Identifier: greaterbritainre01dilk (find matches)
Title: Greater Britain: a record of travel in English-speaking countries during 1866 and 1867
Year: 1869 (1860s)
Authors: Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir, 1843-1911
Subjects: Voyages around the world
Publisher: New York, Harper & Brothers
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress

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former value,and the colony—a wheat-growing country—is now import-ing wheat and flour to the value of half a million sterlingevery year. The depressed condition of affairs is the result partly ofcommercial panics following a period of inflation, partly ofbad seasons, now bringing floods, now drought and rust, andpartly of the discouragement of immigration by the colonialdemocrats—a policy which however beneficial to Australiait may in the long run prove, is for the moment ruinous tothe sheep-farmers and to the merchants in the towns. Onthe other hand, the laborers for their part assert that the ar-rivals of strangers—at all events, of skilled artisans—are Stillexcessive, and that all the ills of the colony are due to over-immigration and free trade. • To a stranger, the rush of population and outpour of cap-ital from Sydney, first toward Victoria, but now to Queens-land and New Zealand, appear to be the chief among thecauses of the momentary decline of New South Wales, Of
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290 Greater Britain. immigrants there is at once an insufficient and an overgreatsupply. Respectable servant-girls, carpenters, masons, black-smiths, plasterers, and the like, do well in the colonies, andare always wanted ; of clerks, governesses, iron-workers, andthe skilled hands of manufacturers there is almost an over-supply. By a perverse fate, these latter are the immigrantsof whom thousands seek the colonies every year, in spite ofthe daily publication in England of dissuading letters. As the rivalry of the neighbor-colonies lessens in the lapseof time, the jealousy that exists between them will doubtlessdie away; but it seems as though it will be replaced by a po-litical divergence and consequent aversion, which will forma fruitful source of danger to the Australian confederation. In Queensland the great tenants of Crown lands—squat-ters as they are called—sheep-farmers holding vast tractsof inland country, are in possession of the Government, andadminister the laws to the

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