A correspondent who knows more than a little about cotton and cotton-growing sends some rather discouraging comment on our recent note on Queensland's possibilities in that way. "I was down in Queensland a few years ago," he writes, "and amused by looking into the question. Cotton can be and has been grown there, in fact the potential cotton belt of the world, i.e. between 40° N and 30° South of the Equator, includes about three-quarters of Australia. It is also quite true that there is plenty of water available below the surface. But labour conditions, i.e. high wages and short hours, make cultivation on a profitable basis impossible. The Australians will never allow cheap labour into the country they maintain an extremely' high level. of wages—I daresay at a guess that no labourer in Australia would be permitted to work more than eight hours a day for goodness knows how many shillings per hour. That fact makes cotton-growing there impossible from the first moment of tearing up the ground to the final picking and baling. Competition with all the big coloured-labour cotton-growing countries—U. S. Southern States. Egypt, India, China, Africa and Asia Minor, under those conditions would be absolutely impossible." Non-Australians have frequently urged that what Australia really, needs is free Chinese immigration, after the example of the Straits Seitlements. But one must, confess one hardly expects even this new Common-wealth Government, with Labour for the first time in 20 years in complete minority, to allow it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.