and guarantees, the unsatisfactory experience of New South Wales administration in pre-separation days led the people of Southern Queensland to doubt whether the vaunted fraternal spirit would withstand the actual attrition of business competition. They feared that the great urban populations of Sydney and Melbourne would, under the proposed democratic Constitution, secure for themselves industrial, commercial, and administrative advantages at the expense of their brethren, but none the less rivals, in the more remote parts of the continent. Believing that, though their occupations and products were the same as those of the Southern States, their interests were conflicting, the majority in Southern Queensland cast their votes against the union. Finding themselves in a minority, many of the opponents of federation deliberately refused to exercise the franchise in the first election, held in 1901. Instead of taking steps to secure the return to the Commonwealth Parliament of men who would try to avert any evil consequences arising from non-representation at the Conventions and who would oppose any unfair discrimination, the short-sighted abstention of these people from voting enabled the Labour party, who certainly did not comprise a majority of the electors, to return nine out of our fifteen representatives in the two Houses. [Illustration: MOUNT MORGAN: OPEN CUT AND DUMPS] [Illustration: MOUNT MORGAN: MUNDIC AND COPPER WORKS.] One of the first results of this predominance of Labour representation was the early passage of legislation abolishing Pacific Island labour in the sugar industry--which is almost exclusively confined to Queensland--and requiring all the islanders to leave Australia for their native homes not later than 31st December, 1906. With a view to compensating the cane-growers for the added cost of labour, and to induce them to abandon all forms of coloured labour, a bounty, ranging at the present time from 7s. 6d. per ton of cane in the extreme North to 6s. per ton in Southern Queensland and on the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, was offered upon all cane grown exclusively with white labour; while to provide funds for payment of the bounty an excise duty, first of L3 and then L4 per ton, was imposed. These radical changes occurred at a time, unfortunately, when the State was suffering from severe depression resulting from an unprecedented succession of adverse seasons and the substitution of a uniform protective Customs tariff for the State tariff, which had for years previously yielded a large revenue per head while affording protection to many native industries. The abolition of interstate Customs duties caused a further loss to the Queensland Treasury; so that the Government felt compelled to ask Parliament to impose new taxation as well as sanction severe retrenchment in order to check the alarming series of revenue deficits which, despite large loan expenditure, marked the stressful period.