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426 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUDI~S
course it has taken. Always we must be d~pendent on
foreign imports, in whatever degre.e we increase the
home supply by giving it an artificial price.
h is the same with mining. For a long time, about
thirty years, we have been iJ:tlporting iron ore in in-
creasing quantities, and this follows on a gradual sub-
stitution of foreign supplies for home in the case of
copper, white tin, zinc and lead.' Resort to foreign
countries has become essential by the exhaustion of
our own mines, just as it has been essential for centuries
as regards gold and silver themselves, and is so for
many other metals and minerals not produced at aU, or
not produced in any quantity, in the United Kingdom.
In coal mining we are still among the leading com-
munities, and coal mining, as we all know, has even
developed wonderfully of late, while other mining in-
dustries have been decaying j but the general circum-
stances also point to a change in the future as regards
our coal mining, from circumstances quite beyond our
control.
In regard to our primary industries, then, I should
say that the complaints of fair-traders, as far as they
correctly describe what has occurred, merely refer to
changes which have been quite inevitable in our
economic development, and which no foresight and no
action could prevent. However protectionist we might
have been we should have arrived at the same result if
we had had an increasing population. Probably under
protection population would not have increased as it
has done, but our general prosperity in that case would
have been less than it has been.
Much the same may be said of those manufacturing
industries by which we obtain in part the things we re-
quire from abroad. Some of the leading manufactures
have not developed as they did in former years, <tnd
this is a serious matter, we are told, fo. a country whicl\
..
must obtain so much from abroad. Here the fair-trade
1 See supra, "The Recent Rate of Material Progress in England,"
vol. ii., p. 105.