CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF 
sparse population and great distances, transport, dependent 
largely upon overseas trade, has become one of the most im- 
portant, if not the most important industry in the community ’.1 
The statement is probably even more profoundly true of the 
Australian community, where railway transport is a government 
monopoly and where expansion of the system has always been 
carried out with a view to further concentration in the capital 
ports. Again, as Dr. B. W. Shanahan has demonstrated, there 
is in progress in all countries of recent development a definite 
migration of manufactures from the countryside to the seaboard, 
and a concentration of industry in the great seaports that is 
determined, on the one hand, by the ‘layout’ of the railways and, 
on the other. by economies in the industries themselves arising 
from economies in handling due to the provision of better port 
facilities. 
This movement towards monopoly control is continuous and 
pervasive in every department of our economic life. The 
Federal control of Australian loans and currency, and the close 
association between the relatively few banks—which are be- 
coming fewer by amalgamation every year—constitutes a 
condition of monopoly control that is on all fours with the 
‘trustified’ organization towards which every large industry 
from mining to wheat-growing is moving in the Commonwealth. 
Most of the raw materials of manufacture, and every important 
consumers’ product from sugar to coal, are already produced 
and distributed under monopoly or semi-monopoly conditions. 
All these factors, aided in an unusual degree by the government 
regulation of industry, have operated to establish a unified 
trading system, and to promote a unique condition of economic 
interdependence between the different states of the Common- 
wealth. The result has been to establish a situation for Australia 
as for Canada, ‘ where there is little likelihood that an important 
industrial or financial phenomenon arising in one part of the 
country will be neutralized by counteracting phenomena in 
another part’. Always excepting, be it understood, the more 
or less local variations in weather resulting in good or bad 
seasons. 
Add to these circumstances the national sentiment and the 
traditional commercial ties which unite Australia and Great 
1 Canada’s Balance of International Indebtedness, p. 11. 2 Economica. 1923. 
1