130 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES, 
a climate in which British children thrive and develop true to type. 
In the great basin of the Murray River and its confluents, not far 
from the huge superficial deposit of brown coal in South Victoria, 
is a combination of fertile soil, forcing sun, water for irrigation and 
cheap electric power transmitted from the coal-field. This favoured 
region, the ‘ Heart of Australia,’ as it has been called, with a population 
of “only three million, is equal in size to France, Italy, and Germany 
combined, which have a population of more than one hundred and thirty 
million. The problem of Australian settlement is, however, complicated 
by the circumstance that the northern coast- lands lie in the Tropics, 
and have a climate which makes field work very arduous to white men. 
It is, moreover, uncertain if British families would continue true to 
ancestral type in this climate. If, however, settiers from the neighbour- 
ing monsoon lands of Asia be admitted, whose descendants would rapidly 
increase, it would be impossible to maintain a colour line between 
Tropical and Temperate Australia, and the rough labour of the Common- 
wealth would in time be done by coloured people. The fact that this 
labour is cheap would result in the employment of a great number of 
coolies instead of the use of machinery, and Australia might become a 
land of coloured workmen and white overseers. Circumstances, there- 
fore, forced the Australians to decide whether their tropical belt should 
be a Link or a Barrier between white and coloured labour. The decision 
to erect a Barrier was taken early, and has been consistently maintained. 
The strategic responsibility of the decision is seen to be very great When 
we look into the future and reflect on the facts of population. 
Of the 1,650 million people in the world, the whites number about 
500 and the coloured 1,150. The former are mainly grouped on the two 
sides of the North Atlantic Ocean; of the latter, the greater part, about 
800 million, are in the monsoon region of Asia, which includes India, 
Indo-China, China proper, and Japan. The Australian British are far 
from the main body of the white race and from Great Britain, the chief 
recruiting base of their own nation. On the other hand, the distance 
by sea between Townsville, Queensland, and the Japanese coast is no 
longer than the course of the coasting steamers from Fremantle to 
Townsville; and the other lands of Monsoon Asia are even nearer than 
Japan. 
Enough is known of the relation between geographical environment 
and national well-being to declare with confidence that the decision to 
erect a Barrier against ‘coloured labour in Tropical Australia is best both 
for the white race in Australia and for the coloured people of the 
monsoon region of Asia. Not only is Government much more difficult 
with a two-colour population, but the admission of coolie labour would 
deteriorate the national character of the Australians, for history shows 
that the greatest nations are those which provide their own working 
class. Turning from the Occidental] to the broader humanitarian view, 
it is only necessary to look ahead in order to see that the admission of 
Asiatic coolies to a British homeland is unkind to their descendants. 
Those that remain unmixed in race will have a stunted existence as a 
community cut off from full national life, whilst the case of mulatto 
descendants is almost worse, for the children are not brought up in the 
