LOCAL INDUSTRIES WEEK.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16551, 15 May 1914, Page 8

LOCAL INDUSTRIES WEEK.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —During one week of the year we hear a lot about the advisability of supporting goods of New Zealand manufacture. Why do the manufacturers confine their patriotic campaigns to one single week in the whole year? Is it because they are not sincere? It seems to me that they kick up a fuss and bluff the public for one week as a blind, while the rest of the year their travellers and representatives are pushthe sale of imported goods, which these manufacturers import and stock so largely. Surely the directors of our woollen companies should be above importing English-made flannel and should exert their energies in the direction of improving and increasing the output of New Zealand-made flannels. New Zea-land-made flannels are made of wool grown in New Zealand, while the English flannels (which are imported, largely by one of the leading woollen companies not a thousand miles from Christchurch) are probably made of wool grown in the Argentine. Why should New Zealanders be encouraged by our local woollen mills to wear wool grown in a foreign country when their own country produces the finest wool in the world?—l am, etc., i GENUINE PATRIOT.