usly profitable industry as this, just
because he finds a few thousand hundredweight of foreign soap creeping
into the country?

CHAPTER IV.

MORE MISREPRESENTATIONS.

Attention was called in the last chapter to some of the picturesque
exaggerations--to use the mildest possible term--in which Mr. Williams
had indulged in dealing with the chemical trades. We now pass to the two
chapters which he devotes to the iron and steel and their "daughter
trades." And at the outset let it be clearly understood that I do not
for a moment deny that in some of these trades the progress of Germany
has been relatively more rapid than our own. A child, if it is to grow
at all, must move faster than an adult. An infant four weeks old doubles
its age in a month; an adult takes thirty or forty years to double his.
Nor can we expect that the whole world will stand still while Great
Britain goes on every year adding to her strength. All that I do argue
is that the shooting-up of the German infant does us on the whole no
harm, and that there is nothing whatever in the figures of our trade to
suggest that full-grown England is approaching senile decay.

"ICHABOD! OUR TRADE HAS GONE."

With this general prelude let us turn to what Mr. Williams has to say
about the industries connected with iron and steel. He opens by
referring to a visit of the English Iron and Steel Institute to
Duesseldorf in 1880:--

"And when the time of feasting and talk and sight-seeing was
over, they returned to their native land, and there, in the
fulness of time, they perused the fatuous reports of the British
Iron Trade Association, which bade them sleep on, sleep ever.
And they did as they were bid, until the other day, when they
awoke to the fact that their trade was gone."

Another paragraph, headed "Ichabod!" begins:--

"And now all that is changed. The world's consumption (of iron)
is greater than ever before. Yet our contribution in the years
since 1882 has dropped at a rate well nigh unknown in the
history of any trade in any land. From the 8,493,287 tons of
1882 pig iron has gone hustling down to the 7,364,745 tons of
1894."

Truly Mr. Williams is an ingenious person. By picking out the two years
1882 and 1894 he has cunningly obscured the fact that the production of
pig iron, as of everything else, is subject to fluctuations, and that
1894, following worse years than itself, will in all