THAT INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION.

Observer, Volume XVI, Issue 953, 3 April 1897, Page 3

THAT INDUSTRIAL EXHIBITION.

Tlie Idea Taken Up at I^ast.

Six weeks ago —that is to say in our issue of February 20th— we strongly urged the expediency of .taking the necessary steps to hold an Industrial Exhibition in Auckland that should be worthy of the city and be also a fitting reflex of its industrial resources. We pointed to the financial success which had attended similar Industrial Exhibitions at Wellington some months since, and at Christchurch eighteen months ago. We also dwelt upon the stimulus such an exhibition would afford to our local industries, if confined to local products, by impressing the public with ocular demonstration of the ability of our own people to compete in cheapness and quality of goods with the foreign producer.

Our appeal was directed to those who are actually engaged in local industries, for we were disposed to believe that little help or sympathy need be expected from a body like the Chamber of Commerce which might be snpposed to reflect the sentiments of oar large importers. But the manufacturing interests, in whose cause we wrote, made no sign. We therefore returned to the subject three weeks later, and published the letter of a correspondent who condemned some of the methods parsued by the Executive of the Wellington Industrial Exhibition. He was, however, in entire accord with the expediency of holding an Industrial Exhibition in Auckland, and recognised the practical benefits that would flow from it. But, as before, the local manufacturers, who ought to be the readiest to discern the potentialities of such an Exhibition for helping forward the development of their various industrial enterprises, remained inert and maintained their silence.

Now, however, help has come from a quite unexpected quarter. Mr B. Kent, the Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce with the shrewd foresight of a live business man who has the welfare of the city at heart, has warmly taken up the suggestions thrown out by as, and means to crystallise them into a definite undertaking. He saw for himself the Wellington Industrial Exhibition, noted the tangible benefits it had compassed for the manu. facturing interests of Wellington, and

quickly perceived how/much more favorable were the conditions for bringing to successful fruition a similar enterprise in Auckland. . The Execntive Committee of the Chamber of Commerce is quite in agreement with its Chairman on this subject, and Mr Kent is now busy collating the necessary data preparatory, to placing the affair before the public, and [calling upon them to assist in launching it.

The intention is to make it a public enterprise in -the broadest acceptation of the term. All sections of the community will be invited to share in directing and controlling it. Bat the predominant and determining idea will be to make of it a fall and complete exposition of the industrial resources and manufacturing skill of this part of the colony. On this Bubject of an Auckland Industrial [Exhibition, we have received the following letter from Mr Samuel Brown, who was president of the Exhibition so recently held in Wellington : —