chief town of the settlement. Behind it lies an
unlimited grazing country, and on the riverbanks
are some millions of acres fit not only, for
growing grain, but also sugar, cotton, and
tobacco. Coal, iron, copper, and gold have been
found. Pine and cedar are among the timber.
There is pearl in the bay; there are turtles;
and there is the dugong fishery. But, thanks to
a warm subtropical climate, with fine growing
showers throughout the year, the soil is said to
be a paradise for agriculture, producing not only
European green-peas and potatoes, but peaches,
oranges, grapes, pines, and guavas. Three crops
of maize, eighty or a hundred bushels to the
acre, have been got from the same ground within
a twelvemonth. The Maryborough people have
been establishing among themselves a Cotton-
growing Association. Mr. Bazley, of Manchester,
a good practical authority, has found samples of
this Queensland cotton to be very fine, and worth
about forty pounds an acre, the yield being six
hundred pounds an acre from two crops a year,
"Judging," he says, "by what is done in the
United States, a man with his family in Queensland
could cultivate ten acres of land, which
would yield four hundred pounds a year, a very
high rate of profit."

Further north is Port Curtis, just under the
tropic of Capricorn. The harbour formed by
Facing Island is completely land-locked, and
could be entered by the Great Eastern at any
time of tide. It is said to be one of the most
magnificent ports in the South Seas, and the
worthy site of a great city of the future. Its
city of the present is the town of Gladstone,
which, together with Happy Valley, a mile
inland, at present contains only about five hundred
inhabitants. It was Mr. Gladstone, our present
Chancellor of the Exchequer, by whom this
settlement was first projected, and to whose name
it will be a few centuries hence a substantial
monument in the form of one of the first cities
of the South. The ground is more broken, though
not less fertile than at Wide Bay. There are
floods and droughts, with a climate less even
and reliable. Gold has been found a hundred
miles from Gladstone, in quantity enough to
breed an evanescent mania, but it is possible that
the mineral wealth of the district will hereafter
be found to aid in its advance.

Rockhampton, in the Fitzroy River, lies under
the line of the tropic. It contains nearly a
thousand inhabitants, most of them in wooden
buildings, some in tents. Inland there are vast
plains, forming an immense sheep-walk. But for
raising here of sugar, rice, or cotton, Dr. Lang—
who is the best historiographer of the whole
region once known as New South Wales— thinks
that the continuous field labour under a tropical
sun could best be carried on by help of Asiatic
labour. For the raising, however, of Sea Island
cotton here and elsewhere in Queensland (and
that is the best sort raised in the cotton states
of America), the labour of Europeans might
suffice, the greater difficulty being with the
production of inferior sorts. It is the Sea Island
cotton, that thrives best in Queensland.

Of the whole colony of Queensland it is found
that even to two hundred miles within the
tropics, and probably to the northernmost point,
sheep thrive, and suffer no deterioration of the
wool. The Queensland yield of wool is
considerably below that of Victoria, being two
pounds and a quarter instead of three pounds,
to a fleece, but this is nearly compensated for
by the superiority of quality. The free supply
of rain causes not only abundance but variety of
natural growth. Dr. Leichhardt found, along
only thirty paces of a cattle track near Ipswich,
seventeen different species of grass in seed at
the same time, not reckoning any grasses that
were past their seed-time, or not yet arrived at
it. The general allowance of grazing ground to
each sheep in New South Wales is over three
acres; three sheep to ten acres. But, when
Moreton Bay was a penal settlement, the officer
in charge of government stock kept six thousand
sheep in good condition for a year and a half
upon only five thousand acres of land— less than
an acre apiece. The Queensland squatters have
acquired much wealth. When it was proposed
in the first parliament of Queensland that the
governor's salary, which the British Secretary
of State had fixed at two thousand five
hundred a year, should be raised to four thousand,
the honourable member who proposed the addition
said that two thousand five hundred a year
was only equal to the income of a second-rate
squatter with twenty or twenty-five thousand
sheep.

The land regulations of Queensland were
modified by four acts passed during the last
session. One of these was to destroy the business
of men called "run jobbers," who hunted up
good possible runs, marked them, and tendered
for as many of them as they could get, for the
sake, not of stocking them, but of selling their
rights at an advance of price. It is now required
that all runs shall be occupied and stocked to
the extent of a fourth of their capability within
twelve months from the date of lease, on penalty
of double rent, and, after another six months'
delay, of forfeiture. Other new acts encourage
with special advantages the pioneer squatter,
whose rent for the first four years is not to
exceed ten shillings a square mile, in blocks of
twenty-five miles; for the next five years to be
not less than a pound or more than two pounds;
and in the last live years of the fourteen years'
lease, not to exceed two pounds fifteen. But it
is the new Land Sales Act that concerns the
greater number of the emigrants. By this act,
"Agricultural reserves are to be proclaimed and
set apart for cultivation in each of the chief
settlements, and an agricultural area of not less
than ten thousand acres around every town
containing more than five hundred inhabitants."
The settler, then, having chosen his farm of not
less than forty nor more than three hundred and
twenty acres, pays the land agent at the rate of
a pound an acre, on conditions of occupation and
improving cultivation. If he do not begin to
fulfil these conditions within six months, the
contract is cancelled and his money is returned