reduced not more than twelve marks per centner. In the fifty years, 1822-1872, it was reduced more than sixty marks. It is true that there has been, all this time, an import duty on sugar in Germany, which has operated as protection to both the beetgrower and the refiner in the home market. The point I make is that Professor Patten is all at sea as to the particular facts. upon which his criticism of Mr. Wells rests.

The Professor thinks, moreover, that

Mr. Wells is also greatly mistaken in his supposition that the taking off of the bounties on the part of European nations would cause the production of beet sugar to become unprofitable and compel a return to the natural production of Southern regions.

Mr. Wells has not indulged any such "supposition,” or if he has, he has kept it to himself. What he said was:

The great difficulty of the situation, however, is that much of the sugar industry that has been called into existence artificially would be immediately ruined, with great loss and suffering to a large number of people, if the bounties were at once discontinued.

This is true. It has been proved true in Russia. It is not necessary to explain how. Nor is it necessary to point out the difference between what Mr. Wells said and what is attributed to him.

In Mr. Wells' appendix on iron and steel, he showed, on the authority of a pamphlet issued in 1888 by Mr. James M. Swank, that the average price of Scotch pig iron in Glasgow for the ten years 1878-1887, inclusive, had been $12.94 per ton, and that the average price of anthracite foundry iron in Philadelphia during the same period had been $21.87 per ton. The difference is $8.93 per ton. The difference in price is accounted for by freight charges about $2 and duty $7 per ton. Multiplying the number of tons of pig iron consumed in this country during the period by seven, he said, would show "the relative price or cost of iron and steel to the consumers of these metals in the United States as compared with those of Great Britain and other countries." (Page 471.) Is not that a fair statement and a true statement? It seems to me as true as any proposition in Euclid. The whole drift, scope and purport of the appendix was to show

that this disparity of cost had disabled the United States from competing with Europeans in supplying the vast populations described as the "non-machine-using countries of the world" with iron and with the things of which iron is the basis and condition of cheap production. There are twelve pages in the appendix and there are thirteen distinct and separate statements that it is the comparative cost of iron and steel between the two countries that is under review, — an average of rather more than one such explanation to each page. We quote the last paragraph in full:

The American people are thus subjected to a very heavy and continuous loss. Their power of controlling their home markets is impaired; they lose the advantage of their position and of their opportunity to supply the vast non-machine-using countries of the world, containing over a thousand million population, with goods and wares made at high wages and low cost, for the reason that, in consequence of a disparity in the price of the material which lies at the foundation of all arts, they have, by their own act, given supremacy to Great Britain in the lower cost of her investments for meeting this demand.

The appendix next tells us that, if all the duty on iron and steel were removed to-morrow, the prices in England would rise to our level, nobody in this country would be hurt, and the conditions for our sharing in the supply of the non-machine-using nations with iron and other manufactures would be equalized with those of Great Britain. Various reasons are given for this belief. They need not be specified here, but it is worth noting that the condition predicted has already come to pass, partly as the result of causes shown by Mr. Wells to be then working. Pig iron and steel rails are selling in England as high as in this country. The cost of making them is as high. The Iron World of Pittsburg (March 7) figures the cost of making Bessemer pig $1.87 higher in England than here.

Now what objection does the critic raise to this?

It is now too late [he says] to expect that the American people will ever consent to the destruction of their leading industries [sic], and hence it devolves upon the advocates of free trade to show that American production would not be reduced if the tariff were taken off. On the one hand they must prove that the tariff is added to the price

325 paid by consumers, and on the other hand that production in America would not be less without a tariff. These two fallacies are both plausible and when used with skill are quite effective, but it will not do to bring them into too close connection.

The occasion for this sarcasm is found by ignoring the main body of the argument in the appendix and selecting one or two paragraphs in which the statement is made, perhaps too broadly if taken alone, that the cost of pig iron is absolutely enhanced by the tariff seven dollars per ton to the American consumer; whereas, the purpose of the appendix was to show that, looking at comparative cost in the two countries as competitors in the world's markets, the price was by reason of the tariff seven dollars to the disadvantage of Americans. Here, if anywhere, and in the manner indicated, Professor Patten has made a point; but I cannot consider it anything to be proud of.

