form the pick of the Boer race, and therefore every farm of value has long been under cultivation, the agricultural land that remains for incoming settlers being either (a) second-class, (b) exhausted, and only unoccupied for that very reason. Moreover, land values are greatly enhanced since the war. Properties which six years ago could be purchased at 10s. the morgen, and cultivated, even at that rate, at practically no profit, are now only to be purchased at five times that price, which it requires no expert to explain could only mean cultivation at a dead loss.
The chief pastoral district to the north-east of the Colony is in every way suitable to the industry, but the prevalence of cattle disease, which can only be stamped out by the combined action of the various State Governments, makes stock-rearing to-day a risky business. If, however, the advice of the veterinary staff is accepted, and all the diseased stock slaughtered, the infected areas cleansed by the exclusion of cattle for fifteen months (the utmost limit of possible infection), and the system of fencing improved, Orangia will presently offer a suitable colonization area for the British settler.
Horse-rearing will, however, prove the most profitable undertaking for the farmer who is not an agriculturist, for there is great promise for the future in this stock. The Imperial Government, anxious to rear within the Empire all its own army beasts, offers encouragement to the breeder; and if a sufficient number of horses could be certainly relied upon annually, this encouragement will very properly take more definite and satisfactory shape. There can be no question that in cavalry, artillery, and service horses generally, our Empire, with its magnificent areas for breeding, should be entirely self-supporting. If war, unhappily, overtake this country again in the future, there need be no repetition of the Austrian remount scandals, of the enormous Argentine shipments; and it is the business of the British settler in breeding districts to think and act imperially upon this issue. Happily, there is little
