SIXTH ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING.

THE Sixth Ordinary General Meeting of the Session was held at the Whitehall Rooms, Hôtel Métropole, on Tuesday, April 10, 1894, when the Hon. James Inglis, M.L.A. and Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce, Sydney, New South Wales, read a Paper on "Recent Economic Developments of Australian Enterprise."

Sir Saul Samuel, K.C.M.G.,C.B., a Member of the Council of the Institute, presided.

The Minutes of the last Ordinary General Meeting were read and confirmed, and it was announced that since that Meeting 19 Fellows had been elected, viz. 10 Resident and 9 Non-Resident.

Wm. Rierson Arbuthnot, Richard A. Bosanquet, H. North G. Bushby, J.P., Louis M. Casella, Frank M. Cheadle, Francis J. S. Hopwood, C.M.G., David H. McGowan, John Denison Pender, Frederick C. Selous (Honorary Fellow), J. Griffin Ward, J.P.

Non-Resident Fellows :

Percy Adams (New Zealand), Leslie E. Brown (Fiji), Fitzherbert G. Knight (Barbados), Wm. Akerman Miller (Jamaica), Hon. Richard E. O'Connor, M.L.C. (New South Wales), Philip S. Solomon, Q.C., M.L.C. (Fiji), Alfred C. Stephen (New South Wales), George Coleridge Thomas (Lagos), Captain F. G. Younghusband (India).

It was also announced that donations to the Library of books, maps, &c., had been received from the various Governments of the Colonies and India, Societies, and public bodies both in the United Kingdom and the Colonies, and from Fellows of the Institute and others.

The CHAIRMAN: Lord Jersey has written to express his regret that he is unable to be with us to-night, and Sir Thomas McIlwraith and other gentlemen have also sent us apologies for their inability to attend. I may mention that we are honoured with the presence of Major Forbes, of Matabeleland, and I am sure we are all pleased to welcome him. I now call upon Mr. James Inglis to read his Paper. Mr. Inglis is a gentleman who has been known to me for very many years; he occupies a high place in Australia, he has been Minister of Public Instruction of New South Wales, and is

now President of the Sydney Chamber of Commerce. He is a gentleman of great ability, and has written several books, which I recommend you to read. I am sure the address he is about to deliver to us will greatly interest you.

Mr. INGLIS In the short time at my disposal, I cannot be expected to deal fully with all the great subject that I have chosen to speak upon; indeed my remarks will be more suggestive than detailed. But in a time when many people are feeling, even in their spirits more than in their persons, the effects of depression, it is the duty, as it is the privilege, of every man who has strong faith within him to give reasons for that faith and to adopt at all events a cheerful and hopeful attitude in the face of difficulties and depression. It is with such a feeling I venture to speak to you tonight upon a land which has been indeed a land of promise to me; for when I had become debilitated by arduous pioneering work for twelve years in India, in Bengal, Oudh, and on the very frontiers of Nepaul, I went down to Australia shattered in health and given up by my medical advisers, and in a very short time the wonderworking air of Australia effected the transformation you now see. It may be curious, as simply an actual physiological fact, to say that when I arrived in Brisbane I weighed 8st. 4lbs. I am now about 16st. I am sorry to say. I had, too, the opportunity-which is rarely afforded to ordinary humanity-of reading no less than three obituary notices of myself in Indian newspapers, and I am happy to say these were all of a highly laudatory character. I will now, hoping you will forgive this personal introduction, plunge right into the subject of my paper.

RECENT ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENTS OF
AUSTRALIAN ENTERPRISE.

Ir is some thirty years since I left this great old land, to become a humble working-bee in one of the swarms which are continually leaving the busy parent hive, and are carrying the institutions, the thought and speech of Britain, into the ends of all the earth. Every British Colony is a reproduction in large degree of the grand old Motherland-like in a measure, yet varying, as are the countless vicissitudes of climate, the varieties of product, and the differences of soil, place, and people, among whom the pioneer sons of Britain find themselves cast. Our colonising aptitude-instinct-geniuscall it what you will, has become such an ingrained habit, such an

established possession of our race, that we are apt to undervalue it, to treat it as too much a thing of mere commonplace, to at times quite inadequately understand its real significance and the potentialities of it.

The ordinary humdrum Briton, immersed in the worries of his daily business, is apt to take, possibly, a parochial view of life, and impatiently refuses to acknowledge that there even are Colonies at all; and the extra-ordinary, the acute-minded, feverishly active Briton, who looks on a Colony only as a new market for his wares, takes, possibly, a too one-sided, restricted, purely mercantile, and altogether insufficient view of Colonial activity and progress; and so it is that such an Institute as this, and such Britons as yourselves, fulfil a most vital and important national and patriotic function, in seeking to make Great Britain and Greater Britain more and more interdependent, and better understood each of the other. You know the Colonies. You have borne your part in the burden and heat, the cark and care, the ups and downs of a Colonial career. You know what expenditure of muscle and brain-power, what sacrifice of ease and comfort, what unflagging resolve and unremitting effort, the building up of Britain's empire beyond the seas involves. My paper to-night is not, therefore, primarily or mainly intended for you. I would fain address myself to those of my brothers here, who perchance know little and possibly care less about our Colonies. I would fain rouse the interest of careful fathers, and perhaps careless sons, who may possibly harbour an odd thought now and then as to the future of the rising generation, and I would like to show, as far as my humble powers permit, what splendid opportunities are afforded for patient persevering effort, what golden prizes lie within the reach of the deserving, determined, and industrious worker, and what conquests are to be won by the brave-hearted soldier-offortune who may enlist, say, as a sapper or miner in the ranks of Britain's Colonial pioneers.

