Poverty Bay Herald AND East Coast News Letter. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. MONDAY, MARCH 24, 1879.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VI, Issue 658, 24 March 1879, Page 2

Poverty Bay Herald AND East Coast News Letter. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. MONDAY, MARCH 24, 1879.

In a former article, referring to the commercial condition of Poverty Bay, we mentioned that we had no local manufactures, to supplement the natural wealth and the industries of the towns and their numerous districts ; but, we think, there is no reason why this should long continue to be the case. The shearing season has just passed oyer us, and we have seen hundreds of dray loads of wool drawn to the outer wharf to be placed in lighters and conveyed on board ship, to be carried to England, and thence, at heavy cost and charges, to be sold in a market depressed beyond all precedent. By and hy, this same wool will recross twelve or fourteen thousand miles of ocean, and be delivered to us in woollen manufactured goods of many descriptions, with, of course, the cost of manufacture and the manufacturers profits added. The flannel shirt the bushman wears is possibly made from the wool ofthe sheep he himself has shorn. The blanket of the settler and the flannel underclothing of his wite may have come from the station for which a large value has been given. Is it not possible that we can turn our own wool to account! Would it require much capital, or any costly skill to convert j

the hides we export into leather ; the skins of sheep into the many uses it is employed when properly prepared for the market ; our tallow into soap and candles. Hundreds of tons of bones are bleaching through the districts unused, when with a very little simple machinery, they might, after being gathered up, be crushed for bone dust mauure, for which there is always a ready and mostprofitable sale. The low price of wool, and the cost of exporting it, certainly ought to suggest to us the necessity of seeking fresh fields of industrial development. To be dependant altogether on wool in its raw state, means that we are at the mercy of those natural vicissitudes of commerce, which periodically arise, and which we can neither foresee nor guard against. In an economic point of view, having in pastoral districts no exports of any consequence beyond that of wool, a fall in the price of that article, and more especially so great as that at present affects, and will continue to affect, the whole financial arrangements of the colony. This fact, of itself, will readily be accepted as a good and sufficient reason for the creation of new industries. To allow I a people the full sense of society and communion of interests, there must be a variety and interchange of products, manufactures, and employments. Without these, we are failing to fulfil those duties which pertain to the people of a new country, such as New Zealand. If we continue content only with wool, and cattle, and horses, with a decreasing yield of gold, and an indifferent market for cereals, we shall not only continue pooi', and subject to all sorts of commercial reverses, but we shall cease to rank as against other colonies. Country life needs the quickening influences of town, trade, manufacture, and other industries. The towns are nothing without the country, but towns cannot live and grow without enterprises, which do not come of the country. It is the union of the two — the combination of men trained to various occupations, which makes a poor country rich, and a rich countiy great. Happily, out of misfortune oftentimes comes good. The potato famine in Ireland, for a time, caused much suffering and distress ; but it resulted in this great good. It taught the people of Ireland that they must cease to depend upon potato crops, if no more famines were to follow. So Irish farmers took to growing wheat, and fattening cattle, at the same time creating other industries, and Ireland to day is prosperous beyond, what a quarter of a century ago, the imagination could have pictured. So with us, the depreciation in the price of wool, the xmlikelihood that it will ever again fetch former rates, will lead the people to look to something else than the mere idle pursuit of allowing the land to be used for sheep to feed on, until the wool is fit to be shorn from the

carcase.