To a stranger, the rush of population and outpour of capital from Sydney, first toward Victoria, but now to Queensland and New Zealand, appear to be the chief among the causes of the momentary decline of New South Wales. Of immigrants there is at once an insufficient and an over-great supply. Respectable servant-girls, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, plasterers, and the like, do well in the colonies, and are always wanted; of clerks, governesses, iron-workers, and the skilled hands of manufacturers, there is almost always an over-supply. By a perverse fate, these latter are just the immigrants of whom thousands seek the colonies every year, in spite of the daily publication in England of dissuading letters. As the rivalry of the neighbor-colonies lessens in the lapse of time, the jealousy that exists between them will doubtless die away, but it seems as though it will be replaced by a political divergence, and consequent aversion, which will form a fruitful source of danger to the Australian confederation. [Illustration] In Queensland the great tenants of crown lands, “squatters,” as they are called, sheep-farmers holding vast tracts of inland country, are in possession of the government, and administer the laws to their own advantage. In New South Wales power is divided between the pastoral tenants on the one hand, and the democracy of the towns upon the other. In Victoria the democrats have beaten down the squatters, and in the interests of the people put an end to their reign; but the sheep-farmers of Queensland and of the interior districts of New South Wales, ignoring wells, assert that the “up-country desert” or “unwatered tracts” can never be made available for agriculture, while the democracy of the coast point to the fact that the same statements were made only a few years back of lands now bearing a prosperous population of agricultural settlers. The struggle between the great crown tenants and the agricultural democracy in Victoria, already almost over, in New South Wales can be decided only in one way, but in Queensland the character of the country is not entirely the same: the coast and river tracts are tropical bush-lands, in which sheep-farming is impossible, and in which sugar, cotton, and spices alone can be made to pay. To the copper, gold, hides, tallow, wool, which have hitherto formed the stereotyped list of Australian exports, the Northern colony has already added ginger, arrowroot, tobacco, coffee, sugar, cotton, cinnamon, and quinine.