Chapter 12

In estimating the future of these two great colonies and their respective capitals, I will endeavour to mark some distinctive considerations. Unquestionably the climatic difference, although it may not be serious, is in favour of Victoria, for the English race of both colonies and for English industries. Then, again, we have this ever-recurring Australian drought, from which Victoria does not indeed always or altogether escape, but to which, with her cooler sea-girt shores, she is certainly less liable than her sister colonies, including New South Wales. Even now, as I sail along the northern shores of the latter and along Southern Queensland, the severe drought which has prevailed for the past six months is indicated by the ascending smoke of bush fires in every direction, while Victoria, as I left it, was in universal green from the sufficiency of rain. Lastly, there is the disputable question as to how the much wider area of New South Wales than Victoria bears upon the question. Is that a help to her or a drag? With the present scant population to either, the advantage seems to me with Victoria, compact as she is, and full of fertile land. Fifty years hence, when the population of each has passed from one million to ten millions, and when a system of irrigation has fertilized the large proportion of now sterile areas of the larger colony, the latter will assert her precedence and, perhaps, easily pass her rival. But for the present she is rather handicapped than otherwise by her distances. Granting that she has throughout as many rich acres as Victoria, still she is, for the time being, under the disadvantage of having to draw her resources from greater distances--from an average, say, of more than 300 miles to Victoria's 100.

Against this collective relative handicapping in her race, New South Wales has happily still to oppose her good fortune in having adhered as yet to the impartial freedom of exchange for the labour products of all her workers, while Victoria has restricted that freedom, and has, consequently, by so much, reduced that product, by her protective enactments. Let me try to estimate this most important matter. Victoria has seen fit to protect certain interests, agricultural and manufacturing, at the expense of the whole of her public. Happily for her the agricultural protection is probably almost, if not indeed altogether, inoperative, as the climate and the soil of the country, and the vigour of her people, give to her, independently, the natural lead in agricultural products. But the manufacturing protection is confessedly effective, so that the manufactures would not be forthcoming without the extra price of protection. Let us average this protection at 25 per cent, and let us further suppose that one-fifth of all the people's requirements are thus extra-charged. This means that the Victorian public are made to pay in the proportion of 125 pounds for a class of their daily requisites which the New South Wales public, by virtue of their freedom of exchange for all the products of their labour, can secure for 100 pounds; and that this very considerably enhanced cost affects as much as the one-fifth part of all those requisites. Victoria, and the vigorous life which peoples her, will in any case ever present a spectacle of surprising progress. But if she is mated in a race in which, while the two rivals are otherwise equal, she is thus restricted in labour output by protection, while the other keeps herself free, she is as surely to be beaten in that race as if, on her grand Flemington racecourse, she were the seriously handicapped horse of a noble pair admitted to be otherwise equal.

POST POSTSCRIPT.

BRISBANE, 22ND AUGUST.

My publisher affords me just time to record my arrival yesterday, at the capital of the youthful but already great Queensland, and to give some opinions of the place after a glance, which is, however, of necessity so cursory.

Brisbane is to me not less astonishing than either Sydney or Melbourne. From the adjacent heights of Mount Coot-tha, I looked over several square miles, mostly of thickly compacted streets and dwellings, comprising a town and connected suburbs of 75,000 busy people. While the suburban houses are chiefly of wood, the town proper already, in some respects, fairly rivals its senior sisters of the South. Thus Queen-street, in its general architectural aspect, and in the tide of business life which it presents, is but little short of the chief streets of these other cities; while the structures of two of the Queensland Banks, the Queensland National and the London Chartered of Australia, together with those of the Australian Mutual Provident Society and of the stores of Messrs. D.L. Brown and Co., Messrs. Stewart and Hemmant, and Messrs. Scott, Dawson and Stewart, seemed to me quite equal to anything of the kind, respectively, which I had met with since my arrival. Indeed, I am prepared to congratulate my friend, Mr. Drury, at the head of the former of these banks, upon an edifice which, in graces of structure, as well as in mere dimensions, seems to me to surpass all rivalry.

The Bank of England--the highly conservative "old lady of Threadneedle-street"--on the recent occasion of negotiating yet one more large Queensland loan, broadly hinted to her go-ahead client that her borrowing must, for a time at least, be more restricted. I do not deny the wisdom of this advice, for truly all Australasian borrowing has been utterly outside of all principle and precedent. But while the Home public is preoccupied with these colonies' great debts, my visit here has diverted the leading idea rather to the solid and expansive basis of trade and prosperity which I see around me. I have not yet seen South Australia or New Zealand, but, from what already reaches my ears, I have no reason to expect that my account of either colony is to differ materially, if at all, from that of the others. The ready facility to incur debt on behalf of colonial progress is due, as it seems to me, rather to consciousness of strength than to indifference about financial obligation. Each colony will "pay" with equal certainty and promptitude, although a New South Wales or a Victoria may do so with less strain than their sisters.