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I 18 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDIES
crease of £9,000,000 as compared with an increase of
£2,000,000 only in the last ten years. Making all
allowance for the fall in prices in recent years, these
figures still show a greater relative increase of imports
of manufactured articles before 1875 than afterwards.
I t cannot, therefore, be the increased import of foreign
manufactures which has caused the check to our own
growth in the last ten years.
But foreigners, it is said, exclude uS from their pwn
markets and compete with us in foreign markets. Here
again, however, we find that any check which may have
occurred to our foreign export trade is itself so small
that its effect on the general growth of the country
would be almost nil. Take it that the check is as
-great as the diminution in the rate of increase in the
movements of shipping, viz., from an increase of about
5S per cent. to one of 33 per cent. only, that is, broadly
speaking, a diminution of one-third in the rate of in-
crease of our foreign trade, whatever that rate may
have been. Assuming that rate to have been the same
as the rate of increase in the movements of shipping
itself, the change would be from a rate of increase
equal to one-half in ten years to a rate of increase
equal to about one-third only. Applying these propor-
tions to the exports of British and Irish produce and
manufactures, which represent the productive energy of
the country devoted to working for foreign exchange,
and assuming that ten years ago the value of British
labour and industry in the produce and manufactures
we exported, due deduction being made for the raw
material previously imported, was about £ 1 40,000,000,1
then it would appear that if the same range of values
had continued, the check to the growth of this trade
would have been that at the end of ten years the
British labour represented in it instead of having
increased 50 per cent., viz., from £140,000,000 to
£210,000,000, would have increased one-third only,
-
1 See supra, vol. i., p. 4z6.