To me, if I may be pardoned the personal allusion, coming back after thirty years' pioneer work in New Zealand, India and Australia, nothing is so surprising and so sad, as this prevalent (seemingly so, at all events, to my cursory examination), this apparently prevalent blasé, used up, worn-out, cynical attitude towards everything which is outside the regular routine of one's daily experience. The average young Englishman I meet is almost brutally frank in his avowal that really he is not interested in Colonial matters. He really knows very little about the Colonies. He supposes they are very nice," and "rather jolly, and that sort of thing, don't cher know,"

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but honestly he cares very little about them. Certainly this attitude, disappointing though it be, is better than the almost offensively patronising and complacently paternal one, which certain very young and sundry very old Britishers occasionally exhibit. Be the reason what it may, I deplore the fact that so many stay-athome Britons do not seem very often to have an adequate conception of what our Colonial Empire really means, and have little or no knowledge of its wondrous history and growth, and as it seems to me an altogether unworthy estimate of its value, its veritable present, and its magnificent future. In illustration, it is an actual fact that a lady of my acquaintance, who has been twentyfive years in Australia, was asked in my hearing recently how she had managed to keep up her English!

Possibly some fault may lie at the door of the Colonists themselves. It may be that, immersed in pressing cares, engrossed by their ceaseless war with Nature in reclaiming the wilderness, they have suffered themselves at times to get out of sympathy, out of touch, with the currents of thought, the varying "changes and chances" of politics, or social problems at home. Sometimes, too, they may have been too exacting, too unreasonable, or too blunt. But the time has surely come, I think, when, in the face of tremendous changes in the political and social order that seem threatening all around, in the near prospect of mighty movements of thought and action, and possibly aggression, among the leading nations of the earth; eruptions which may threaten grave danger to the most cherished traditions and tendencies of the men of our race— surely it behoves us all to draw the ties of kinship tighter, to stand shoulder to shoulder, ready to meet any danger that may assail; as one undivided people, striving to weld together the various elements of our one common origin and racial affinity, into a splendid solidarity that will defy all outside attack or internal misunderstanding, so fulfilling our beneficent destiny as leaders and benefactors of the whole human family. Does this sound too poetic? Surely, at all events, it is no petty, no ignoble conception of what we may yet become as a united people?

Does it sound too transcendental, too ambitious? First hear, then judge.

One of the great blemishes of our sordid latter-day life, is its ugly utilitarianism. We are, it seems to me, too much destitute of wonder and admiration. We appeal too much to the logic of figures and results, and too little to the imagination. I am therefore not concerned much to-night with figures and dry statistics. I care not

to descant on, or compute by number, our millions of flocks and herds, our miles of railways, our countless acres, or the volume of our exports and imports. But I do want to try and get young Englishmen to realise what this Colonial Empire of ours really means -what chances it has for honourable and profitable careers, and what new avenues are even now being opened for brave hearts and willing hands to build up at least comfortable homes, if not great fortunes, and to take a share in the work of building up this Greater Britain, which is yet destined, I hope, to eclipse the good old Motherland in high renown and honourable fame, no less than in material prosperity and tangible possessions.

How inadequate, for instance, is the bare idea of the extent and diversity of any one of our Australian Colonies, as far as regards merely its physical features. Indeed, it is not even realised by many young Australians themselves, that in the one Colony of New South Wales, taking that Colony as a fair illustration, climate ranges from the tropic to the almost arctic-that we have in parts a winter like Canada and a summer like Jamaica! Yet it is so.

In Kiandra, for instance, a mining town near the source of the Snowy River, on the mountainous borderland between New South Wales and Victoria, all travelling communication with the outside world for three or four months of the year has to be carried on by the use of snow-shoes. The mail-man who carries his mail over the snow has to use these aids. The inhabitants regularly organise snow-shoe races, and the whole environment for a considerable time of the year is a counterpart of what may be experienced in the NorthWest of Canada. At the selfsame time the sun may be blazing down with torrid strength upon the western plains round Bourke or over the northern plains of Queensland. Rivers and streams are licked dry before his fiery breath. Man and beast may be dying of thirst. And in some towns water has been even, at times, dearer than wine, and may have to be brought from great distances, at much cost, to supply domestic wants. Indeed, a whimsical story illustrative of this, is told of what we call a new chum in the very early, unsettled frontier times. And I may be pardoned if I use it simply to illustrate this aspect of my subject.

The new chum, so the story goes, arrived late at night, after a day of severe travel in the blazing sun, at a small bush township in the western plains, where manners were rough and accommodation worse. His fancy had been revelling in the anticipated delights of a cool refreshing bath, but on his arrival he found that the locality was suffering from a water famine. There was short allowance