As regards imports for commerce with the natives, the chief desiderata are the articles technically known as “trade,” with which the labour to be used for developing the exports is remunerated. The native generally desires to receive from the white man knives, axes, tobacco, Jews’ harps, beads, dogs’ teeth, and red calico; but it is to the exports that the enterprising trader has to look in the future. The finest field for enterprise in New Guinea—and one which I have therefore left to the last to be dealt with—is tobacco. The district of Mekeo produces a magnificent leaf, of which the seed has been imported from Cuba. The syndicate that imported the leaf applied to the Government for 100,000 acres of land in the central division of British New Guinea, but this request was opposed by the New South Wales Government, without reason vouchsafed to the Government of the possession, whose officials in a recent report described this action as “a very serious blow to the immediate development of the country by Australian capitalists of high standing.” The same report, while deploring this misfortune, remarks that the tobacco should do very well if the leaf is properly treated for the market, as the soil appears to be very rich. Very different was the action of the German authorities in the Kaiser’s New Guinea possessions. With their usual indefatigable enterprise, the Teutons have financed a large tobacco undertaking, and are exporting the leaf in great quantities. Their syndicate has so far introduced methods of civilised trade that they have struck and issued their own coinage (which bears the image of a bird of paradise), and their five-mark, two-mark, and one-mark pieces are accepted by the natives instead of trade. These pieces are, of course, spent by the natives in the German stores. Not without reason did the Prince of Wales advise Great Britain to wake up.