says in his next sentence, Australia' is perhaps the most promising field for settlement now available for the growing white population of the world.' Of the 716,000 square miles capable under present conditions of cultivation in some form only 27,000 were (according to the 'Official Year Book' for 1926) actually under cultivation in 1925; the margin would seem wide enough to accommodate all the immigrants and all the natural increase of population for some years yet. Indeed, the first thought of English students confronted with these figures is apt to be Why, then, does not the Commonwealth attract immigrants by the obvious and satisfactory method of giving away some of it?' The reason is simple-the Commonwealth has none to give away. All the soil of Australia (except the tiny Federal Capital Territory and the huge but purely pastoral Northern Territory) is controlled by the several States; and the best areas do not now belong to them, but to private citizens who either bought the more fertile patches long ago or have leased them on a long tenure. Of the soil of Victoria, for instance (and Victoria is just now in disfavour because it has refused to take more immigrants), over 60 per cent. is privately owned, and less than a quarter remains at the State's disposal-unless it acquires more by re-purchasing fertile but unused land from the present owners. (The quarter, it should be noted, is practically all mountainous and largely inaccessible.) In New South Wales a third of the area, including every yard of fertile and well-watered soil, is alienated, a good deal more than half is held under lease (this comprises most of the good pastoral land out west), and the State is left with 9 per cent. of its own. The trouble is not that the good land is unoccupied, but that it is used for purposes which do not fully utilise its goodness. The Federal Labour Ministry of 1910-13 attempted to correct this by imposing a tax on the unimproved value of land, so that owners should be encouraged to make better use of their property and give agriculturists, either as sharefarmers or as small purchasers, room to settle and bring up families. The immediate results were encouraging; between 1910 and 1914 the area under crop increased by nearly 50 per cent. Since then, in spite of a sudden war-stimulus that in 1915-16 gave the Commonwealth

its highest recorded area under crop, the real increase has been very slow, and to provide farms for the newcomers whom the country so badly needs the States have been compelled to re-purchase (up to June 30, 1925) nearly seven million acres at a cost of over 25,000,000l. in order to create 20,000 new farms. Land so acquired cannot be given away; and settlers established at such a cost will be looked at twice before asking for more.

The problem of making available for newcomers the undoubtedly large area of cultivable land in the Commonwealth is thus less simple than the man in the street believes. Nor is it rendered any easier of solution by attempts to instruct the migrant agriculturist in English methods of farming before he leaves these shores. The experience of the last twenty years has shown that the most effective form of immigration concerns itself with boys of 14 to 18 or thereabouts, who are taken out under a Dreadnought' or 'Big Brother' (or, in South Australia, a Farm Apprenticeship) scheme, and are trained to local conditions either on Government farms or under strict apprenticeship rules with much supervision. The Fairbridge and Barnardo schemes are of this kind, but take out children as a rule too young to start training. Assisted migration of families and of single adults involves obvious disadvantages, arising from the novel situations in which newcomers with more or less fixed habits and prejudices must inevitably find themselves; but friendly and careful supervision minimises the disadvantages, and the redistribution of our surplus population within the Empire (and over an area already predominantly British) is in itself a countervailing advantage.

While the Commonwealth, as has just been said, is unable to foster settlement by providing land for immigrants, it has of late years discovered its real métier in this regard. It can investigate the conditions of successful settlement-which have no specific relation to State boundaries-with greater skill and efficiency than would be possible to any single State. It can discuss, recommend, and aid with grants of money, improvements both in the methods of bringing apparently inhospitable areas under profitable cultivation and in the amelioration of the inland settler's usually dull and

lonely existence. Acting on these lines recent Federal ministries have liberally subsidised and supervised aviation (a specially suitable remedy for the evils of isolated settlement in the more sparsely populated States) as well as a huge water-conservation scheme that will both establish continuous navigation along the Murray for a thousand miles of its course, and also provide irrigation for several million acres in the three States through which it flows.

On a larger scale they have developed an 'Advisory Council of Science and Industry,' created during the war, into a Commonwealth Council for Scientific and Industrial Research which, with the help of committees set up in each State, is at present investigating : (a) animal pests and diseases; (b) plant pests and diseases; (c) fuel supply, especially with respect to liquid fuel; (d) forest products; (e) the preservation of food-stuffs and the bettering of cold-storage methods—a sufficiently inclusive programme. This Council also acts as a clearing-house for research work carried on at the State universities, and as a liaison between the State agricultural departments.

