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.
EXCESS OF IMPORTS OVER EXPORTS.
This anxiety has also seemingly taken his attention away from consistency in his own statements. In the first article he rejoices over the fact that our imports exceed our exports, regarding that circumstance as a sign of prosperity; in his second article (when he has another sort of article in hand) he writes as follows:—“When two tradesmen have mutual transactions, that man will feel that he is doing best who sells more to his neighbour than he buys from him. And rightly so!” That note of exclamation is his. It also represented my feelings when I read the statement. I am also quite at one with him in the quoted remark, but (as in my poor way, I tried to be consistent) I am at issue when in his first article he chuckles over the excess of imports. Suppose that excess to be made up entirely of shipping, sale commissions, and interest on foreign investments, and that it does not imply that we are living on our capital; even then the thing does not work out quite happily. Shipping is all right, of course, but sale commissions less so; they spell enrichment, doubtless, to a certain class of City men, but the working and manufacturing classes generally get nothing out of these foreign manufactures. Still less do they share in the third item. It does not help this country’s industries to aid the establishment of rival industries abroad, which is what foreign investments mostly mean; while when the returns on those investments are used to purchase foreign goods it is again difficult to see exactly where the English industrial classes come in. With regard to the entrepôt trade, your correspondent says that it “seems somewhat to halt in the process” of slipping away; but as his own figures show that the sixty-seven millions of 1889 have dwindled in six years to the sixty millions of 1895, I don’t think I need occupy further space by combating his assertion with figures of my own.
Yours faithfully,
Ernest E. Williams.
(To be concluded.)
To the Editor of the “Daily Graphic.”
Sir,—In my first article I endeavoured to show that the charges of disingenuousness brought against me by your critic not only missed their aim, but possessed a boomerang quality. I will ask your attention to another instance. In his second article your correspondent, in order to damage my reputation for intellectual honesty, writes:—“Mr. Williams has artfully picked out half-a-dozen or so items of our imports from Germany, and then exclaims in horror at the amount of ‘the moneys which in one year have come out of John Bull’s pocket for the purchase of his German-made household goods.’” This, in vulgar language, is a staggerer.
Let me explain my artfulness. In a half-jocular section in my first chapter, I invited the reader just to look round his own house and make an inventory of the German goods it probably contains. I helped him with a list of the toys in the nursery, the piano in the drawing-room, the servant’s presentation mug in the kitchen, the pencil on the study table, &c., and then tried to give point and solidity to my little excursion into the lighter style of writing by enumerating the yearly national bill which Germany presents to us for these household items. The correspondent (to use his own admirable verb) “twists” this into the implication above quoted, and writes as though these were the only figures I had adduced. Ingenuous, is it not?