expenses of treatment, will prove to be able to work at an excellent profit, A great scheme, for which an expenditure of £2,500,000 has been authorised, has been devised by the engineer-in-chief, Mr O'Connor, and approved by other engineers of high standing. This scheme includes the construction of a reservoir to impound the waters of the Helena River; and its pumping to a height in the Coolgardie district, and distribution thence by gravitation. The preliminary works are being carried out; but, as faults have been found in the strata where the reservoir has been started, and as it is no easy matter, even with the aid of the most powerful pumps, to make twenty-five million gallons of water daily flow uphill for several hundred miles, more than two and a half millions sterling will, probably, be required in the end.
In the period, then, of less than nine years since Representative Government—a period the latter part of which has seen the rise of the population from forty to one hundred and seventy thousand, more than half of the manhood of which is settled in the desert of the lately unknown interior, where great mining plants, telephones, electric lights, and palace hotels have replaced the mia-mias of a few wandering blacks; and which has seen the expansion of the revenue from £400,000 to nearly £3,000,000 (£2,478,000 for the present financial year; being £275,935 less than in the preceding year), and of trade from £2,000,000 to over £10,000,000; the energies of the Government have been chiefly occupied in pressing matters of administration, in providing for the necessities of the new-comers, for means of transit to their homes, and for water for their mines; in a policy of works, that is, which has been denounced by those who have benefited from it as a policy of sop. Hence Western Australia has not yet had time to devote itself to those
