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.