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