The long quarrel between New South Wales and Victoria (the
upper river States) and South Australia (the lower) over the irrigation, development, and navigation rights of the Murray bat at last been composed by the intervention of the Federal Government. The joint looking and storage system now agreed on, and described by a correspondent in Tuesday's Times, will not only secure improved irrigation, but Meanathe opening of a great water highway for nearly a thousand miles up the Murray, and probably, later on, several hundred miles up the Mnrrumbidgee and the Darling. The scheme when carried out will provide the main freight transit through. out the greater part of the area embraced by this river system —which is one-seventh of the entire continent. It also pro- vides—either by a canal from Goolwa on Lake Alexandrine to Victor Harbour• in Encounter Bay, or by deepening a passage through the Murray mouth to Goolwa to admit of the passage of ocean steamers—for the establishment of a new port on the southern coast of Australia which should rival even Sydney in the size of its business. The correspondent describes the announcement of the settlement of the dispute as probably one of the moat important ever cabled abroad from the Common. wealth.
