succeed—nay, to brilliantly succeed—is it not folly—is it not sinful, for patriots with exuberant verbosity, to get up and demand that the State shall impose protective duties on this and that industry, thus hampering the free play of commercial activities, strangling all noble self-reliance, and crushing all independent spirit out of a people already deeply infected with the demoralizing doctrine that the State is to do everything, and that private pluck and enterprise are a mistake and a delusion.
Some time ago several Chinamen started fish-curing on one of the northern lakes in New South Wales, and at the time I knew the place, they were doing well and making a good thing out of it. But then there arose vicious and evil practices, such as the sinful slaughter of myriads of young fry—the use of illegal nets, the wholesale destruction of spawn by means of dynamite, &c., and I believe the fishing on that part of the coast was pretty well murdered. It is a saddening and a humiliating reflection that, with all our self-complacency and self-congratulations about our marvellous resources and wonderful natural wealth, we really do so mighty little practically to develop the one or utilize the other.
Possibly the hardest-working and most self-reliant class we have in the Australian community, it seems to me, are our miners or diggers and prospectors; and upon my word, our mining legislation generally, seems deliberately designed with the object of making things as hard for the
