EXHIBITIONS AND COLONIAL TRADE.

Patea Mail, 30 August 1882, Page 4

EXHIBITIONS AND COLONIAL TRADE.

A Hawke’s Bay journal remarks that the Australian colonies and New Zealand are already commencing to reap great benefit jrom the recent industrial exhibitions, and referring the withdrawal of America from the meat trade, says: Both as respects climate and the fertility of the soil, New Zealand especially is unequalled. Our oats are the best, our wool is the most eagerly purchased. The frozen meat trade, now in its infancy, demonstrates the fact that our stock are fully appreciated as an article of food. Undoubtedly a market close at hand is a wonderful advantage, and this is exactlywhat America will have in a very few years, simply because her enormous population will adsorb all its supplies. Croakers have us on this point of distance, but it is more apparent every day that New Zealand’s exports are superior in quality to those of other competitors, and that therefore such exports must represent a profitablereturn. The advantages which a decreasing export trade in America will give us need not be pictured. At present trade is a pigmy which will become a giant In the meantime England has absorbed our produce of all sorts ; she rules the prosperity of this country by her own. Every old colonist has bitter experience of what hard times mean when England’s trade is dull, her mills stopped, or her manufactories at a standstill. If then the result of these exhibitions be to throw open a wider field for trade, and so make us somewhat less easily affected by such fluctuations, we shall have reason to remember them as a public benefit, and as a source of increasing prosperity.