Chapter 2 explored the transnational world in which Mann and Ross operated and their place and influence within it. Parts II and III investigate their contributions to specific aspects of this world. I begin, in the two chapters comprising Part II, by concentrating upon their most important contribution – to the nature and development of socialism, including socialist syndicalism, in Australia, New Zealand, Britain and, albeit to a lesser extent, the wider world.

Chapter 3 highlights the shared nature of Mann's and Ross's socialism, especially during their respective VSP, Broken Hill and common SFA years, up to 1908. This was reflected in the eclecticism of the influences underpinning their political philosophy. A belief in both evolutionary and revolutionary Marxism lay at the heart of their socialism, as opposed, as some of the Australian historiography argues, to gradualist and purely evolutionary kinds of socialism. During this period, Mann and Ross also attached primary importance to the economic rather than political means of realising socialism, to the achievement of the ‘Social Revolution’ peacefully and quickly, to both ‘scientific’ and ‘ethical’ socialism (the latter embracing, particularly for Mann, the ‘true’ religious socialism of Jesus Christ) and to socialist internationalism.

Yet both chapters of Part II, especially so Chapter 4, are also concerned to identify and explain differences as well as similarities. The former were reflected in Mann's developing syndicalism, his effective downgrading of the importance of political ways and means, and his later synthesis of syndicalism and revolutionary communism, as contrasted with Ross's post-1908 attachment to the equal importance of the political and economic means to socialism, his 1920s membership of the ALP and his rejection of the Bolshevik ‘revolutionary road’ as the way forward in Australia. Ross's growing involvement in Rationalism also signalled that he was becoming more outspoken and unqualified than Mann in his opposition to most kinds of religion.

At the same time, however, important similarities persisted. For example, both men retained their commitment to the speedy and peaceful attainment of the Social Revolution, their criticisms of palliatives and reforms as ends in themselves and the importance of sentiments, ethics and agency as well as the ‘cold and impersonal’ logic of ‘scientific’ structural determinism to socialists and socialism. They also remained comrades and good friends right up to Ross's death in 1931.