COMMERCIAL.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 4299, 31 December 1874, Page 2

COMMERCIAL.

THE AMERICAN COMMERCIAL OUTLOOK. (From the New York Herald , Oct. 20.) The condition of business during the present autumn is not only a test of the wild theories broached in Congress last winter, but a tolerably sure criterion for estimating future prospects. The pretence so vehemently urged for many months after the panic, that the chief need of the country was more currency, is of course exploded by the great abundance of money at this season of the year, when the movement of the Western grain crop is at its height. The banks have more money than the community can use, and there has never been an autumn when loans could be obtained at such low rates on good security. This ought to have been foreseen during the crazy inflation clamor. The amount of money needed bears some proportion to the Amount of business, and an immense curtailment of business was a necessary consequence of the panic which toppled so many great houses to the ground. The men who failed were among the most daring and adventurous members of the business community. They were engaged in sinking vast amounts of active capital in enterprises like the Northern Pacific Railroad, which could bring in no returns in this generation, and extending manufactures beyond the ability of consumers. After the crash not only was the money misemployed in these undertakings set free for other uses, but the class of pushing men who had given' an unhealthy stimulus to business were disabled from again perpetrating this kind of mischief. The amount of currency remaining the same, and the uses for it being so greatly diminished, it was a necessary, and ought to have been a foreseen consequence, that the supply of money would for qiiite a period be in excess of the demand. A contemporary calls attention to a fact which is one of many illustrations of the difficulty of finding profitable employment for money at present. Within the last thirty-six days ten millions of dollars of city taxes have been paid. This forwardness to pay taxes is without precedent, the experience of previous years having been that money could bo employed to better advantage in the early part of autumn. And yet, with money so cheap and abundant, there have been some failures within the last week or two. These failures are of little significance, however, except to the houses immediately interested. Nobody interprets them as premonitory symptoms of another panic. The general business of the country is too contracted and too cautiously conducted to admit of a wide collapse. There is nothing surprising, certainly nothing alarming, in the fact that a few houses which barely rubbed through the embarrassments of last year by the leniency of creditors or the assistance of friends find themselves unable to go on. Their hopes of getting through depended on a full revival of business this autumn, which has proved a vain expectation. Especially in cases like that of Mr. Clews, who was prostrated by the panic, but set on his feet again by the favor and confidence of friends, everything was staked on a large and profitable business this fall. But the general business of the country rests at present ort a solid basis of actual capital, and cannot be shaken by a few sporadic failures.