After leaving the Government dockyard, the Prince was taken over works of private enterprise of even larger significance, the steel-furnaces, rolling-mills and rod-mills of the Broken Hill Proprietary Company, which are also located in Newcastle. Here he was conducted by Mr. Delprat, general manager, and Mr. Baker, local manager, and saw the whole of the processes, from the emptying of three open-hearth blast furnaces, to the conversion of glowing molten steel into 72-lb. railway rails, of which these works claim to have manufactured, last year, some hundred and sixty thousand tons. The capacity of the works is very much larger even than this amount, two separate strikes having reduced out-turn in this period. The price paid for these rails by the various state railways in Australia, which now depend almost entirely upon this source of supply, was thirteen pounds per ton. I learnt also that the average pay of the labour employed in the works was about one pound sterling daily per man. The profit upon the £4,000,000 capital of the concern is such that its one-pound shares were quoted in the Sydney Stock Exchange the day the Prince went over the works at sixty-four shillings apiece. After seeing the steel-works, the Prince was conducted by Mr. MacDougall over a neighbouring wire and nail factory, which claims to be now filling the entire demand of Australia for plain-wire fencing. The firm was preparing to set up additional machinery upon a large scale to make barbed wire which Australia has hitherto bought in Europe. The significance of this development is considerable, since barbed wire forms the top, as smooth wire does the lower strands, of fences of which hundreds of thousands of miles are already in existence in Australia, and millions of miles more have still to be built. After leaving the wire-works, the Prince drove in procession, through decorated, crowded, cheering streets, to a sheltered park overlooking the Pacific, where thirty thousand people had assembled and Mayor Gibson read a civic address. In the course of his reply the Prince dwelt upon the remarkable industrial development of Newcastle. "Your harbour," he noted, "your shipping facilities and your manufactures have greatly enhanced the importance this district has possessed from the earliest date on account of its rich deposits of coal." Leaving Newcastle in the afternoon by train, the Prince returned to Sydney through a pleasant land of tidy orange plantations and ragged blue-gum bush. On the way he held a reception in the city of Gosford, and saw further reaches of the beautiful Hawkesbury river. A record crowd cheered him at Sydney railway station, and along the route to the harbour where he rejoined the _Renown_. XV WESTERN AUSTRALIA