TRADE WITH AUSTRALIA.
TIM latest accounts from Sydney present an anomalous state of trade, which is not peculiar to that town, but has been observed be- fore in Melbourne, and in a very minor degree at Adelaide. There had been "few arrivals with supplies either from Great Britain or from foreign ports"; and great excitement prevailed on the part of sellers, buyers being proportionately stunned at the consequent prices. "Advances on cost price in England, taken not partially but generally, not as the exceptions of trade but as its rule, were never so enormous as now," writes the Sydney _Morning Herald of April 20: " our commercial report of yesterday," it continues, "gives rates of advance almost as high as 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, and even 2400 per cent."
These irregularities are very distressing, no doubt, to sober econo- mists, who perceive the waste which is involved in transactions of suet disproportionate exchange ; but we believe that the evil will cure itself. It is to be hoped, indeed, that these reports of ex- orbitant prices will not stimulate some random "shovelling out" of goods, to take advantage of a market described in April, but perhaps in a very different condition in October or December. It is this random trading that has contributed to the fluctuations of the Australian markets. The steadier if more moderate returns of regular trading will no doubt teach merchants to pursue their business according to the principles invariably found best in the long run.
It is quite natural that the Australian trade should have been abnormal for some time. The sudden development of the gold- digging population, the careless habits of individuals, the many cases of disappointment, have all imparted a provisional character to the state of things, which fundamentally is not provisional. The extent of the gold-fields, some 500 miles long by 100 broad, and the renewed profit derived from diggings already out of fashion, such as the Hanging Rock, prove that the gold-digging population, or something to resemble it, is a permanent institution in Austra- lia; while the trade and settlement will continue to develop them- selves, probably with a steady acceleration.
Merchants who have sent out special cargoes, hastily got up on report of prices, probably to meet an altered state of the market on arrival, cannot have failed to observe how often the profits which they expected had been anticipated by merchants on the spot, who had timed their supplies and their transactions better, because they had ready access to full information, and had sent home specific instructions without waste of time or purpose. Ma- nufacturers who have resorted to the species of delusive practice of sending out consignments on their own account have probably found that what was saved in agency was often lost in mistaking the character of the market. In these respects, some considerable houses have had a better example set them by humbler traders; who, content to trust to a really bolder, though soberer kind of en- terprise, have not treated the state of trade in Australia as pro- visional, but have taken some steps to establish permanent agencies or permanent branches of their own business in the towns of Aus- tralia. Such men are in a condition, we may say, to conduct their business with a local knowledge ; and they are not liable to the mistakes which must have been made by random traders, specu- lating consigners, or slaves of " quotations " from the Antipodes. This steadier species of communication with Australia will no doubt develop itself as the regular and random kind of trading gradually gives place ; and thus we anticipate that the vexatious irregularities of which our Australian contemporaries complain are already by the force of events, in course of effective correction.
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