Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899: Volume LIV, No. 3, January 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1899: Volume LIV, No. 3, January 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
More inland marshes, like the Piako Swamp in New Zealand, have been so
completely drained as to make the soil too dry to carry wheat, and so
have swamped both capitalists and banker. Where the squatter owner
keeps the land in his own hands, he may lease an unbroken-up tract for
three or five years to a farmer who plows and fences it, takes off
crops, pays a light rent of from five to fifteen bushels per acre, and
leaves it in grass. On one tenure or another the whole colony
gradually comes into cultivation.
The predominance of the agricultural interest is long threatened and
at length shaken by the rise of the industrial stage. It is partly
evolved from the pastoral and agricultural stages and partly
independent. Nor do these stages at once and necessarily give rise to
collective industry. In all young colonies where the population is
scanty and processes are simple there are no division and no
association of labor. The account that one of the best of American
historians gives of the Northwest Territory might be accepted as a
description of this primitive state, and realizes Fichte's ideal of a
_geschlossener Handelstaat_ (closed trade state). Shut in by
mountains, the people raised their own flax and sometimes grew their
own wool, which they spun and wove at home. They made their own
spinning wheels and looms, as they made their own furniture. They
tanned their own leather and cobbled rude shoes of it. Of Indian-corn
husks they spun ropes and manufactured horse collars and chair
bottoms. Barrels and beehives were formed of sawn hollow trees. They
extracted sugar from the maple and tea from the sassafras root. Their
boats were dug-out canoes. In colonies of later foundation this
self-sufficing stage, which repeats an earlier period in the mother
country than the time when the colony was given off, is dropped,
though there are traces of it everywhere to be found. Sheep countries
give birth to the woolen industry. New Zealand reduplicates the woolen
manufactures of England and, owing to protective duties, has attained
a deserved success. New South Wales, with finer wools, has not
succeeded, for no other apparent reason than that she refuses to
impose such duties. For it is to be observed that it is under
legislative protection--bounties, bonuses, drawbacks, export and
especially import duties--that almost every colonial industry has
grown up, as the industries of the mother country grew up. Sometimes
the profit in a particular undertaking is exactly equal to the amount
of the import duty, and it is seldom greater. By taking extravagant
advantage of the liberty long refused (as leave to manufacture was
long refused to the North American colonies), but at length conceded,
to impose import duties, an Australasian colony, misled as much by its
own splendid energy as by evil counselors (Carlyle among them), built
up a whole artificial system of industries which sank in ruinous
collapse when the boom had passed. Independent industries spring first
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