That the farming has been and is atrociously bad, there can be no doubt. Men continue to crop the same ground with the same crops year after year without manuring it, and when the weeds come thicker than the corn, they simply leave it. Machinery has not been introduced. Seed is wasted, and farmers thrash their corn with flails out on the roads after the old Irish fashion. I need hardly say that there is no reason why this should continue to be so. That the land would soon pay for good farming I have no doubt, even though the surplus grain were sent home to England. At present the colony, which should above all things strive to be an agricultural colony, actually imports flour and grain to the amount of about £6,000 per annum. I have already said that wool is the staple commodity of the country. I doubt much whether it will continue to be so, as the trade of wool-growing does not seem to extend itself in any way at all commensurate with the area of land which it occupies. In 1869, there were 654,054 sheep in Western Australia, and in 1871 the number had increased only to 670,999. In the other wool-growing colonies, it is thought that no squatter can make money on a run with less than 10,000 sheep. In Western Australia, 3,000 or 4,000 are considered to be a fairly large number, and squatters frequently run flocks that do not exceed 1,500 or 2,000 over enormous tracks of land. In New South Wales and Queensland, few squatters have less than a sheep to three acres. No rule can be laid down, as every run must be considered as a whole, and on most runs there is some land, more or less, which is not fit for use at all. But a squatter with 60,000 acres will generally have grass for 20,000 sheep. In Western Australia, one hears of a sheep to ten acres, and a sheep to twenty acres. The sheep of the Australian colonies amount together, I believe, to about forty millions. In Western Australia, which boasts of being the largest in area of them all, there is not as yet one million. In truth there is very much against the squatter. It is not only that much of the land which is called pastoral bears a poisoned shrub fatal to sheep;--but that, from this and other causes, the distances are so great that a sufficient number of sheep to make the business really remunerative can hardly be kept together.