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New Zealand Mail, Issue 422, 13 March 1880, Page 14

The British Board of Trade returns for the month of February are more satisfactory than any issued for a long time past. The imports, amounting to £33,250,000, show an increase of £4,562,000 compared with those of the corresponding month in last year. This, in itself, is but a doubtful gain to Home producers, because it indicates the large extent to which England is compelled to seek food supplies from abroad ; but still it shows there must have been, during the month, an increase in the imports of manufacturers' raw material. The return of exports, aggregating £17,437,500, show a satisfactory increase of £3,781,250 on the return for the corresponding month in the previous year. The detailed Board of Trade returns for January will not come to hand until the delivery of the in-coming San Francisco mail, but those for December bear testimony of a steady revival in Home trade, and evidences of this are likely to be repeated in both the January and February returns, judging from the brief items already cabled. Referring to an authority already to hand, we find that in the year 1877, the exports from Great Britain exceeded the imports by £2,648,085, while in 1878 the reverse was the case ; the imports then exceeding the exports by £5,811,578. And again, in 1879, the balance was on the wrong side to the extent of £4,544,256. Thus the evidence of an increase in the opposite direction of no less than three and a half millions in one month is a most cheering indication of a genuine revival of profitable trade, and in this the colonies, as the producers of one of the main staples of British industry, must necessarily share. As remarked by the chairman of the Union Bank of Australia at a shareholders' meeting, held in London on 12th January last, "a rise on the low average of only 2d. per pound means an additional sum of over £2,000,000 in the pockets of the flockmasters." That average has been already reached, and the wool market has still an upward tendency. But it is not in the increased value of wool alone that Britain and her colonies will find mutual profit in the revival of the Home trade. An increase of exports from Great Britain, in the present position of the world's finance, will not indicate any undue speculative ventures. Trade, in all its branches, has of late undergone a crucial test, resulting in the abandonment of much that was unsafe or doubtful. There has

been an effectual check placed on haphazard . commercial ventures, and just as importers in this and other colonies have been compelled by force of stringent circumstances to limit their imports to legitimate requirements, so also have exporters from the Home markets become chary of casting their bread upon the waters with a too sanguine faith in problematical returns. An increase in exports from Great Britain, so far as the colonies are concerned, may be accepted, therefore, as an assurance of renewed confidence in commercial affairs on this side of the world, and which must result in mutual and, we may hope, permanent advantage.