A HOUSEHOLD INDUSTRY.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 5, 25 February 1871, Page 11

A HOUSEHOLD INDUSTRY.

Pettit is so plentiful this year in all parts of the province that early apples, plums, and peaches are, as we are assured by several correspondents, actually,,rotting by bushels on the ground. And yet we continue to import bottied fruit from Europe, and jams from Tasmania as well as Europe! This is not a healthy state of things. Instead of importing we ought to be exporting such commodities as these. And it becomes well worth the consideration of the Government, whether it could not allow a drawback on exported jams equal to the amount of duty paid on the sugar used in their manufacture. We do not pretend to believe that the heavy duty on sugar prevents the manufacture of jams either for domestic or foreign consumption, for we are persuaded that this is not the cause. The fact is, the absence of long and severe winters in this colony is unfavorable to domestic industry, indoor occupations, and those household manufactures which in less favored countries, though taken but little notice of by political economists, tend largely to augment tbe national wealth. But what is denied by nature is sometimes supplied by art; and it becomes a question for the true statesman to consider whether those household industries which prove materially and morally so advantageous to the people of other countries, and which have grown spontaneously as it were from the soil, could not with equal advantage be transplanted here, and become, under the fostering care of the Government, like the products of the vegetable and animal kingdom, successfully acclimatized. Without caring to inquire whether a drawback, or even a bonus on exported jams would be a violation of the principles of the Manchester School of Economists, it is worth recording that that school .just now is in very bail odour in England, which, according to the “Pall Mall Gazette,” has sunk into such utter discredit that the very name has become a by-word, and a hissing in the counties in which its existence began. The question is whether such a drawback or bonus would tend to establish an industry which would prove highly beneficial to our farmers, while it could not injure any other class in the community. As in Tasmania, the time will, come when the jam trade of this colony will augment the income of the former »n4ttye wealth of New Zealand,