WOOL INDUSTRY. 189 



Estancia after estancia, district after district, has passed into the 

 hands of the sheep farmer. The value of sheep has increased ten 

 fold within twenty years, and of land in the same ratio. The 

 shepherds, from the poorest classes of English and Irish immi- 

 grants, have become wealthy proprietors, and the republic, through 

 her sheep mainly, has become the most prosperous of the states 

 of South America. 



Australia. But Australia presents the most striking example 

 of the influences of sheep husbandry upon civilization. In 1803, 

 Captain McArthur brought a few merinos, from the choice flock of 

 George III, to New South Wales. In 1810, the export of wool 

 was 167 pounds. In 1875, the export of wool from New South 

 Wales was 216,000 bales, of the value in the London market of 

 between five and a half and six million pounds sterling. The 

 number of sheep in the seven colonies of Australia, in 1874, was 

 61,684,127. The exhibits of wool from Australia, at the Exposi- 

 tion at Philadelphia, were the finest ever before made. Hardly less 

 conspicuous than the wool exhibits were the evidences of wealth 

 and progress in all the arts, the variety of products of the mine and 

 the soil, and the illustrations of social and educational improve- 

 ment, which made the exhibit from these distant colonies among 

 the most attractive in the exhibition. The chief instrument of this 

 civilization was the sheep. In the words of one of her commission- 

 ers, " Although Australia may freely boast of the unequalled rich- 

 ness and variety of her mineral productions, of the large returns 

 and great fortunes amassed from her gold fields, yet nothing 

 approaches the wool industry in importance." The close of this 

 century will doubtless see these separate and dependent colonies 

 incorporated into an independent republic, and the extraordinary 

 fact will be shown of an empire founded by the humble sheep ! 



Kelations to Settlement in the United States, It is only within 

 the last ten years that the system of pastoral wool husbandry, 

 as an independent industry, — after the methods of Australia, the 

 Argentine Republic, and Russia, — has been undertaken in this 

 country. The attempts in Texas were arrested by the war of the 

 rebellion. The tariff of 1867, by excluding the over-production 

 of the Southern Hemisphere, firmly established the pastoral sheep 

 husbandry upon the Pacific coast. This year, from the returns 

 which we have, California will produce fifty-one million pounds of 

 wool ; while, in 1860, the whole country produced, according to the 



