Page:(Commercial character) The Joseph Fisher lecture in commerce, delivered at the University of Adelaide (IA commercialcharac00jessrich).pdf/16

12 taste, and pamper luxury, with the necessary transport and manufacture. Commerce caters for the necessities, the tastes, the weaknesses, and the vices of the world's population, and we must not overlook the elements of increase and variation. Invention is always at work seeking to evolve what in its delicacy, intricacy, and absolute certainty of performance, may almost be regarded as sentient machinery. The fertile brain is ever striving to comprehend and utilize the forces of nature. Every invention and every discovery tends to the increase and the modification of commerce, and everything points to a universal commercialization. The reign of the cult will, in all probability, be superseded in the teeming east by the enthronement of the almighty dollar, and the true yellow peril may be found to be the patience, the thoroughness, and the cheapness of oriental labour. The situation in the clerical world is becoming more interesting from the fact that Woman, "once our superior, now our equal," to appropriate the toast of the old beau, is entering into serious competition in this as in other walks of life. I need scarcely remind you that Australia's commercial reticulation must spread when labour suitable to the physical conditions is profitably employed in our tropical country under the auspices of that true empire builder, the enterprising speculator, or under intelligent state supervision, and a general settlement of something over one or two people to the square mile is effected. When a trained and educated national government renouncing commercial empiricism leave to old and congested countries the task of settling the modus vivendi between rich and poor, and of reconciling the views of contented and discon-