AMERICA AND AUSTRALASIA.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 17, 20 May 1871, Page 4

AMERICA AND AUSTRALASIA.

It is truly refreshing to read the following from the San Francisco Evening Bulletin of March 8 :—“ What America supplies to Australian imports : The amount of American goods used in Australia can hardly be ascertained, but it must amount to several millions of dollars. In what may be called the domestic department, American manufactures reign almost supreme. The flour from which the bread is made, the oven in which it is baked, and the broom with which the industrious housewife clears away dust and cobwebs, all hail from America. Enter the house of an artisan, his own property in most cases, and you will find that it is built of American lumber ; the doors, windows and sashes are American ; the chair in which you sit is American. The table on which he takes his frugal meal, and the wooden bedsteads where he sleeps, are American. If he has bacon for dinner, the chances are that it once ran free in the woods of Ohio; if he has fish, they have come from Newfoundland ; his coffee is from Jamacia, and his rice is from Carolina. If he has babies about the home, they are fed on maizena from New York. No lumberer will use any other than an American axe, and the traveller arms himself with a revolver from America. Tubs, pails, and wooden ware in general are all American. Yet very little of the trade is carried on in American ships or from American ports. It passes through the hands of some English house, whose owners make sure of their precentage before it reaches the merchant in Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Adelaide, Hobart Town, or Brisbane. All this trade of right, belongs to us; the most of the articles are found or manufactured at our doors, and we fail to profit by the opportunity afforded us. This commerce by itself alone is capable of supporting a fleet of

swift steamers. But the articles mentioned are only a small portion of those which are at the present moment sold as cheaply in this city as in Melbourne, which could be laid down there at the same cost at which English goods are, and which would be in superior condition to the latter on arrival, owing to the much shorter sea voyage.”