AUSTRALIA AND THE FOOD PROBLEM 127 



districts of the north to the centres of population in 

 the south. In 1913 three of these steamers were 

 owned by the government of West Austraha. The 

 Honorable John Scadden, prime minister, in an in- 

 terview in the Ltbor Leader on February 20, 1913, 

 called these steamers an important step in the con- 

 trol of the food supply. "Previously," says Mr. 

 Scadden, "the traffic was in the hands of a com- 

 bine, but by our intervention and the starting of 

 state butchers' and grocers' shops we have effect- 

 ively broken the back of the food and meat tmst 

 and have already reduced the price of meat from 

 one shilling (24 cents) to 5 pence (10 cents) per 

 pound, and soon we shall have complete control of 

 the coastal shipping service. This is only the con- 

 sistent corollary of the state ownership of the rail- 

 ways."* 



After the drought of 1914 the state of Victoria 

 chartered ships on which 50,000 tons of hay were 

 transported from South America for the draft an- 

 imals to be used in the next season's ploughing. 

 This action on the part of the state was an im- 

 portant factor in producing the unusually large crop 

 that followed the drought. The state spent $3,- 

 000,000 in these transactions.^ 



* The CoUectivist State in the Making, Emil Davies, p. 33. 



* Elwood Mead, Metropolitan Magazine, January, 1917. 



