"raw materials" and the partly manufactured products which are necessary in the processes of domestic industry, should be imported free of tax, I think there could then be very little doubt that we should not only control our home market, but also secure a much larger share in supplying other nations with cotton fabrics than we now enjoy. The number of our spindles might then be almost indefinitely extended; and when the prices of iron, steel, and copper are the same in this country as they are in Great Britain, making allowance for the cost of transportation, as they would be if free of duty here, I doubt if any carding-engine, combing-machine, or spinning-machinery, or any other important part of the plant, except some specialties, could be imported from any other country.
The annual consumption of iron and steel in this country is now thirty-five to forty per cent of the commercial or known product of the world. It is equal to the entire commercial product of the world in the years 1865 and 1866. It is in excess of the largest product ever made by Great Britain. Now, it is upon supremacy in iron more than anything else that the control of commerce rests, and I think we shall soon hold it without lowering our prices materially, but in consequence of rising prices abroad. The deposits of fine iron ore suitable for making Bessemer steel are rapidly diminishing in Great Britain in ratio to the demand upon them. The coking coals, which are necessary in the work, are becoming more costly year by year. As the mines become deeper they become hotter, and the veins in Durham, the chief source of supply, are only two feet wide, and they lie horizontally, so that the miners must work at a great depth in a very heated atmosphere, lying on their sides. As the necessary consequence, although the wages of labor are much less, the cost of coke is much higher than it is in this country.
Great Britain now imports twenty per cent of all her ores. The chief supply of fine ore has been in the neighborhood of Barcelona, Spain, but that supply is becoming exhausted. When that time comes, Great Britain must get her supply of fine ores from the south of Spain—inside the gates of Gibraltar—from Algiers, or iron mines not yet worked to any great extent, three hundred miles from the extreme northern end of the Baltic Sea, in Sweden.
The supply of workmen capable of operating iron-furnaces and steel-works in Great Britain is also relatively small, so that with each advance in the price of iron, an advance in wages is demanded not due to improvements in the processes, but due to the relative scarcity of laborers. On the other hand, the demand for iron upon the furnaces, both of Great Britain and of this country, which for many years varied with the activity or
