Alexandria Gazette

COMMUNICATED.
Hard Times.

If any one will take the trouble to read over the advertisements in our city dailies and compare the list of home products offered for sale with the products from other States and foreign countries, they will find twenty imported to one raised or manufactured within the borders of our State. They will find scores of advertisements which read in this way:

"Arrived this day 200 bbls. of New York apples, 50 bushels Peach Blow potatoes, 25 bushels of onions."

Now there are thousands and tens of thousands of acres on the eastern and western slopes of the Blue Ridge that cannot be excelled in the world for growing apples, and tens of thousands of acres in the Piedmont district equally as good for raising Peach Blow potatoes and onions, yet, at least, in this one instance, a thousand dollars in greenbacks has been sent out of the State, and out of Alexandria, to New York, for this cargo of apples, potatoes, and onions.

There is no finer, purer, nor sweeter flour in the world than the flour manufactured in the mills located between the Blue Ridge and the Potomac, yet these choice brands are set aside to make room for "Welch's celebrated flours."

"Just arrived another cargo of large split Labrador herring, Round Shore herring," &c.

"Maryland brand hams just received.

"Another advertises 750 lbs. of prime New York butter at 35 cents a pound, which adds to the currency of New York $262.50."

"Attention Gentlemen! We have purchased a large lot of gentlemen's shirts."

We'll wager a ginger-soap that the sewing women and girls in our midst and in so much need of work, had no hand in making these shirts, but like everything else, they were made north of Mason and Dixon's line.

"Burt's fine shoes for ladies and misses."

Mr. Burt, no doubt, lives in Massachusetts, and is making a fortune in furnishing "fine shoes" for Virginia ladies and misses.

"By New York steamer 10 tons of pressed cut hay at $25 per ton."

As good hay can be bought near Alexandria for $18-$4 for cutting would make it cost $22 per ton, but for the sake of helping the New York farmers to dispose of their hay crop a draft for $250 is immediately forwarded to Gotham for its equivalent in hay far inferior to our own. Surely a prophet is not without honor save in his own country. To complete the wholesale discrimination in favor of outside interests $300,000 is spirited away to be invested in Northern Pacific and St. Joe bonds and other wild-cat securities rather than invest in the gold-bearing bonds of our own railroads, or assist in building steamboats, schooners, ship-yards, iron works and factories, so much needed to build up the good old city. Shall we wonder that times are hard and money scarce in Virginia when her rulers and people prefer to buy foreign fabrics and invest in foreign speculating schemes rather than encourage home industry? "He that provideth not for his own household is worse than an infidel."

D. T.