NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13278, 10 September 1906, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

PLENTY OF ROOM YET IN

AMERICA.

Mr. H. G. Wells, who has been on a. visit to America recently, giving his impressions of that country in an English paper, says: —"The long distances of travel and the sense of isolation between place and place, the remoteness verging upon .inaudibility of Washington in Chicago, of Chicago in Boston, the vision I have had of America from observation cars and railroad windows brings home to me more and more that this huge development of human appliances and resources is here going on in a community that is still, for all the dense crowds of New York, the teeming congestion of East Side, extraordinarily scattered. America, one recalls, is still an unoccupied country, across which the latest developments of civilisation are rushing. We are dealing here with a continuous area of land which is, leaving Alaska out of account altogether, equal to Great Britain, France, the German Empire, the Austro-Hungariau Empire, Italy, Belgium, Japan, Holland, Spain and Portugal, Sweden and Norway, Turkey in Europe. Egypt and.the whole Empire of India; and the population spread out over this vast space is still less than! the joint population of the first two countries named and not a-quarter that of India. Moreover, it is not spread at all evenly. Much of it is in undisturbed clots. It is not upon the soil, barely half of it is in holdings and homes and authentic communities. It is a population of an extremely modern type. Urban concentration has already gone far with it; 15 millions of it are crowded into and about 20 great cities, other 18 millions make up 500 towns. Between these centres of population run railways indeed, telegraph wires, telephone connections, tracks of various sorts, but to the European eye these are mere scratchings on a virgin surface. An empty wilderness manifests itself through this thin network of human conveniences, appears in the meshes even at the railroad side. Essentially America is still an unsettled land, with only a few incidental good roads in favoured places, with no universal police, with no wayside inns where a civilised man may rest, with still only the crudest- of rural postal deliveries, with long stretches of swamp and forest and desert by the track side, still unassailed by industry. This much one sees clearly enough eastward of Chicago. Westward, I am told, it becomes more and more the fact. In Idaho at last, comes the untouched and perhaps invincible desert, plain and continuous through the long hours of travel. Huge areas do not contain one human being to the square mile, still vaster portions fall short of two. A LOST INDUSTRY. It is probably unique in the history oil commerce to see, during' half a century, the birth of an English industry, its rise to a commanding position—practically to a world-wide monopoly—and then to witness its decline to comparative insignificance, while another nation does the trade of the world in it, and draws the world':; profits as a reward for its achievement. That is, however, the story of the aniline dyes, the. jubilee of whose discovery was recently celebrated in London by a banquet to the discoverer of the process and the creator of the business, Sir William Henry Perkin, on whom the King has just conferred tho honour of knighthood in recognition of that and other services to the cause of science. Our loss of the aniline dyes industry, which, 30 years ago, was worth between three and four millions sterling a year-, and is now worth only about a beggarly half-million, has given an annual trade valued at some ten millions sterling to Germany and Switzerland. That of the former has been calculated, at a moderate estimate, as being worth from eight to eight and a-half million pounds, while that of Switzerland is set at from a million to a million and a-half. The result is that Britain has now to import between £4,000,000 and £5,000,000 worth of dye stuffs every year, instead of manufacturing all it needs, and all that the rest of the world needs, as it used to do. This 6taiie of affairs has been due to the apathy on the part of British manufacturers, who have allowed the trade to be wrested from them because they would not advance with the times, and were too short-sighted to see that new processes were demanded by new discoveries which cheapened the cost of production.