States during the first seventy years of the Constitution suggests that the question of the respective rights of the Federation and of the States may furnish a prominent and persistent issue. This is quite possible, for in Federations there is a tendency for many controversies of various kinds to connect themselves with, or to raise afresh, controversies regarding the true construction of the Federal instrument as respects the powers which it assigns to the Nation and to the component communities.

(5) It is however questions of the economic order that are likely to occupy, more than any others, the minds and energies of Australian statesmen. The tariff is a practically inexhaustible topic, because apart from the general issue between a Protective and Free Trade policy, the particular imports to be taxed and the particular duties to be imposed will furnish matter for debates that can hardly have finality, seeing that circumstances change, and that the financial needs of the Government will increase. It need hardly be said that in a new country like Australia direct taxation is difficult to collect and highly unpopular, so that larger recourse will be had to customs and excise than orthodox economists could justify in Europe. The financial relations between the Commonwealth and the States will be another fertile source of controversy. So may the regulation of the railways, which the Commonwealth seems likely to take over. So will the arrangements for securing the respective rights of different States as regards both irrigation and the navigation of the rivers, practically the only rivers of the Continent, which intersect the three south-eastern colonies.

Among the labour questions likely to arise, one problem, much before the minds of Australians, may be found to cause difficulties in its details if not in its general principle, viz. the exclusion of immigrants of coloured race, Chinese, Japanese, Malays, and Indian coolies. The white labourers of the temperate colonies have been strongly opposed to the admission of such strangers, but the planters of the tropical north, who have used the labour of Pacific islanders on their sugar estates, take a different view of the case.

Some may think that the obvious line of party division will be found to be that which ranges the four smaller and the two larger States into opposite camps. If this should happen, which may well be doubted, it will be owing to a coincidence of economic interests, and not to the mere fact that the strength of one set of States lies in the House, that of the other in the Senate. The two largest States, New South Wales and Victoria, have hitherto been conspicuously divergent in their financial policy. In America, though the small States fought hard against the large ones in the Convention of 1787, the distinction has never since that date possessed any permanent political significance.

If parties form themselves on any geographical lines, the line will more probably be one between the tropical and the temperate regions. These tropical regions are at present much less populous and wealthy than is the temperate south-east corner of the Continent. They will doubtless increase both in wealth and in population, but as the strong sun forbids out-door labour to white men, the population enjoying political rights cannot, for generations to come, be a large one.

XXIV. POSSIBLE ENTRANCE OF NEW STates.

The existing situation may be so materially affected by the entrance of new States that one naturally asks what are the prospects that new States will be admitted. As the whole Continent is already divided among the five existing States, new ones can come into being only by carving up the three larger of these. There has already been talk of dividing Queensland into two or perhaps three States. Others might be formed out of the now sparsely peopled regions of the north and north-west, when they have become more thickly inhabited. How fast the process of colonization will advance in these regions will depend upon what engineering science may be found able to do for the more arid tracts in the way of storing rain-water and raising it from deep wells, while something will depend on the disposition of the Federal Government to spend money for that purpose. Nor is another element to be overlooked. Vast as is the mineral wealth already known to exist in the explored parts of Australia, it may be equalled by that which exists in regions which have received no thorough geological examination. Should mines begin to be worked in the arid tracts, an additional motive would be given for the provision of water supplies there, for the existence of a population furnishing markets would stimulate men to develop the capacities of the soil for ranching and even for tillage. These possibilities show how many factors hitherto undetermined may go to moulding the political future of the country. The increase of population in regions now

thinly peopled would either make the four smaller States, or some of them, the equals of the larger, or would, more probably, lead to the creation of new States, some of them with a character different from that of the two which now command a decisive majority in the House of Representatives. As the settlement of the Mississippi Valley changed American politics, so a filling up of large parts of the interior and north of Australia, unlikely as this now appears, might affect her constitutional growth in ways at which we can now only guess.

At present not only these tropical regions, but also the settled parts of Western Australia are separated by vast uninhabited spaces from the populous south-east corner of the continent. Hence just as in Canada an Intercolonial Railway to connect Nova Scotia and New Brunswick with Quebec and Ontario was provided for in the Constitution of 1867, and just as the construction of the great transcontinental Canadian Pacific line enabled Manitoba and British Columbia to become effective members of the Federation, so a line of railway from east to west across Australia, as well as the completion of the line, already partly constructed, from the south to the north, are among the political needs of the Commonwealth, and might do much to weld its people into an even more united nation.

One community remains to be mentioned whose geographical position towards Australia recalls the saying of Grattan that while the Ocean forbade Ireland to be politically severed from Britain, the Sea forbade an incorporating union. It has been hoped that New Zealand would enter the Federation, and she has herself

seriously considered whether she ought to do so. With a healthy climate, a soil generally well watered, and an area not much less than that of the British Isles, New Zealand has evidently a great future before her. The population, now between 700,000 and 800,000, has tripled within the last thirty years; and the level of personal comfort and well-being is as high as anywhere in the world. Her accession would give further strength to the Federal Commonwealth. But New Zealand, as one of her statesmen observed, has twelve hundred reasons against union with Australia, for she is separated from the nearest part of Australia by twelve hundred miles of stormy sea, a distance more than half of that which divides Ireland from Newfoundland. She may therefore think that some sort of permanent league with Australia, for the purposes of combined naval defence and joint action in external questions of common concern, would conform better to her outlying position than would participation in a Legislature which must be mainly occupied with the affairs of Australia. Of the subjects assigned by the Constitution to the Commonwealth Parliament, there are several in which, because purely Australian, New Zealand would have no interest, some also with regard to which she could legislate better for herself than the Commonwealth could legislate for her, inasmuch as her economic and social conditions are not the same as those of Australia. An illustration is furnished by the difference between the native races in the two countries. The Australian aborigines, one of the most backward branches of the human family, are obviously unfit for the exercise of any political functions. They are not permitted to vote