elaborated the charge that Labour was cutting its own throat by wrecking industry and commerce.
"But will anything get us away from this fact, mates," he said: "that there's never a shop shuts down because it can't pay the weekly wage-bill. If a shop shuts down, it is because it can't pay a high enough dividend, and there you've got it.
"Australian Labour has set out from the first on the principle that huge fortunes should not be made out of its efforts. We have had the obvious example of America before us, and we have been determined from the start that Australia should not fall into the hands of a small number of millionaires and a larger number of semi-millionaires. It has been our idea that a just proportion of all profits should circulate among the workers in the form of wages. Supposing the worker does get his pound a day. It is enormous, isn't it! It is preposterous. Of course it is. But it isn't preposterous for a small bunch of owners or shareholders to get their ten pounds a day, for doing nothing. Sundays included. That isn't preposterous, is it?
"They raise the plea that their fathers and their forefathers accumulated the capital by their labours. Well, haven't our fathers and forefathers laboured? Haven't they? And what have they accumulated? The right to labour on, and be paid for it what the others like to give em.
"We don't want to wreck industry. But, we say, wages shall go up so that profits shall go down. Why should there be any profits, after all? Forefathers! Why, we've all had forefathers, and I'm sure mine worked. Why should there by any profits at all, I should like to know. And if profits there must be, well then, the profit grabber isn't going to get ten times as much as the wage-earner, just because he had a few screwing forefathers. We, who work for what we get, are going to see that the man who doesn't work shall not receive a large income for not working. If he's got to have an income for doing nothing, let him have no more than what we call wages. The labourer is worthy of his hire, and the hire is worthy of his labourer. But I can not see that any man is worthy of an unearned income. Let there be no unearned incomes. So much for the basic
