EMPIRE TRADE COMMISSION.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 26 March 1913, Page 2

EMPIRE TRADE COMMISSION.

The Commission was heralded with trumpets, for some months it passed through the Dominion with great pleasure and much j interest. It was impressed! with, most of the evidence given,; and it thought no end of the scenery of the country. Moreover its admiration for the reports in the press of its proceedings as well as those of the scenery of the Hansard men told off to attend to its little needs in this respect were unbounded. Perhaps it may he deduced from this last touch that the Commissioners came prepared for a much lower plane of civilisation all round, j Now that they have passed on to other scenes one wonders what benefit will come out of their visit. What they are sure to say, if there is anything in the evidence tendered, is that the future of this Dominion in the mineral and manufacturing line is not worth speaking of. that the agricultural and pastoral industries are the main stay and must always remain so, that until the big estates are broken up and the Maori lands arc opened for settlement—the remnant of them which is by no means so extensive as has been represented—the progress of agriculture will not be what it ought to be. They will say also that the finances are sound and the country progressive— and this in spite of one strange critic who asked them to believe the country bankrupt because the exports do not uniformly exceed the imports by five millions. I hey may also have some observations to make about the neutralising effect of freight discrimination on preference to British goods. Of wireless telegraphy, of ocean cables and 'k All Ked-routes," they will say that what they heard in evidence was scarcely worth the trouble of coming all this distance to hear. In fact that is likely to be the key note all round. Four guineas per man per day besides travelling expenses—it seems a good deal for what might have been got from blue books. But that of course is not all that will result. So keen an agriculturist as Sir Eider Haggard will hare some-

thing encouraging to say about the agriculture of the Dominion to men anxious to rely, on the good-word of a good man before throwing in their lot with New Zealand. - This brings us to the key note of the whole. It is that the -Dominion has: pasied for the first time under the eye of a band of experts of various kinds whose report will give the peo-. pie of Britain as good an impression cf this country as is cultivated by its own Inhabitants; In that way the money cost be-'----comes a bagatelle.