A still more important Federal institution of recent creation is the Development and Migration Commission, based on the axiom that improvements in developmental methods such as the Commission is designed to suggest, will increase each State's capacity for accepting immigrants. This body not only co-ordinates State efforts after the pattern of the Research Council, but advises the Federal Government as to the expenditure of Commonwealth funds on specific developments in the various States, which are bound to find room for immigrants in proportion to the amount spent within their limits. Among the works already put in hand under this Commission are the drainage of over-moist but rich lands in Western Australia, the supply of water to dry farming areas in that State and in South Australia, a good deal of light railway construction for the benefit of new settlement areas, and the utilisation-either by afforestation or by irrigation-of hitherto neglected districts of Victoria. Schemes for reviving gold-mining, encouraging the dried-fruit industry, and developing the deep-sea fisheries, are also under close investigation.

Enough has probably been now said to destroy in the reader's mind the picture of Australia as a hugely magnified but deplorably empty Essex, needing only the advice of well-meaning visitors to blossom as the rose and become the home of countless millions. For that we must substitute a rough sketch of a continent unique in conformation and conditions (climatic and other), whose resources need careful study for their full development and use. By picking out the plums, settlers and miners of earlier years enriched themselves at the expense of the community as a whole, and created a false impression of wealth attainable without effort. That impression once erased, Australia will be given her rightful place in the complicated structure of the Empire.

When from the problems that depend mainly on Australia's physical conditions and their handling we turn to problems involving her politics, we find the same lack of coherent knowledge and of careful study made by those who provide the public with information about the Dominions. The British publicist is wont to see the Commonwealth by flashes of lightning. Nearly all the information he can accumulate about it in his spare time comes from the cabled messages of the daily press -occasionally verbose and sensational, usually meagre and disconnected by long intervals. During the first decade of the century, when The Times' and 'The Morning Post' made room almost weekly for long letters from their Australian correspondents, it was possible to construct a fairly clear picture of the political world overseas, to understand the great surge of public opinion there towards the principles for which Australian Labour then stood, and to foresee the reactions that might result from such outside influences as the naval crisis of 1908-9 and the outbreak of war in 1914. Since the war, however, no similar means of enlightenment has been vouchsafed to us by the British press. Well into December last, for instance, it was impossible to ascertain from any cabled messages what was the actual cause of an important strike' which had begun on Nov. 21. Wharf-labourers in Melbourne had certainly refused to work overtime; that did not constitute a strike, since awards do not compel a man to work overtime. Putting two and two together, one may guess

that the refusal to work overtime was by way of protest against a recent award of some arbitration court; and that the associated shipping firms, noting the imminent inrush of Christmas goods and reckoning that any enforced delay in their unloading would deprive the wharf-labourers of public sympathy, decided to use the refusal as excuse for a lock-out. What is certain is that the disturbance was a lock-out, not a strike. On special occasions it has deigned to publish valuable letters dealing with particular events or movements; but nothing has been done to collate the knowledge thus gained or to explain how, for instance, an Imperially-minded Australian can also be a convinced protectionist, or why a Labour Ministry should be the safest instrument for quelling dangerous strikes. It may be worth while, therefore, to suggest here a few explanations, and to consider the ideals and motives which urge Australians now and then into action unexpected by, and sometimes embarrassing to, the Briton of the home islands.

The ideal of prime importance-which has been rightly characterised as rather a religion than a political principle-is of course that of 'White Australia.' This has been frequently discussed of late, and affects the external rather than the internal workings of Commonwealth politics, so that we need not linger over it. It will suffice to repeat the warning that White Australia is concerned neither with the colour of an immigrant's skin nor with the dread of cheap labour, but

'is firmly based on the fact that under adult suffrage every permanent resident in the Commonwealth has a voice in public affairs, and the resolve that no one whose traditions and ideals differ substantially from Australian traditions and ideals (i.e. those of Western Europe) shall be given a chance of influencing those affairs.' ('History of Australia,' p. 207.)

Probably the central fact of Australian life, the root of all those branching phenomena that differentiate its social and political existence from that of older countries, is the well-grounded belief of every able-bodied Australian that some day he may be a landowner and employer of labour. He does not look forward, as working-men in the United States are exhorted to look forward, to being a millionaire or even a rich squatter or manufacturer ;