in comparison with black all the world over, and white labour in the tropics will certainly not be less costly than in the temperate zone. Therefore the produce of white labour in the tropics will be more costly than the produce of black labour; nor does it seem likely that this handicap can be neutralised by the use of labour-saving devices, because any fresh machinery that may be introduced for that purpose will also be available to planters whose estates are worked by coloured labour, and would lower their producing costs correspondingly. Therefore the produce of tropical white labour cannot compete in the world-market, or even generally in the more restricted but still ample market of the British Empire. This is not a matter of free trade or tariff reform, for while the free trader will not grant a preference at all, the tariff reformer, who is anxious to encourage empire-grown produce, is not prepared to put a higher duty on Jamaican sugar because it is negro-grown than on Australian sugar because it is grown by white men.

But this consideration is for some time ahead not altogether relevant. So far from the Australian sugar-planter exporting his crop, he cannot yet fully supply the Commonwealth market. Within that market he receives a substantial advantage, and that advantage is likely to be more permanent than most fiscal regulations, because it is based, not on a transient desire to benefit a particular industry, but on the intention to maintain the White Australia policy. The last few years have shown that the industry can be carried on in Queensland by white labour, and therefore capital invested is secure, at any rate until Australian tropical produce outstrips the growing Commonwealth market.

A third consideration, in the case of the Australian tropics, is political. There can be no doubt that the country has suffered from divided control. For many years the Northern Territory was administered by South Australia; the good citizens of Adelaide were at first enthusiastic over their new possession, then indifferent, and finally they came to regard it as a white elephant. But at no period of their control did they understand its requirements, and in any event their resources were insufficient to its development. It is now ruled by the Commonwealth, as is also the Territory of Papua; but the northern part of West Australia, which has a precisely similar climate, VOL. 225. NO, 460.

soil, and industries-if the word can be applied to the activities of its scanty population-is under the control of the West Australian Government, which with its headquarters far away at Perth labours under much the same disadvantages as South Australia did with the Northern Territory. The northern district of Queensland is governed from Brisbane, which is less remote from Cape York, and it can hardly be a mere coincidence that this country is, on the whole, somewhat more advanced than the Northern Territory and tropical West Australia.

There is a strong case for considering whether the time has not come for a new political alignment, cutting off the whole of Northern Australia from coast to coast at the southern latitude of the Northern Territory, or preferably at the Tropic of Capricorn. The new State thus created would include the present Northern Territory, or most of it, West Australia north of the Ashburton River, Queensland north of the Diamantina and Rockhampton, and probably Papua, with the addition of what was once German New Guinea. This new State would be under the general control of the Commonwealth; its citizens, no longer divided among three provinces with different laws and capitals, would become a natural nucleus for the tropical white Australia of the future, and consideration could then be given with some prospect of success to the great problems of development which have yet to be faced. Those problems are, firstly, the drainage and damming of the rivers, which at present run to waste, and cause alternative floods and droughts, and consequently disease; secondly, the provision of a line of steamers round the northern coasts, which would give more adequate communication with the outside world, and carry northern produce to the southern ports; thirdly, the surveying of the best route for a future tropical transcontinental railway and its eventual construction; and, fourthly, the establishment of proper land settlement regulations suitable to the country. All save the last would cost money, but it is money that in the long run will be richly repaid, both in actual profits and in the strengthening of the Commonwealth, always provided that the work is properly carried out in accordance with our growing knowledge of tropical conditions.

A. WYATT TILBY.

PRESIDENT WILSON'S PEACE PROGRAMME
AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE

I. Enforced Peace. Proceedings of the First Annual National Assemblage of the League to Enforce Peace, Washington, May 26-27, 1916.

2. Recueil de Rapports sur les différents points du Programmeminimum. Published for the Organisation Centrale pour une Paix Durable by Martinus Nijhoff. The Hague. 1916.

3. The Monroe Doctrine. An Interpretation. By ALBERT BUSHNELL HART, Professor of the Science of Government in Harvard University. Duckworth. 1916.

