Still, within the last thirty years, from one cause or another, groups of settlers have made their homes far beyond those limits. Thus the wheat lands of Maranoa were settled when there was no farming more than a few miles to the west of Toowoomba. Over eighteen hundred years ago Tacitus wrote of our Saxon forefathers: "They live apart, each by himself, as woodside, plain, or fresh spring attracts him." And this racial characteristic is strong in many of their descendants in Queensland. Better results and greater profits might have accrued from concentration, but the wonderful development of the British Empire owes much to this centrifugal impulse and to the spirit of independence and self-reliance which it has fostered; and as the flag has followed the adventurer in so many parts of the globe, so are the scattered pioneers of our Western lands nuclei around whom settlement is gradually gathering. To people coming for the most part from the mother country, experience constituted no safe guide to the agricultural possibilities of their new home in the South. Naturally, mistakes were made and time and money lost before they discovered which crops were the most profitable, and on what kind of land those crops could be grown with greatest certainty of success. When Dr. Lang induced the "Fortitude" immigrants to cast in their lot with the Moreton Bay settlement, in whose welfare he took so deep an interest, his desire was to establish the cultivation of cotton, to which he believed the climate and soil were specially adapted. But, despite the heavy crops produced on the river flats, cotton did not prove remunerative until, after the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, the Lancashire spinners were reduced to such straits that they gladly paid high prices for all that could be obtained from Queensland. The product was of excellent quality, but the cost of picking precluded competition with countries where cheap labour was plentiful, and, with the return to normal conditions in the United States after the termination of the war, cotton passed almost out of cultivation, and has never since become a crop of commercial importance. An effort was made some years back to resuscitate the industry by the offer of a Government bonus upon manufactured piece goods. The bounty was earned by a mill at Ipswich, but the industry did not long survive the stoppage of the bonus. Since the drought of 1902 cotton has again been grown, principally in West Moreton and North Queensland, as a subsidiary crop, and farmers have been encouraged to extend their operations by the recent offer of a bounty by the Commonwealth; but, until machinery takes the place of hand-picking, farmers are likely to prefer crops which are not subject to competition with the cheap labour of other lands.