products. For nine years the joint efforts were made to effect this, resulting in the denouncement of commercial treaties and the framing of a tariff in 1892. “Accordingly, the Government constructed two tariffs, a maximum tariff for the countries with whom France should have no convention, and a minimum tariff, about twenty per cent lower, for the countries with whom France should conclude one. Duties upon agricultural produce were never to be subject of a convention or to be admitted into the conventional tariff. And it was laid down as a principle that the conventions of the future should be conventions for a short period, and that they should be terminable at a year’s notice. By this device the Government hoped to secure more industrial control, more stability, more elasticity. It would go, for instance, to the Government of Switzerland and say, ‘Reduce your duties and take our minimum tariff.’ There would be no complicated haggling; the brilliant diplomat could not sacrifice the commercial interests of the country to a political coup. Switzerland would have to choose between either the minimum or the maximum rate, and both rates were fixed by the Chambers.”[1] In practice this scheme has not been found practicable, as under the constitution the President could conclude a commercial treaty on his own authority.
This policy of expressly excluding agricultural products from any concessions in duty by treaty was significant of the feeling of the agricultural population of France, and a fair measure of its immense political influence. Before 1884 the “agrarians” had hardly sufficient strength to make themselves felt locally. The question of wheat growing in France had even then become important, for prices began to fall in 1882. The peasant had noticed that wheat had shrunk in value from twenty-two francs a hectolitre in 1881 to eighteen francs in 1883, and 17.7 francs in 1884. But it was as yet an economic problem, and not connected with political factors.
A government commission was constituted, and from one of the reports presented in 1884 may be taken some bits of prophecy as gratuitous as that already quoted from the English presentation. M. Rissler, director of the National Agricultural Institute, expressed an opinion that the wheat trade of America had arrived at the extreme limit of its development, because the fertility of virgin soils is becoming exhausted, and more expensive farming is necessary; and because wheat is now grown in more remote districts, and could not continue to be carried at unremunerative freights. India, like America, was unable to produce wheat profitably at current prices. In Australasia he thought labor was too high priced to permit it to be turned to wheat cultivation at the prevailing price. Although
- ↑ Fisher. The Protectionist Reaction in France. Economic Journal, September, 1896.