4. America's Foreign Relations. By WILLIS FLETCHER JOHNSON. Eveleigh Nash. 1916.

SPE

PEAKING in May 1916 President Wilson said: 'If 'this war has accomplished nothing else for the benefit ' of the world, it has at least disclosed a great moral necessity, ' and set forward the thinking of the statesmen of the world 'by a whole age.' This, he added, had been made clear by repeated utterances of the leading statesmen of the nations now at war, which imply that the principle of public right 'must henceforth take precedence over the individual interests ' of particular nations, and that the nations of the world must in some way band themselves together to see that right prevails, as against any sort of selfish aggression.' In his address to the Senate on the 22nd of January last, the President again enlarged on this theme, with all the weight of authority belonging to the head of a great nation speaking ex cathedra. He claimed, indeed, that the tradition of the American people gives them a peculiar right and duty to share in the work of laying afresh and upon a new plan the foundation of peace 'among the nations.' But it was only on certain conditions that they would take part in the 'universal covenant' by which alone peace and justice could be guaranteed throughout the world. The peace that shall conclude this war must be not 'merely a peace that will serve the several interests and imme➡ 'diate aims of the nations engaged'; its elements must 'engage

'the confidence and satisfy the principles of the American 'Government.' Especially it must recognise the absolute equality of rights between the nations, great and small; and, to safeguard this equality, 'Right must be based upon the 'common strength, not upon the individual strength, of the 'nations upon whose concert peace will depend.' For 'mere agreements' would not make peace secure.

'It will be absolutely necessary that a force be created as a guarantor of the permanency of the settlement so much greater than the force of any nation now engaged or any alliance hitherto formed or projected, that no nation, no probable combination of nations, could face or withstand it. If the peace presently made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the organised major force of mankind. There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organised rivalries, but an organised common peace.'

So far as the general principle involved in this programme is concerned, President Wilson is right in claiming that it has received the endorsement of some of the leading statesmen of the nations now at war. At the banquet given in New York, on the 25th of November 1916, by the American League to Enforce Peace a cablegram was read from Viscount Grey, then British Foreign Secretary, strongly supporting the objects of the League. 'I sincerely desire,' he said, ' to see a league of nations formed 'to secure peace after the war; I regard such a league as the best. promise of preserving treaties and saving the world from aggressive wars.' On this and subsequent occasions messages of sympathy were also received from responsible statesmen in Germany and France, as well as from Denmark, the Netherlands, Japan, Switzerland, and Spain. And though the proposals of the League to Enforce Peace are, as we shall see, much less far-reaching and revolutionary than those formulated by President Wilson, they rest upon the same basic principle.

Long before this, in a speech delivered in Dublin in the early months of the war, Mr. Asquith had committed himself to the same principle. Taking as his text Gladstone's words that 'the greatest triumph of our time would be the enthronement of the idea of public right as the governing idea of 'European politics,' he declared that this meant, when translated into practice, the substitution for force, for the clash of 'competing ambition, for the groupings and alliances and a

' precarious equipoise, of a real European partnership, based on 'the recognition of equal rights and established and enforced 'by a common will.' In his speech to his constituents at Ladybank, on the 1st of February last, Mr. Asquith called fresh attention to this pronouncement in the course of an eloquent and sympathetic reference to the fine ideal' set forth by the President in his address to the Senate, adding:

'I am not sure that there is any substantial difference between President Wilson's ideal and the one which I thus endeavoured to depict, except-and this I admit is a large step in advance-that he would blot out the geographical limitation of Europe, and associate the United States and indeed all civilised peoples in the same peace-preserving fraternity.'

While thus committing himself to the ideal of a 'universal union' Mr. Asquith was careful, with the acumen characteristic of the legal mind, to introduce a saving clause. The ideal ought to be realised, but the process of its realisation might be slow and gradual.' Unfortunately saving clauses are apt to escape the notice of the ordinary man, who is inclined to take the utterances of politicians and diplomatists at their face value, without inquiring too carefully into their motive, which may be purely opportunist. On a thousand platforms throughout the English-speaking world it has been proclaimed that this is a war to end war.' The leading statesmen of the nations at war have, with varying degrees of sincerity, encouraged this idea and done at least lip-service to the ideal of the effective organisation of peace,' without troubling to explain how this organisation is to be made effective, or what sacrifices of cherished national liberties it may involve. The general atmosphere of somewhat nebulous idealism thus created is not favourable to clear thinking, and out of the resultant confusion of thought certain tendencies full of peril to our commonwealth are taking shape. These tendencies are often fundamentally opposed, though the mass of people do not realise the opposition. A passionate nationalism is in the same persons combined with a sentimental cosmopolitanism, and the essential antithesis is either not perceived or is glossed over with some dialectical subtlety. Yet the antithesis is there, and the recognition of its existence will force our people, when the period of reconstruction shall come, to choose one of two alternative principles on which this reconstruction is to