KING COTTON DETHRONED.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5167, 13 October 1877, Page 1 (Supplement)

KING COTTON DETHRONED.

(From the World.) Recently acorrespondent of The Times brought a great discovery to the notice of that journal in the following letter:—" I chanced lately to go into a village shop wherfl cotton goods are sold. On the counter lay a large piece of cotton cloth or calico on which was stamped an eagle on a rock, occupying ten inches, with the words, 'This cloth was made in America;' a second piece, also American, with the name of an English firm as agent, both a penny a yard cheaper than the English of the same, or rather inferior, quality." We must say that it takes our "enterprising" daily contemporaries a long time to find out what is going on in our own country. Their foreign correspondence, as a rule, is excellent; if a Hindoo does not get enough to eat, whole columns are suit about the awful incident from Calcutta ; but to events which are happening at our own doors they seem to pay no attention whatever. A fire, in which four poor creatures are burnt alive in London, is dismissed in three lines at the bottom of a column, while the submarine telegraph and a force of special correspondents are called in to report that " a drunken Cossack has killed a Roumanian peasant at Parapan." There appears to us to be great room for a paper which would condescend to give a little English news now and then. Nothing more important has ever happened in the history of English trade than the threatened displacement of our cotton manufactures by thuße of America. Yet we have for mouths looked iu vain, for a word in the " leading journals" on the subject. Piece goods from the Lonsdale Mills of New York State are now sold in every town in England at a lower price and of better quality than English goods of a nominally corresponding grade. Is not the falling off of our Lancashire trade very mysterious ? People who go about the world with their eyes shut think that it is. The fact is that the Americans are beating us in ouf own field—a fact which it may take the political economists and city editors a long time to digest, but which, unfortunately, will soon be brought home to us all by the spectacle of thousands of working men thrown permanently out of employment, and the hopeless paralysis of a chief source of our commercial prosperity. The disaster might still be warded off if our manufacturers would only bestir themselves to meet and dislodge their rivals ; but they are told by the city editor of the The Times and other authorities that "it is only a passing cloud ;" and although they have been told the same thing for three or four years, and the cloud has not passed, yet they go on believing it, and presently will be rudely shaken out of the fool's paradise in which they have been slumbering. We rppeatedly told the public last year in these columns that American manufactured cotton could be bought better and cheaper in London than the products of the Lancashire mills. It has taken The Times till .Tnly 1877 to find out the same piece of news. Hw long will it take ou.- contemporary to apprehend its full meaning and significance ?