The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1874

Evening Star, Issue 3424, 11 February 1874, Page 2

The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 1874

The Mikado has left us, and the San Francisco mail service has been resumed. No flourish has been made of this really important circumstance. Public attention, instead of being concentrated on an event that we trust will prove of vast advantage to the Colony, is en g a g e d in a duel between tv\ o parties, members of a public institution ; and thus the departure of this vessel, the sailing of which re-establishes communication with groups of islands, whose inhabitants will, we trust, be benefited by our commerce and the influence our civilization will have upon them, is noticed only in the ordinary list of departures in the shipping columns of our contemporaries. M uch as we value the emancipation of men of all classes from those mental fetters that superstition has thrown around them, we think the Athenseum struggle of comparatively small momentwith this extension of communication to Northern America. We are fully assured thatatno distant day men will cease to attempt to force their fellow-men to square their conduct in accordance with narrow creeds, and that true religious liberty will be enjoyed, whichever party gains the victory this evening. Time and the advance of knowledge will do this; it is, therefore, secondary in importance to the opening of a service that brings New Zealand into direct communication with millions of our fellow-men, civilized and uncivilized. The full value of this service has never been realized. Crushed in its infancy, the commerce that might by this time have developed into profitable interchange was interrupted, and must be resumed difficulties incident to all unsuccessful enterprises. Capital has been diverted to another directionmerchants engage timidly in unknown traffic ) business connections have to be formed anew or resumed amid doubt of their and those arrangements by which interchange might have been facilitated had intercommunication been uninterrupted will have again to be moved in. Undemonstrative as we have been in regard to this service, we ' trust it will never more be abandoned.

There are signs in the United States that the people are beginning to tire of fettered trade, and are anxious to resume free commercial relations with the world. When they succeed in shaking off their restrictions, New Zealand will largely and directly benefit. Nor must it be supposed that there can be commercial advance without civil, moral, and intellectual progress. It is the fashion to condemn commerce as tending to moral degradation, because it tends to enrich and comfort mankind. We therefore read and hear Jeremiads bemoaning the devotion of men to the acquisition of wealth and luxury. Strangely enough, we do not hear about the temptations and degradations of poverty, as if they were not more trying, more severe, more to be pitied, more soul-crushing. It is seldom pointed out that the poorer nations are the least happy—usually the most enslaved. Yet this is capable of proof. Commerce has ever proved the greatest civilizer, and therefore every extension of it must be regarded with unmixed satisfaction. We trust that the resumption of the San Francisco service will prove a blessing, not only to the islands in the direct route, but to the whole of the populations of the Pacific Basin.