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RECENT RATE OF MATERIAL PROGRESS IN ENGLAND 141
The increase of the manufactures of cotton, wool, coal,
and iron in Germany and the United States, they wi1l
say, has in recent years been greater in proportion
than in England, which is undoubtedly true. The ex-
planation I have to suggest, however, is that the com7
petition with the leading manufacturing country, which
England still is, is naturally in the staple articles where
manufacturing has been reduced to a system, the newer
and more difficult manufactures and the newer develo~
ments of industry generally falling as a rule to the older
country. Even in foreign countries, however, there are
signs of slower growth of recent years in the staple
articles as compared with the period just before. In
Germany, for instance, the production of coal increased
between 1860 and 1866 (I take the years which I find
avai1abl~ in Dr. Neumann Spallart's .. Uebersichten ")
from 12,300,000 tons to 28,200,000, or nearly 129
per cent.; between 1866 and 1876 the increase was
from the figure stated to about 50,000,000, or about
77 per cent. only; between 1876 and 1885, another
period of ten years, from the figure stated to 74,000,000
tons, or less than 50 per cent.-a rapidly diminishing
rate of increase. In the United States of America the
corresponding figures for coal are IS, 22, 50, and 103
million tons, showing a greater increase than in Ger-
many, but still a rather less rate of increase since 1876
than in the ten years before. The experience as to the
iron production would seem to be different, the increase
in the United States and Germany having been enor-
mously rapid in the last ten years; but I have not
been able here to carry the figures far enough back for
comparison. Still the facts as to coal in Germany are
enough to show how rapidly the rate of increase of
growth may fall off when a point is reached, and that
the experience of the United Kingdom is by no means
exceptional. As the staple articles develop abroad the
rate of increase in such articles will diminish too, and
foreign industry in turn will become more and more
miscellaneous.