It is perhaps impossible to do more than briefly intimate the slow development of Australian trade with what is to her the Near East. At least there is one thing to be said. The stupid, ill-informed and sometimes vicious attacks made upon the representatives of Commonwealth in the East have suddenly ceased. Now the other side is being "heard The very brief references of Senator Bakhap left the impression that he had much more to say, and had probably officially said it. Now we are reading in the papers the statements of Mr. Jones and Mr. Robinson (taking fictitious names) in which they explain that there is big trade to be done in the East, but Australians do not attempt to do it. Details are gone into, agencies are suggested, and Senator Bakhap's advice to establish banking facilities is not nored. It is not to be expected that T should advertise, unasked, the commercial travellers who say these things, but it is well to show that Mr. E. Little, in Shanghai, and his colleague, Mr. Sheaf, in Malaya, are very fully justifying the reasons of their appointments, namely, the fact that the Australian business ran is, in the vernacular, "too slow to catch worms." That they are hurrying him up ijn the race is so self-evident that the Press most hostile to. the Government 18 either silenced, or has lost its place ili the great anti-Trade-Commis-siamer stunt.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.