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RECENT RATE OF MATERIAL PROGRESS IN EXGLAND 119
or from £140,000,000 to about £187,000,000. The
annual difference to' the energy of the country de-
veloping itself in the foreign trade would on this show-
ing be about £23,000,000 only; an insignificant sum
compared with the aggregate income of the people of
the country, while the country, it must be remembered,
does not lose the whole of this sum, but only the differ-
ence between it and the sum earned in those employ-
me~ts to which those concerned have resorted, which
agam may be a plus and not a minus difference. Even
therefore if foreign competition is the cause of a check
to our general growth, yet the figures we are dealing
with in our foreign trade are such- that any visible
check to that trade which can have occurred must have
been insufficient to cause that apparent diminution in
the rate of our material growth generally which has to
be explained.
It has to be remembered, moreover, that when the
figures are studied and the fall of prices allowed for it
is not in our foreign trade that any check worth men-
tioning seems to have occurred at aU. The diminution
in the rate of increase in the movements of shipping
is very largely to be accounted for in the way already
explained. viz .• by the fact that the increase just before
1875 was largely owing to the multiplication of lines
of steamers. and that a framework had then been pro-
vided up to which the traffic has since grown. Even
an increase of one-third in the movements in the last
ten years may thus show as great an increase in real
business as an increase of 50 or 60 per cent. in the
movements in the twenty years before. Foreign com-
petition. even from natural causes. is thus insufficient
to account for the diminution in the rate of increase of
our material growth in the last ten years.
These figures may be put directly another way. The
increase of our foreign exports per head between 1860-
64- and 1870-74 was from £4 14S. lid. to £7 7s. Sd..
or about 5S per cent., and allowing for an average rise
of prices between the two dates may be put as having