The Star. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1889.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6649, 13 September 1889, Page 2

The Star. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1889.

The Uses of Water. What will it not wash out? Not the bloodstains of crime, Lady Macbeth — that lady of rather pronounced views — tells us. But there are people whose experience is wider than hers. Your washerwoman will tell you what-water will do for dirt; your agriculturist will declare without hesitation that it will remove scarcity; your politician with his eye on the last reported utterance of Sir Henry Parkes, will begin to think that it can wash out the unity of a great oontinent. Water is the great essential want in Australia. The groat continentis emphatically the thirsty land. Without quench for this thirst there will never be a great nation there. The problem of greatness is the problem of making the water of few channels do the work of very widely extended agriculture. One of the knotty points necessarily of the ' future is the ownership of the waterof boundary streams. With characteristic audacity Sir Henry has suddenly claimed for his Colony the whole of the Murray water, threatening the growing agriculture of all Northern Victoria. He Bays at the same time, carelessly, as d propos to nothing, that New South Wales can, under her- system, raise 30,000 men at a moment's notice. Is it posaible-£hat~war is intruding his grisly front into "the last of the Arcadiaa?