Page:(Commercial character) The Joseph Fisher lecture in commerce, delivered at the University of Adelaide (IA commercialcharac00jessrich).pdf/21

17 I hope, on the turn, and legislators are beginning to think that the question of populating our estate is one worthy of consideration. With every sympathy with the ideal of a white race—physically perfect, mentally excellent, morally superlative—I can but think that we shall have to reconcile actuality with idealism, and determine to solve the problem what human stock the country will carry, always having regard to the changes which will be wrought on the white race by physical conditions, and the class of labour necessary to the development of tropical regions. In our very legitimate aspiration to figure as a factor in the world's manufacturing, we must not lose sight of the vast and increasing value of water power, especially in electro chemical industries. In our anxiety to compete with such lands as America and Canada, it would be folly to ignore the fact that in the fall of Niagara river those countries possess the greatest hydraulic energy on earth, together with immense possibilities of this character in other directions. That they have the capital and energy to develop and the brains to avail themselves of these advantages to the utmost is undoubted, and it seems to me that our protectionist friends, when proposing to counteract their effect by a high tariff, supply the consumers with a very strong argument in favour of freetrade, although character, enterprise, technical knowledge, industry, and other factors do much to efface disabilities in international industrial competition. The part that Science plays in commercial life is a most interesting one. There was a time when the scientific student was a man apart. One pondering the phenomena of nature, floundering among first principles, groping slowly and laboriously from darkness