if crude iron and crude steel could be had at lower prices in this country than in Europe; yet that is what is more likely to occur than anything else, and that time would be greatly hastened by the instant removal of duties on ore and coal, and perhaps by the immediate removal of every duty on pig-iron, although prudence might require a period of five years or so to carry out the latter policy by successive reduction.
I think we have been protecting the machinists, engine-builders, and ship-owners of Great Britain, and retarding the progress of our own, by keeping up a disparity in the price of the materials which form the chief element of cost from fifty to a hundred per cent higher in this country than they have been there. How can we expect to keep the control of the home market on machinery when the duty on the materials is fifty to a hundred per cent higher than on the machine itself? I think it is time this question was taken out of politics and settled by sensible men in a sensible way; but that may be a visionary theory, which I may not live to see reduced to practice.
I speak of this subject because it has a most important bearing upon the question which has been put to me. We can readily overstock our own market, which is small compared with the demand of the world. Glance at the accompanying pictures which represent the present conditions of the cotton manufacture of the great empire of China. In No. 1 is seen the cotton growing; in No. 2, the clearing from the seed by snapping a bow-string with the hand, which gave the name of "bowed Georgia" to Southern cotton before Whitney invented the saw gin; No. 3 shows the press; No. 4 the spinning-wheel, No. 5 the warper, and No. 6 the hand loom, as they have been in use since prehistoric times. In one of these pictures there is a bit of evidence of manual dexterity which is hardly credible: one woman appears to be spinning three strands from three separate rovings on one wheel.
The latest and most authentic computation of the population of the globe is fourteen hundred millions. The manufacturing or machine-using nations of the world—that is to say, the nations which have to any considerable extent adopted the factory system of making textile fabrics—consist mainly of the inhabitants of this country, of Canada, of Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland, numbering in all about two hundred millions.
The only nation, and, in fact, perhaps the only country, which makes cotton fabrics to any extent in excess of its own consumption is England. We import more cotton fabrics than we export, but they are chiefly of the finer kinds, or else they are laces, embroideries, and the like. I am not quite sure, but I think that even France and Germany import more cotton fabrics than they
