then, he generally loses it. What would these people in your scheme do under such circumstances?”
“In the first place,” respond Harry, “there wouldn't be such circumstances. It would be impossible. The individual farmer, who has to struggle along unaided is in a very different position to the co-operative pioneers I have been describing. If the farmer comes to grief when his crop fails, it is because he is dependent on those crops to pay his rent or the interest on his loans, or to purchase the food he cannot produce; but these pioneers have no rent to pay at all, no interest to meet, and no food to buy, because those remaining behind are sending them a sufficient supply from the city every week to keep them going. It doesn't matter to them if not one of their crops came up for six months, or not one cow gave milk, or not one hen laid a single egg; because their supplies are guaranteed and forwarded to them regularly; and while the farmer is starving because a drought has set in, and he cannot afford to employ labor to irrigate his lands, or the markets are not realizing a price sufficient to pay him properly, the pioneers are irrigating their own lands, instead of racking their brains to find out how to get others to do it, and the prices their commodities are fetching in the market concerns them very little, because they don't depend upon it for their living, and the smallest fraction it brings them in is a fraction more towards the accumulation of the mutual capital which is to free them from the dependence on the capital belonging to the outside capitalist and to ultimately employ every one of their members in the same manner. Now I have shown you briefly how the collected money of the members will act in finding them employment, in providing them with capital in the form of machinery, seed, live stock &c., in providing them with houses, and in drawing them out of the city of exploitation and into a newer city or village of freedom. You see they have no swindling building society to gobble them up, no rent collector to worry them, no grinding lease to pay, because they have paid for their lands in full already. But they have now to guard against the evils of the present property system cropping up again in their midst, and they do so by not permitting anyone to monopolize land to another's detriment, nor to charge another for the use of any lands they may be using or desirous of using, but according to the constitution adopted by them all, and incorporated in the registered deeds of their association, they are legally and morally bound to recognize no other title but the usufruct. That is to say, every individual has the right to certain land only because he is using
