Page:In bad company and other stories.djvu/76

 as nearly as possible—from wool, say £22,000,000, from surplus stock £5,250,000, and stock £27,250,000.

The outgoings will be—for wages, carriage, stores, £10,000,000; interest on £300,000,000 capital at 5¾ per cent, £17,250,000; total outgoing, £27,250,000. The returns are comparatively small, taking the whole of the population together.

The frequent droughts, causing the loss of millions of sheep, with other ills and ailments fatal to stock, have not been taken into the calculation. The properties as a whole will bear no increase in cost of management.

Another reason which actuated the employers, pastoralists, merchants, and others connected with the pastoral industry, was that the sudden withdrawal of their labourers was attended with greater loss and expense than, say, in the case of mines or shipping. The mines could be closed, the ships laid up. Expenditure on the part of owners would then cease until the strike was ended. But, on the far back stations, wells had to be worked, wood carted for machinery, edible shrubs cut for starving sheep, in default of which immediate loss of stock to a very great extent would take place.