Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News THURSDAY, MAY 13, 1909. OUR INADEQUATE EXPORTS.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVII, Issue 4410, 13 May 1909, Page 2

Te Aroha AND Ohinemuri News

THURSDAY, MAY 13, 1909. OUR INADEQUATE EXPORTS.

This above all—to thine own self be true , And it must follow as the night the day Thou canst not then be false to any man Shakespeare .

While we desire to promote a spirit of cheery patience with regard to the present financial stringency we have no wish to close our eyes to facts, nor to overlook the significance of those facts. Between the years 1895 and 1907 the value of our imports per head more than doubled itself, whilst our exports remained considerably under the duplicate. Last year our exports fell by more than three million sterling below 1907, and this year they have sunk still lower, in fact they are well over four million sterling less than they were in 1907.

Money is tight and no wonder. To 1 be bled financially at this rate necesI sarily produces a general commercial j decline. In the cities it is all too ! obvious. Business houses anxious j to put in as cheerful a courage as i possible are yet reluctantly comI pelled to admit that they are overI staffed. Again, finding themselves I with an overplus of stock at the I end of the reason, they are I “ slaughtering ” their goods at ! painfully low figures, for the "buyers’ restricted purchasing power demands it. Good employees are finding themselves looking for billets with a diminished chance of finding the same, and there are not wanting some of the features of the depression of twenty-five years ago. We have no desire to exaggerate, although, as we pointed out in an article on the subject some months ago, the destruction of the world’s wealth, which has taken place in the wars of the last decade is tellingjin

the present depression. It is quite impossible to destroy property with-* out inflicting loss, and the American i War with Spain, the English War with the Boers, the Russian War with Japan, simply demolished the millions and millions of capital which were devoted to their conduct We are quite sufficiently involved in the common scheme of thiDgs to bear our share in the general loss. But apart from this, and apart also from the effect of the recent fall in wool, both of them circumstances beyond our control, there remains several factors potent for promoting a better state of things. We need more capital. But the vexatious and harrassing misapplication of our labour legislation is effectual in driving capital out of our midst. The notorious Dixon case last year was an instance of this misapplication of our labour legislation. Further, we need to have the enter prise and thrift which characterise private enterprise applied to state. But instead of this we are perpetually mulct in roads tmd railways, and the state of some of our back blocks recalls the words of the venerable wayfarer, who, in the unroaded days having made bis way to Moriinsville announced “ Here be I, but where be Waitoa?” We require to have our population distributed over the entire face of the Dominion, to have the locked up Crown Lands and Native Lands titled, fenced, and roaded. It is ridiculous that the natives should passess land on terms which insure to them an increment from the general advance of the country, an advance which they are doing practically nothing to promote. All the land in the Dominion needs opening up, and every man who holds land, on any terms whatsoever, ought to be made to work it or sell or lease it to someone who will work it. We should then have a wellp. opled, prosperous country, with moderate sized and slumless towns, centres of commerce and manufacture and distribution scattered throughout the length and breadth of it. Our agriculturalists sending forth to the uttermost markets the wealth derived from the soil, could bring thence the sinews of war, whereby to keep the forces of our manufacture on the march toward great achievement. /Vages would be high and work and capital plentiful, and we should be in a position to open our manufacturing houses ito the artizan from the Old Land, who unfortunately now finds himself distinctly gratuitous here. There would be no more talk of “ nearing the million ” in a land which is a perpetual invitation, a veritable El Dorado to covetous outsiders.