THE CHARGE OF DATE-COOKING.
He reviles me for my dates, and in his own diagrams proves the wisdom of my choice. The object of my book was to show that England’s industrial supremacy was departing. Clearly the way to do this was to show the height to which that supremacy had attained, and to contrast it with the position to-day. Now, his first diagram shows that the highest point was reached at the commencement of the nineties. Of course, therefore, I made my comparisons beginning with that period, except where the decline had begun earlier. What is there wrong in this? Similarly I am derided as an “ingenious person” because, in order to show that our production of pig-iron was on the downward grade, I gave the figures for 1882, the highest year, and for 1894, the latest available year. If there were any truth in the charge of date-cooking I should have given to my readers the figures for 1892, which was the lowest year since 1882. It has suited the correspondent to misconceive the whole purport of my book. I was not writing an industrial history of Europe for use in schools. My work was to rouse the manufacturers of England to a sense of the danger threatening their dominion, and I went in detail through the various trades wherein this danger was apparent, showing how great they had been and what was their condition to-day. In different trades the decadence had begun at different periods; to take the same starting year of comparison in each case would, therefore, have been a stupid error. “Made in Germany” is a call to arms, not an academic disquisition on the movements of trade.