GUM AND GLOOM.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 967, 7 November 1910, Page 6

GUM AND GLOOM.

INDUSTRY SERIOUSLY MENACED.

(By Telegraph.-Special Correspondent.) Dargavillo, November 5. In the course of an interview with a "North Auckland Times" reporter, Mr. Dell, manager of Messrs. Harding and Company's Northern Wairoa gum business, states that the market is entirely dead. -Middlemen in Auckland will nol touch kauri gum, tho chief reason being the depression in America. To show how bad things are, he stated that, last week, he bought at 70s. gum which, last year, he paid 120s. for, and, even at that reduced figure, he cannot get an offer for it in Auckland. _ Another serious monace is the substitutes for kauri gum, is the shape- of South American and South African gums and China oil. Manufacturers prefer kauri gum, but, if they cannot get it at a price, they use the substitutes. Referring to the layers of unrecovered gum which arc believed to be lying at considerable depths, Mr. Dell said that there was no reason to doubt that gum, and very good gum, might be found in low strata, but ho did not think that it would pay to recover from great depths. It was not like gold. Ho very much doubted whether there wore five hundred British diggers, all told, on tho whole of the fields, and he considered it only a matter of time when there will be none at all. British diggers did not work systematically like the Austrians, and they simply cannot make .a. living, as prices now aze.