COMMERCIAL VALUE OF THE COLONIES.

Westport Times, Volume IV, Issue 644, 12 April 1870, Page 2

COMMERCIAL VALUE OF THE COLONIES.

Sir George Grey, at one of the emigration meetings in London, said : " What would our commerce now have been if Australia and New Zealand were not in existence ? ■ For a long period of time after these colonies were founded, year by year large numbers of emigrants left England, sent out to the colonies, the British Government applying for purposes of emigration the land funds of these colonies. So long as that system went on, so long had England continued prosperity." And Mr R. D. Ross, Assistant Commissary-General, writing to the Times, says : —" Even now the mere handful of people in Australasia are of greater commercial advantage to this country, as tested by the value of exports from the United Kingdom, than the Dominion of Canada, Prince Edward's Island, Newfoundland, British Columbia, Bermuda, Jamaica, Trinidad, Guiana, the other 12 British West India Islands, Honduras, the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Mauritius, Ascension, Gibraltar, and the Channel Islands—or, if foreign countries are compared, than Russia, Sweden, Portugal, and Spain lumped together. Then, again, the export trade of Australasia exceeds the export trade of all the colonies just enumerated, with that of Ceylon added. These statements have reference to the statistics of 1808. In those colonies thereare a greater number (49,500,000) of sheep and horned cattle than are to be found in either the United Kingdom, or in Prance, or in Austria, or even in the United States of America, where there are only 45,500,000. As to the energy with which all kinds of public works have been prosecuted, and of t v ne capacity of the country for sustained progress in that direction, I need only point to the fact that in 1867 the combined gross revenue (£10,050,000) of the six Australasian colonies—l omit Western Australia—was in excess of the united gross revenue of the whole of British North America, from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean ; of the whole of the British Possessions in the West Indies, in Africa, in the East, in the Channel, and the Mediterranean; in fact, exceeded the united gross revenue (about £8,000,000) of all England's colonial possessions."