Page 119 - clra62_0019-(GIPE)

I 12 ECONOMIC. INQUIRIES AND STUDIES
know, is foreign competition. The explanation has
been discredited because of the exaggeration of the
alleged evil to be explained; but it may possibly be a
good enough explanation of the actual facts when they
are looked at in a proper way. In this light, then, the
assertion as to foreign competition would be found to
mean that foreigners are taking away from us some
business we should otherwise have had, and that, con-
sequently, although our business on the whole increases
from year to year, it does not increase so fast as when
foreign competition was less. Those who talk most
about foreign competition have actually in their mind
the unfair element in that competition, the stimulus
which the Governments of some foreign countries give
or attempt to give to particular industries by means on
the one hand of high tariffs keeping out the goods we
should otherwise send to such countries, and giving
their home industry of the same kind a monopoly
which sometimes enables them to produce a surplus
they can sell ruinously cheap abroad, and by means on
the other hand of direct bounties which enable certain
industries to compete in the home market of the United
Kingdom itself as well as in foreign markets. But there
is a natural foreign competition as well as a stimulated
foreign competition to be considered, and it may be the
more formidable of the two.
Dealing first with the stimulated competition, the
most obvious criticism on this alleged explanation of
the recent decline in the rate of increase of our material
progress is that the stimulus given by foreign Govern-
ments in recent years has not been increasing, or, at
any rate, not materially increasing, so as to account for
the change in question. People forget very quickly;
otherwise it would not be lost sight of that after 1860,
as far as European nations are concerned, there was a
great reduction of tariff duties-a change, therefore, in
the contrary direction to that stimulus which is alleged
to have lately caused a change in the rate of our own
development. Since about five or six years ago the