IMPORTS OF IRON.
This limited acquaintance with German statistics has caused the correspondent to go wrong on other occasions. For instance, in the fourth article he produces a table purporting to show our iron trade with Germany, in which the iron exports from Germany to England cut a very insignificant figure beside the English exports to Germany. To quote his own words in another place—“Most impressive! if only it were true.” I had occasion the other day to get out a detailed list of the German exports to England of iron and steel manufactures in 1891; they reached a total of 109,956 tons. The correspondent gives 11,000 tons as the total of iron manufactures; the complete total of iron and steel manufactures, according to the source whence he obviously drew his information, was about 16,000 tons. The explanation is of course that the English returns do not always show the actual place of origin. (It doesn’t matter much; competition in any other name hits just as hard, and Germany, after all, is but one rival out of many. I only used her as an instance of foreign competition generally.)