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Oamaru Mail, Volume IV, Issue 1178, 26 January 1880, Page 2

America expects to achieve considerable commercial benefit from sending its manufactures to the Melbourne Industrial Exhibition to be held in October next. The Press of that country assert that it will then be demonstrated to their cousins at the Antipodes that the Americans are in a better position to commercially treat with them than Great Britain, " that " (in the language of the New York Era) " the products of their country are better adapted than those of Great Britain for the wants of a continent with a vast territory and a sparse wealthy population, where the wages of labor are higher and the purchasing power of the people larger than any other part of the world—except, perhaps, our own Far West." It appears that Australia now imports American goods to the value of several miliions of dollars per annum. But it imports British goods to the tune of 150,000 of dollars within the same period. It is this that has increased the desire of the Americans for more intimate relations with these Colonies. Its newspapers express a hope that a considerable portion of the gigantic trade which this amount involves will ultimately be diverted to America. It will not be the fault of the tactics of our transPacific cousins if it should not be. Their perseverance acknowledges no rebuff. They are obliging in the extreme, and their solicitude for business might easily be mistaken for a desire solely to confer benefit upon those whom they seek to make customers. Their advertising—not ! ° only newspaper, but every other kind—is i perfect. By word painting and convincing | arguments, woodennutmegsare transferred into the delightfully aromatic reality. But their eye 3 have been opened to a serious flaw in their policy. A prohibitory import duty on wool, amounting to between 50 and GO per cent, of the value, is starving its mills. In their anxiety to protect their manufactories they have taxed the raw materials necessary to produce them, for it i 3 generally acknowledged that no country can compete in the markets of the world in woollens unless it introduces into its manufactories a modicum of Australian or New Zealand wool. The Victorians made the same mistake when they imposed a heavy tax on reapers and binders. These blunders arc the outcome of inordinate enthusiasm rather than deliberate calculation, and give some color to the denunciations of the opponents of protection. Such a blot might be erased from the commercial policy of America without in the smallest degree showing a weakness for a return to free trade. Divested of all such unnatural excreaences, protection would present an appearance that would deprive its opponents of any valid objections to it.