My attention is arrested by the phrase: "It is now too late to expect that the American people will ever consent to the destruction of their leading industries," and I think that it is fair to ask a stickler for precision of thought and language in economic discussion a few questions thereunder. What is a leading industry? What is it to consent to the destruction of a leading industry? In my younger days canal boating was a leading industry. Did the American people consent to its destruction or not? It would seem that that portion of them residing in the state of Pennsylvania consented to it without the least hesitation, indeed contributed much to hasten it. The shelling of corn on shovels, as Mr. Wells says and as I remember, was once a leading industry. The American people consented to the destruction of that. The chopping and hauling of cord wood was once a leading industry and logging is such now; but the former is already destroyed in many parts of the country and the latter is going the same way, with the consent of the people, too, as far as I can discover. Retail trade has always been a leading industry; yet Professor Patten thinks that the number of retail traders ought to be greatly curtailed, and he favors the use of the taxing power to that end. His argument shows that if this industry could be destroyed, he at

least would consent to the destruction.1 If Professor Patten, instead of using catchwords, had said that the American people would never consent to such a reduction of the tariff as would cause the abandonment of iron-making, for instance, that would have been an intelligible statement and would have opened for discussion a variety of interesting questions, and chiefly the very ones treated in Mr. Wells' appendix, viz.: Will tariff reduction cause the abandonment of iron-making? Will tariff reduction cause the abandonment of wool-growing, saltmaking, copper-mining, etc., etc.? To say, instead, that the people will never consent to the destruction of leading industries is to make an assertion which, if it means anything at all, is not true; for they have already consented to the destruction of several and have even rejoiced to see them go.

I have aimed to examine seriatim all the specific objections that Professor Patten has raised to Mr. Wells' book. Economists will judge whether those objections are well founded

or not.

HORACE WHITE.

1 The Principles of Rational Taxation, by Simon N. Patten.

REVIEWS.

Travels in France during the Years 1787, 1788, 1789. By ARTHUR YOUNG. With an introduction, a biographical sketch, and notes, by M. Betham-Edwards. London, George Bell and Sons, 1889. Bohn's Standard Library.-lix, 366 pp.

It was a happy thought to celebrate the centennial of the Revolution with a reissue of Arthur Young's classic Travels which have been so long out of print. Equally happy was the selection of Miss BethamEdwards as editor. Her rare familiarity with almost every part of modern France, her enthusiasm for her author and her own vivacious style have enabled her to present Arthur Young to the modern reader in a most attractive manner. The introduction is a succinct comparison of the France which Arthur Young knew with the France of to-day. It is so suggestive and valuable that one wishes it were longer. The sketch of Young's life is done with a skilful and sympathetic hand. His life was one of strange contrasts. Hopelessly unsuccessful as a farmer, he was one of the greatest of writers on agriculture. His work on France, it is hardly necessary to say, stands in the very front rank in the department of economic geography and holds a unique place among authorities on the history of the Revolution. His family life involved unusual extremes of joy and sorrow, and he spent a blind old age as an eloquent popular preacher.

One oversight on the part of the editor should be remedied in a second edition. We are nowhere told that this volume is not a complete edition of Young's Travels. It is in fact merely the Travels proper, with the essay on the Revolution. The complete work includes, in addition, a very valuable series of essays on the industrial condition and economic geography of France. In them are to be found thoroughly scientific accounts of the state of agriculture, commerce, manufactures, taxation and wages, with full statistical tables, as well as a description of the geographical distribution of the different products. On one of his journeys Young went into Northern Italy and Spain, and he records his impressions in his journal and discusses the facts in short essays. All this, which comprises more than one-third of the original work, is omitted from this new edition, and properly enough, as this is a popular reprint for the general reader; but the fact should have been stated in the preface. The complete edition, first published in two stately quartos in 1794, is now generally most accessible in Pinkerton's Collection of