go on it once, as they did in the experiments I have told you of, because you'd soon come back again as they did. You wouldn't have enough means to live on. But suppose you sent a hundred of your number. Let them take plenty of tents, food, seed, live stock, and all the other things they require with them. You can easily do this, because you have plenty of means. Now there is already a hundred of you on your own lands and out of the crowded city—a hundred less proletaires to compete at the capitalist's feet for a starvation wage. Well you continue to supply them with food, week after week, while they are up there; it doesn't cost much to live rent free in the country, and your united capital can easily do it without diminishing much. While you are finding these comrades food, they are doing their share towards sustaining you. They are building little homes away up there, so that they can live in them instead of the tents; and they are also building others for you; they also dig and prepare the ground so that fruit and vegetables may be planted in it to sustain you and them in the near future, and they erect sheds for the cattle and poultry. After a while, they begin to get ‘the house’ ready, as we would say; and you ballot to select a few more pioneers to go and help them. You might this time send their wives and sweethearts; because you know no community will hold together long if there are no sweethearts there (laughter), the men would soon return to the city with all its sorrows, rather than suffer country bachelordom. Then you gradually send more and more of your numbers up there, according to your means, which are constantly being increased by your own weekly contributions, and buy more and more land as you require it. And now you will begin to see the advantage of securing this surplus product that I was telling you about—the big profit that the capitalist appropriates out of your labors. Some of your crops begin to come up, your poultry begins to supply you with eggs, your cows to give milk, and so on. And your friends in the country send all these things, over and above what they require for their own food, to you for you to sell in Melbourne. You accordingly dispose of it, and the money realized goes to swell your fund which had been somewhat decreased by the purchases of land and the settlement of your members upon it. As time goes on this surplus product gets more and more in proportion; your few dozen head of poultry will have increased to hundreds, and then to thousands; your few shillings' worth of seeds will have grown to loads of grain and vegetables, and will also have furnished you with thousands of times as many seeds as you started with; your cattle will have multiplied from dozens to hundreds; and your exports will be increasing every year. This prolific increase of nature, which used to be the principle agency by which you were impoverished because it did not belong to you, becomes the means by which you all get wealthy now that it does belong to you. You soon have realized so much by the sale of your growing surplus product that you can easily buy more land than you need; you can send your remaining members in larger batches to colonize, and can buy them costlier and more efficient machinery. And you can keep on doing this until one after another, member after member has gone up to assist in the pioneering work, until at last the
