[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR,"] SIR,—The instance given by
your correspondent, Mr. Arthur Platt (Spectator, August 15th), of the loser of " LG0,000 in five years" in the flour-milling trade is one which has not the slightest bearing upon the question of Free. trade, and as for the "practical miller," a former owner of a port and inland mill, now "employed in Liverpool docks," the fact that flour mills, in the very town where this un- fortunate miller formerly traded, have continued to prosper, and are to-day larger and more prosperous than ever before in the history of the trade, may be taken as evidence that it was not the fiscal system which was the cause of his failure, but other and readily ascertainable causes. So much for the examples adduced by your correspondent.
On the other hand, one might instance the failures of highly protected American and French mills to pay their way. The great concern located in Minneapolis, partly built up with British capital, has paid little or no dividend on its ordinary stock for years ; the largest milling business in France showed a loss of £50,000 on its last year's trading ; while the mills in Germany are, with but very few exceptions, inferior in every respect to similar concerns in the United Kingdom, and may be taken as a fair example of what we should have had in this country if British millers had been granted Protection in the crisis of twenty-five years ago. Germany to-day has about six thousand small-sized mills compared with England's six hundred modern scientific concerns. Last month the German millers held their annual Convention at Freiburg, when the question of working hours in mills came up for discussion. Herr Zimmermann (Walds- hiit) complained that the Act protecting the labourer was a real hardship for the miller, as he was hampered by the Act enforcing eight consecutive hours' rest to the labourer daily! The president promised to do all that he could to find a remedy. Herr Them (Greifenhagen) proposed, inter cilia, that in all cases mill hands should be given twenty-four Igrars' consecutive rest each fortnight ! Such a state of affairs as these resolutions portray may well give pause to those who would take German methods as an examplo.
Your correspondent, Mr. Charles Booth, jun. (Spectator, . August 15th), has referred accurately to the high position which _ Liverpool has attained as one of the greatest milling centres in the world—its large, but comparatively few, mills are now making over seventy thousand sacks of flour per week of six days—and he might have added that so successfully is the trade worked that while the millers are making substantial incomes, yet the price of the manufactured article is kept so low that scarcely a pound of American flour is to be found in any baker's shop in Liverpool.
Before concluding I would like to add a few official figures showing the absolute progress of the flour-milling industry in this country. in Table No. 30 of the "Statistical Abstract" will be found the quantity of imported flour retained for consumption per head of the population of the United Kingdom. There it will be seen that the year of maximum imports was 1892, when the figure reached was 64.28 lb. per capita, since when there has been a tendency toward lower figures. For the year 1902 only the aggregate imports have been issued,—viz., 7,751,860 sacks of 280 lb., which divided up among the population would give an average of 51.66 lb. per capita. But as it is not usually safe to draw deductions from single y -:ars, the better way will be to show the data of groups of years, as follows QUANTITIES OP FOREIGN FLOUR RETAINED FOR Hopis CONSUMP- TION PER HEAD OF THE POPULATION.
Four years 1899-1902. Four years 1899-98. Four years 1891-94. • 220.87 lb. 225.09 lb. 231.06 lb.
These figures prove that British millers are now successfully stemming the current of foreign imports in spite of their partial failure formerly, due, as it is now generally admitted by those who know, to the long adherence to antiquated methods and the use of obsolete machinery.
Previous page
