ent system! By living for
the Cause, and by being ready to die for it! By having only one idea: to
destroy the Old Order and to bring in the New!" Geisner spoke quietly,
but in his voice was a ring that made Ned's blood tingle in his veins.

"What do you call the Old Order?" asked Ned, lying back and looking up at
the sky through the leaves.

"Everything that is inhuman, everything that is brutal, everything which
relies upon the taking advantage of a fellow-man, which leads to the
degradation of a woman or to the unhappiness of a child. Everything which
is opposed to the idea of human brotherhood. That which produces
scrofulous kings, and lying priests, and greasy millionaires, and
powdered prostitutes, and ferret-faced thieves. That which makes the
honest man a pauper and a beggar, and sets the clever swindler in
parliament. That which makes you what you are at 24, a man without a
home, with hardly a future. That which tries to condemn those who protest
to starvation, and will yet condemn them to prison here in Australia as
readily as ever it did in Europe or Russia.

"You want to know what makes this," he went on. "Well, it is what we have
been talking of, that you should have to ask another man for work so that
you may live. It doesn't matter what part of the world you are in or
under what form of government, it is the same everywhere. So long as you
can't work without asking another man for permission you are exposed to
all the ills that attend poverty and all the tyranny that attends
inordinate power and luxury. When you grip that, you understand half the
industrial problem."

"And the other half, what's that?" asked Ned.

"This, that we've got over the alluvial days, if they ever did exist
industrially, and are in the thick of reefing fields and syndicates. So
much machinery is necessary now that no ordinary single man can own the
machinery he needs to work with as he could in the old pick and pannikin
days. This makes him the slave of those who do own it for he has to work
to live. Men must all join together to own the machinery they must have
to work with, so that they may use it to produce what they need as they
need it and will not have to starve unless some private owner of
machinery can make a profit out of their labour. They must pull together
as mates and work for what is best for all, not each man be trying only
for himself and caring little whether others live or die. We must own all
machinery co-o