284 CONCLUSION 



British Guiana, and India are capable of supplying all our 

 needs as far as cane sugar is concerned ; and with regard to 

 beetroot, we can grow a good deal at home, while Canada can 

 produce both beet- and maple-sugar. 



Of fibres, we are poor at present in cotton, flax, and silk. 

 Of cotton, omitting the Indian crop, which is at present not 

 suitable for fine spinning, the empire produces only about 

 39 per cent, of the requirements of the United Kingdom, but 

 great efforts are being made to increase the production in 

 British countries (especially by the British Cotton Growing 

 Association), and besides such well-known sources of supply 

 as Egypt, and India, and in a less degree West Africa, the 

 Sudan, West Indies, Nyasaland, Uganda, and Kenya Colony, 

 great hopes are entertained that a satisfactory picker may 

 be invented, so that Queensland may enter the lists as 

 a cotton-producer on a large scale. 



Cotton growing is making good progress in the Tana 

 River Valley, which is very suitable for its extensive develop- 

 ment. The rich alluvial lands adjoining the Juba River are 

 also splendidly adapted for cotton growing, and a Government 

 experimental cotton farm has been started there.' 



Flax and silk, too, though not at present produced in suffi- 

 cient quantities to make us independent of foreign supplies, 

 yet show signs of improvement and afford hopes of increasing 

 British supplies in the future. 



There remains the third class of commodities, namely, those 

 which we do not produce within the empire. The most 

 important of these are quicksilver, platinum, borax, and 

 potash. 



In connexion with this question of production we must 

 remember that the empire comprises an area of 13,153,712 

 square miles, and that it contains within it every kind of soil 

 and extends through every zone of climate, and that in 

 consequence there is scarcely a commodity which it is not 

 capable of producing in great abundance. It behoves us, 

 therefore, in the case of those commodities in which at present 



