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Auckland Star, Volume IX, Issue 2711, 28 December 1878, Page 2

The commercial depression in England, and the partial paralysis of numerous great industries has had the effect of directing the attention of many capitalists to the Australian Colonies,and especially toNewZealand as a field, not only for agricultural and pastoral settlement, and absorption of surplus labour, but for the establishment of those industrial enterprises which are languishing at home. We may judge of the condition of affairs in the old country by a perusal of the leading English journals, and the appalling array of strikes, lock-outs, and commercial failures which follow each otlmr in all parts of Great Britain in rapid succession. In very many manufacturing districts the " short time" working system has been adopted as an alternative to closing mills and workshops. Excessive competition and over-production have necessitated a check equal to a loss of one to three days work in the week. One leading English mercantile organ states that a large number of capitalists, in their haste to get rich, have been tempted into trading of the wildest and most ruinous character, and that all the markets of the world have been glutted with English goods, not because there existed a chance of selling them at a profit, but to raise money and to maintain an air of fictitious prosperity. Contemporaneous with this, English manufacturers have been struggling with competition abroad. German cutlery has actually been sold in Sheffield at two-thirds the local cost of production, and other goods are similarly placed. Since 1874, the wages of the ironworkers have been reduced one-half. The reduction in the cost of manufacture in all classes of goods has led to a still greater excess of production, and a corresponding decrease in price to " coax the consumer to patronise Great Britain, to the exclusion of other countries." Even the farmers complain that they cannot pay the wages now demanded by the men. The colonial exhibits at the Paris Exposition produced a very powerful impression on the popular mind of England. The wool, gold, iron, coal, copper, and other raw materials of the colonies showed that at the antipodes a vast and profitable field is open for the exercise of industrial skill and the employment of capital. It is only necessary to make the people of Great Britain understand that another England' exists in the Southern Hemisphere to^ vastly increase the volume of the stream of emigration with little or no Government assistance. Truly "it is an ill-wind that blaws naebody gude."