15. Development of the merchant marine. [Ginsburg in Ashley, 173-195; Taylor in Forum, 1900-01, 30: 463-477.]
16. British shipping subsidies. [Root in Atlantic, 1900, 85: 387-394.]
17. Growth of British ports. [Ackland in Nineteenth Century, 1897, 42: 411 ff.; Browne in Contemp. Rev., Feb. 1918, 113: 190-199.]
18. The port of London and improvements. [Owen in Lectures, chap. 4; Quarterly Rev., 1903, 197: 252-269; Marchant in National Rev., 1902-3, 40: 715-737, with map; Miller in Fortnightly Rev., 1902, 78: 796-805.]
19. The supply of British seamen. [Cowie in Contemp. Rev., 1898, 73: 855-865; Tomlinson in English Rev., 1911, 9: 114-121; Longford in Nineteenth Cent., 1912, 72: 1114-1130.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The course of English commerce has attracted interest in increasing measure, and publications upon it multiply, as we approach the end of the century. Only a few books can be noticed here; the reader is referred to the topics for references to other books and periodical articles.
Ward, *Reign of Queen Victoria, contains good chapters on the industrial development of the reign. Stephen Bourne, *Trade, population, and food, London, 1880, is a careful analysis of the decade 1870-80, and furnishes a good starting-point from which to survey the course of recent trade. J. W. Root, Trade relations of the British Empire, Liverpool, 1903, provides a survey of English commerce at the close of the period, with special reference to the pending question of tariff changes. Similar books have been written by Edward Pulsford and L. G. Chiozza Money. A useful statistical survey is provided by John H. Schooling, *The British trade book, fourth issue, London, 1911. Lectures on British commerce, with preface by W. P. Reeves, is mainly a description of the present organization. A. J. Sargent, *Seaways of the Empire, London, 1918, is a good survey of the geography of British trade; and Adam W. Kirkaldy, **British shipping, London, 1914, includes both history and recent organization. **British industries, edited by W. J. Ashley, is, however, the book deserving of the warmest recommendation; nowhere else will the reader find such good descriptions of the leading industries of Great Britain. Each industry is described by a specialist of recognized authority, and though the book does not go far into history it gives indispensable information on the recent results of historical development. More popular and less valuable is Great industries of Great Britain, London, Cassell, no date (about 1880?), 3 vols.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
ENGLAND: PRE-WAR PROBLEMS
452. Relative decline in value and quality of English exports.—The questions agitating the minds of English business men and statesmen at the opening of the twentieth century rose from a consideration of the immediate past and of the future of English commerce. While the country had enjoyed a full measure of prosperity in recent years, and had witnessed a considerable increase in the quantity of its foreign trade, the quality of this trade awakened forebodings. The increase had been almost entirely confined to imports. Since 1872 the exports, though they had increased in bulk, had remained almost stationary in value; they had kept pace neither with the growth of population in England, nor with the growth in value of the exports of other countries. In the twenty years, 1881-1900, foreign countries enlarged their purchases (imports) by 11 per cent, while England augmented her sales to them (exports) by only 4 per cent; the British possessions enlarged their purchases by 17 per cent, while English sales to these dependencies showed an actual decrease of 1 per cent. The exports of which England has been most proud, as indicating her superior industrial strength—the textiles, and iron and steel—had either increased slowly or shown an actual decline. On the other hand, the exports which had increased in value were of a kind which the English viewed with disfavor. Many of them (apparel and slops, preserves, soap, furniture, etc.) were the product of cheap and unskilled workers and seemed to show a degradation of English labor. Others of them, potter’s clay and especially coal, were raw materials which the English would have preferred to use in their own industry at home.