“ARTFUL AND INGENIOUS.”
But what of your correspondent’s method? With a large air of virtuous impartiality he adopts 1886 for his starting-point all through his tables. It may be my denseness, but beyond meaningless uniformity, I can see absolutely nothing in this method to commend it. I see, however, that it is very useful for optimistic purposes. Did it not strike the reader that, in most industries, 1886 was a year of bad trade, and that therefore its adoption as a starting year of comparison would result in a very inaccurate view of England’s former industrial glory? If I felt inclined to adopt his language towards myself I might be tempted to say that his choice of years was “artful” and “ingenious,” for to say, with blunt frankness, “I will take the last decade and stick to it all through,” is an admirable way to score with the unsuspecting public. The pose of impartiality is excellent. Your correspondent’s figures are doubtless as correct as they are interesting, but (in the light of the explanation I have given) I submit that those diagrams might as well have remained undrawn; they do not destroy the tables in “Made in Germany,” and, so far as dates are concerned, are ineffectual as a commentary.
THE ABUSE OF STATISTICS.
Your correspondent has a better case for his diagrams when he gives weights as a set-off against money figures, and I cannot, of course, take exception to the use of those statistics. But I do take exception to their abuse; and when he attempts to draw from them the inference that the British manufacturer has nothing to complain of in the matter of falling prices, I suggest that there is an abuse. Of course, in some industries the decrease in the price of raw material has made it possible to manufacture for a lower price, but your correspondent goes much farther than the facts warrant when he assumes that the difference in price is balanced by an all-round difference in raw material. He forgets, for example, that coal, which in most manufactures is an item of prime importance in the cost of production, is not cheaper than it used to be in his favourite year 1886. Then the average price was 8·45s. per ton, in 1894 it was 10·50s. per ton. Wages, too, are an even more important item, and these are on the upward grade. So also are rent, rates and taxes. Take his champion instance of the cotton trade. Men used to make fortunes at it. Whoever hears of fortunes being made to-day in cotton manufacture? What we do learn is that recently fifty-two out of ninety-three spinning companies were paying no dividend at all. Prices are cut because of foreign competition. The foreigners have to cut their prices too, but that does not make the fact of foreign competition any the less disagreeable. I still think, therefore, that I followed the right method in laying more stress on money than on weights and measures, and anyway no harm could be done by it, because I used money figures for comparison in both the English and the German tables. To read your correspondent one would imagine that I had confined myself to money figures when tabulating English trade, and to weights when giving the corresponding instances from Germany. Your correspondent was so preoccupied with my skilful conveyance of false impressions that he apparently overlooked the misleading nature of many of his own impressions.