724 
PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION G. 
against State ownership -of railways is that the interest charges upon 
their cost must be met either from the earnings of the road or by a 
tax upon the entire community. Whatever may be the value of the 
services of the roads, the semi-annual dividends must be forth- 
coming. There are no shareholders, as in the case of privately owned 
railways, to whose convenient shoulders the burden of loss, due to 
excessive competition, bad management, or extravagant first cost, may 
be shifted. This fact, to my mind, explains in good part the persis- 
tence of the depression which has so long overshadowed Australasia, 
In every civilised country railways are the key to the industrial 
situation, for, beyond their own intrinsic importance, the value of every 
species of property depends upon them. 
Our methods of cultivation, and the subsequent handling of crops, 
burden the producer in the race for market position. Illustrations of 
this may be found in every department of colonial agriculture, sugar- 
growing alone excepted. I can here only instance a common colonial 
method of handling the maize crop. The ground is first ploughed and 
harrowed in the usual way ; then it is marked off, oue row at a time, 
by the plough again. The land is then ready to receive the seed. 
This is applied by hand, the planter dribbling the seed maize along 
the row at a slow walk. The result of this inaccurate seeding is 
usually an imperfect stand of the young crop. The plants may be 
too thin on the ground, in which case replanting is resorted to ; or the 
stand may be too thick, necessitating the removal, by band, of the 
superfluous plants. Then the lateral shoots growing from each 
maize plant are removed — a wholly unnecessary task — and the 
usual cultivation of the growing crop follows. Until quite 
recently the practice has been to mound the earth about each 
plant with a hoe (hilling), but this practice our farmers 
happily have outgrown. In due course, after the maturity of 
the crop, the ears with containing husk are broken from the parent 
stalk and hauled to a convenient shed, where they are at a later period 
husked. Then follow shelling and cleaning, often with a small hand 
machine, having a capacity for 15 bushels of grain per hour, which 
done, the grain is bagged for delivery at the nearest railway station. 
This last operation brings to a conclusion the work of the farmer in 
connection with this crop of maize. It is not too much to say that a 
large part of this work has been unnecessary and wasteful, having 
advantaged neither the crop of maize to which it was applied, nor the 
condition of the soil in respect to succeeding crops. To go into details 
with this criticism, the method of marking off the laud, of planting, 
of cultivating and harvesting the crop are unnecessarily wasteful in 
labour and inefficient ; the suckering and hilling, when done, are 
wholly superfluous, while the necessity for expensive bagging would 
not exist with proper market and transportation facilities. All this 
will be seen in a glance at the process by which our competitors, the 
Americans, grow this same maize crop. In the States two general 
plans are followed with the corn crop ; the land is ploughed as usual, 
as a preliminary to planting, or the crop is “ listed.” The lister, I 
may add, is a plough with double mould-board, and is ordinarily 
equipped with planter and covering apparatus. It makes a furrow 
for each row of maize. Under the listing system a man and team of 
three horses plough, mark the ground, plant and cover the seed at one 
