When, in a bus, they rode through the suburbs of the wealthy, past shrubberied mansions and showy villas, along roads where liveried carriages, drawn by high-stepping horses, dashed by them, he felt himself in the presence of the fat man who jingled sovereigns, of the lean man whose slender fingers reached north to the Peak Downs and south to the Murray, filching everywhere from the worker’s hard-earned wage.  When in the tram they were carried with clanging and jangling through endless rows of houses great and small, along main thoroughfares on either side of which crowded side-streets extended like fish-bones, over less crowded districts where the cottages were generally detached or semi-detached and where pleasant homely houses were thickly sprinkled, oven here he wondered how near those who lived in happier state were to the life of the slum, wondered what struggling and pinching and scraping was going on behind the half-drawn blinds that made homes look so cosy.

What started him on this idea particularly was that, in one train, a grey-bearded propertied-looking man who sat beside him was grumbling to a spruce little man opposite about the increasing number of empty houses.

“You can’t wonder at it,” answered the spruce little man.  “When the working classes aren’t prospering everybody feels it but the exporters.  Wages are going down and people are living two families in a house where they used to live one in a house, or living in smaller houses.”

“Oh!  Wages are just as high.  There’s been too much building.  You building society men have overdone the thing.”

“My dear sir!” declared the spruce little man.  “I’m talking from facts.  My society and every other building society is finding it out.  When men can’t get as regular work it’s the same thing to them as if wages were coming down.  The number of surrenders we have now is something appalling.  Working men have built expecting to be able to pay from 6s. to 10s. and 12s. a week to the building societies, and every year more and more are finding out they can’t do it.  As many as can are renting rooms, letting part of their house and so struggling along.  As many more are giving up and renting these rooms or smaller houses.  And apparently well-to-do people are often in as bad a fix.  It’s against my interest to have things this way, but it’s so, and there’s no getting over it.  If it keeps on, pretty well every workingman’s house about Sydney will be a rented house soon.  The building societies can’t stop that unless men have regular work and fair wages.”

“It’s the unions that upset trade,” asserted the propertied-looking man.

“It’s the land law that’s wrong,” contended the spruce man.  “If all taxes were put on unimproved land values it would be cheaper to live and there would be more work because it wouldn’t pay to keep land out of use.  With cheap living and plenty of work the workingman would have money and business would be brisk all round.”