PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F. 595 



•countries, according to the exceptionally favorable conditions which 

 happen to fall to their lot respectively. The paramount consideration 

 in deciding whether there should be a free exchange of indigenous 

 products between nation and nation ought not to be the securing of 

 large profits to local producers, and high wages to their work-people. 

 The claims of the two classes last named are, of course, by no means 

 to be ignored. But the interests of consumers, who constitute an 

 overwhelming majority, should be the supreme " objective," and the 

 question as to what branches of trade should engage the chief attention 

 of capitalists and work-people in any country — at least in the first 

 instance — should he determined by the natural advantages possessed by 

 the particular countries in which they live. 



When England left protective duties behind, she based her en- 

 lightened fiscal policy, adopted in 1846, on the broad foundation of 

 her extensive coal and iron mines, and her abundance of available 

 skilled labor in these manufactures. To these, combined with the 

 great shipping facilities afforded by her insular position in the temperate 

 zone for the establishment of numerous convenient ports for export 

 and import trade with all parts of the world, she owes the supreme 

 position she has attained in manufactures, mercantile shipping, and 

 free interchange of products with those of other nations. The vast 

 export trade she carries on with her scattered dependencies and foreign 

 countries enables her to purchase and import goods from them in 

 return under advantageous conditions in the interest, primarily, of 

 consumers, while furnishing ample and remunerative occupations to 

 all classes of her population. No nation in the last 60 years has more 

 rigidly adhered to the cardinal principle I have laid down — that the 

 profitable, economic, and financial development of a country's resources 

 mainly rests on the fixed economic principle that supreme care should 

 be bestowed on industries whose success is specially guaranteed by 

 suitability of indigenous products, soil, and climate. Systematic 

 efforts should be chiefly directed to the production of commodities 

 which can find large markets at a convenient distance, and which can 

 readily undersell competing countries. 



The climatic position of Australia is that of 2,946,691 square miles, 

 which it comprises, 2,203,265 square miles are within 30° south of 

 the equator. This leaves only about one-fourth of the entire area 

 outside the heat-belt. In illustration of the magnitude of the com- 

 bined trade of the United States and the United Kingdom with tropical 

 countries proper, which are within 23i° of the equator, it is estimated 

 that 44 per cent, of their total collective trade is done with regions 

 Avithin that zone. 



As regards the comparatively undeveloped natural resources of 

 three-fourths of Australia within the heat-belt, the area over which 

 these resources mainly extend, virtually remains, up to the present, 

 " a waste howling wilderness." Excluding, for the moment, the in- 

 calculable latent wealth of Queensland and Western Australia, both 

 of which possess varied tropical and sub-tropical resources — capable 

 of supporting a population of hundreds of millions— let us take for 



