The Express.
London, England, 1861-10-30 00:00:00

TO OUR MADER&

SPORTING DITELLIGENCE.

A late edition of the Palmas is published every
evening during the racing season, containing the
results of the day's races.

Ar a time when the amount of our exports to
one or two of the markets we have hitherto chiefly
relied on is threatened with serious diminution, it
is peculiarly agreeable to find new and promising
outlets opening for the products of our industry.
When old customers grow parsimonious or poor,
the trader consoles himself with the prospect of
honest gain derivable from recently formed con-
nexions ; and if, as he notes the steady growth of
his business, he sees reason to believe that those
who have recently come to deal with him liked the
first samples they have had of his goods, and every
month take more and more of them, he naturally
and justly reckons upon the continuance and a
steady extension of transactions in which both
parties are likely to find their account. This is
our case just now with our French neighbours,
who, thanks to the Commercial Treaty, have for
the first time been brought during the present year
to look at a variety of English goods they had
never seen before. As everyone is aware, all the
provisions of the Treaty did not come into opera-
tion at the same time. Those regarding metals,
whether in the raw state or manufactured, were
the earliest to of stain legal force ; while such as re-
late to textile fabrics were practically suspended
until Midsummer, and others until Michaelmas.
No general estimate consequently could be formed
of the working of industrial intercourse between
the two countries under the new system during the
greater portion of the present year. In point
of fact it is only now that wo can fairly be said to
be about to begin the experiment of Free-trade
with France in good earnest ; and all that has
hitherto taken place must be regarded as no better
than trying to do business through a half-open
door. Notwithstanding all these drawbacks and
disadvantages, however, what do we see! Compar-
ing the month of September, 1860, with the cor-
responding month of 1861, we are equally surprised
and gratified with the amount of British exports
to France respectively made in them. In September
last year the money value of these transactions
was 470,0001. ; the same month of this year it
has reached the sum of 1,530,000/. Of this it is
true that somewhere about half a million must be
written off to the credit of wheat and'flour, and, as
such, may be regarded as exceptional in its cha-
racter. But the gratifying result remains, that in
articles of manufacture our exports to France in
the course of the single month of September this
year were more than double what they were in
the corresponding period of last year. But this is
not all. The total value of what we sold to our
French neighbours in the first nine months of
1860 was 3,730,000/. ; the total value of our
sales to our friends across the Channel in the first
nine months of the present year has been within a
fraction of Six Millions sterling. If, as wo have
said, this be done in the grown tree, what may not
be hoped in the dry

Nur are we without information cilium'', which
at once explains and confirms these gratifying
figures. Throughout the manufacturing districts,
but more especially in the West Riding of York-
shire, employers are beginning to find that the
new openings with France have come just in time
to afford a certain amount of compensation for the
partial closing of the American market. We
could name more than one great establishment in
the woollen trade whose hands are at the present
moment as busy as ever they were, and whose
prosperity is referable altogether to the prac-
tical transfer of shipments from Now York and
New Orleans to Havre and Marseilles. It will of
course take time before this can become general.
The middle and working classes must not only
see in shop windows • variety of unaccustomed
fabrics of utility marked at a low price, but they
must feel the comfort of them in every-day wear, '
before they can be expected to look for them
regularly, as our war-stricken cousins beyond the
ocean have long been accustomed to do. But
considering the time it takes to introduce new
habits of clothing among any people, and above all
among • fastidious and fanciful race like our'
good friends the French, it does seem to us, we
own, highly satisfactory that so much progress
should already have been made. The returns of
the Board of Trade attest, moreover, that this pro-
gress has been not in half-a-dozen branches of
manufacture, which might be supposed to be the
result of experimental speculation, but it is
made up of a number of items of the greatest
diversity of character, size, and value. In a word,
the expansion has about it all the marks and
tokens of a natural and healthful growth of the
whole tree of industry, and has nothing about it
of • mere top-heavy or lop-sided graft upon an
uucungenial stock. It will be contrary to all our
past experience of trade with other communities if
an enlarged intercourse thus cautiously and wisely
begun does not in due time reams the prognostics
of those who paved the way for it.
And then there is the other side of the question.