Were it not for the pride of race that everywhere shows itself in the acts of English settlers, there might be a bright side to the political future of Queensland colony. The colored laborers at present introduced, industrious Tongans, and active Hill-coolies from Hindostan, laborious, sober, and free from superstition, should not only be able to advance the commercial fortunes of Queensland as they have those of the Mauritius, but eventually to take an equal share in free government with their white employers. To avoid the gigantic evil of the degradation of hand labor, which has ruined morally as well as economically the Southern States of the American republic, the Indian, Malay, and Chinese laborers should be tempted to become members of landholding associations. A large spice and sugar-growing population in Northern Queensland would require a vast agricultural population in the south to feed it, and the two colonies, hitherto rivals, might grow up as sister countries, each depending upon the other for the supply of half its needs. It is, however, worthy of notice that the agreements of the Queensland planters with the imported dark-skinned field-hands provide only for the payment of wages _in goods_, at the rates of 6_s._ to 10_s._ a month. The “goods” consist of pipes, tobacco, knives, and beads. Judging from the experience of California and Ceylon, there can be little hope of the general admission of colored men to equal rights by English settlers, and the Pacific islands offer so tempting a field to the kidnapping commanders of colonial “island schooners,” that there is much fear that Queensland may come to show us not merely semi-slavery, but peonage of that worst of kinds, in which it is cheaper to work the laborer to death than to “breed” him. Such is the present rapidity of the growth and rise to power of tropical Queensland, such the apparent poverty of New South Wales, that were the question merely one between the Sydney wheat-growers and the cotton-planters of Brisbane and Rockampton, the subtropical settlers would be as certain of the foremost position in any future confederation as they were in America when the struggle lay only between the Carolinas and New England. As it is, just as America was first saved by the coal of Pennsylvania and Ohio, Australia will be saved by the coal of New South Wales. Queensland possesses some small stores of coal, but the vast preponderance of acreage of the great power of the future is on the side of the free settlers of the cooler climate, at Newcastle, in New South Wales.