The subject of Australian Federation has been discussed at length in a preceding chapter. I need only point out that politicians are bound to recognise three lines of severance: the artificial boundaries between one Province and another, the diversity of opinions engendered by differences of climate, as exemplified principally in the attitude in regard to Polynesian labour, and the divergence of development between the denizens of towns and {300} the more settled areas and those who are struggling against the inclemencies of nature in the back country. I felt, and others have chronicled a similar impression, that I had entered into a different country when I travelled in the Western Downs of Queensland. I found myself, if I may generalise from a limited experience of shearers, among a class of men who are thoroughly honest but absolutely narrow-minded and interested only in matters which concern their means of livelihood. They form their opinions from an advanced organ of labour, which is their principal, if not only, literature, and even such of them as are emigrants from Great Britain have little knowledge of the leading events of recent years. The urban population, of course, is in a different position, and is kept by the newspapers in touch with local and Imperial affairs. Apart from the causes of the aggregation of large centres which have been discussed in the opening pages of this chapter, and may be supplemented by the observations of Sir Charles Dilke,[12] it may be noted, as a subsidiary influence, that a high standard of comfort makes people unwilling to face the hardship of the bush, that squatters are inclined to place their sons in urban professions, and that education turns out clerks rather than manual labourers. But the dwellers in towns are, on the whole, comfortably situated; even Melbourne and Sydney do not {301} show an average of more than 2.73 and 4.87 persons to the acre; but these figures include the suburbs, and must be amended if the metropolis proper is solely regarded.