AUSTRALASIAN PROGRESS

Patea Mail, 15 February 1881, Page 3

AUSTRALASIAN PROGRESS

The recently-issued tabulated returns, showing the present commercial position of the seven great members of the Australasian group, are, says a‘writer in the Australian and New Zealand Gazette , as encouraging as they are instructive, and that is saying much. An analysis of the statistics, which reflect high credit on their compiler, shows that at the close of 1879 the total population of the whole continent was 2,211,655, or, if we add the population of New Zealand, we reach a grand total of 2,659,799 souls. Let us see what this population has accomplished in point of material progress—a population considerably under two and threequarter of a million, and consequently very much less than the present population of the metropolis ot the British Islands. The total revenue for the six colonies of the continent was for the period under notice .£12,792,383 or } adding New Zealand, £15,927,488. The gross value of the imports for the same year for all seven colonies was £47,878,783, and that ot the exports £41,276,856, reaching a grand total of some ninety millions sterling, as representing the mercantile activity of these, in round numbers, two-and-a-half millions of a community whose working members must be much under a million.