too, is carried in ships which are wholly or chiefly British owned. As in other places, the United States and Germany have pushed for business, and the former managed in 1908 to export over a million's worth of goods to the Colony, while taking nothing like an equivalent value of colonial produce in, return. The New Zealand Parliament has, however, passed a Preferential Trade Act, which has increased many duties on non-British imports to an extent certain to handicap both American and German merchants. It must be added that the unfriendly navigation laws of the United States, which virtually shut out our steamers from Californian ports, have roused no small feeling in the Colony. Good and cheap steam and telegraphic communication with the outside world is a prime necessity of New Zealand. In the way of cargo-boats there are few countries of her size which are better served. Thanks, too, to the All-red Pacific Cable, the cost of cable messages has lately been lowered to 8s. a word. But letters still take a minimum of thirty-one days to reach London, and passengers, unless prepared to scurry across from San Francisco to New York with the mail-bags, must spend from forty to fifty days in the journey.
The trade above mentioned still consists almost wholly of the export of food and raw material, and the import of manufactured goods. Wool, frozen meat, gold, butter, kauri gum, hemp, cheese, oats, hides, and tallow are the chief articles shipped outwards. Wheat and barley are only grown for home consumption; indeed, the entire area devoted to cereals now only equals one-sixteenth of the land laid down in English—i.e., artificial—grasses.
There is almost no transit trade: the exports are the produce of the Colony; the imports are for local use. In some cases the exports undergo processes which, like the refrigeration of meat and butter, the scouring of wool, tanning of skins, and sawing of timber, may be termed the first rough processes of manufacture.
