THE TRADE POLICY OF GREAT BRITAIN AND HER COLONIES.
The Trade Policy of Great Britain and her Colonies since 1860. By Carl Johannes Fuchs, Professor of Political Economy in the University of Freiburg. Translated by Constance H. M. Archibald.
With a Preface by the Right Hon. J. Parker Smith. (Macmillan and Co. '72. 6d. net.)—This book, though written by a German Professor who has nothing but contempt for "Free Trade doctrinairism," is in no sense a product of the present con- troversy, as it was published in Germany in 1893; and it is marked by so much of a scientific spirit as to be a really useful aid towards the study of our fiscal history during the period which it covers. The conclusions drawn by Professor Fuchs in regard to the wisdom of British adherence to Free-trade, in presence of the advance of the Protectionist movement abroad since the "sixties," are, indeed, distinctly unfavourable, and, in our opinion, quite erroneous. But this does not sensibly detract from the interest or value of his careful narrative of such events as the arrangement of the " Cobden Treaty" in 1860, and the negotiations with France connected with its renewal in 1873 (supplemented by the Convention of January, 1874), and our sub- sequent commercial discussions with Austria, Italy, Spain, and other countries; or, again, of his account of the development of the "national" trade policy of Canada. We have not noticed any attempt to strain points in support of the author's general views ; and, on the other hand, he is far too well informed and fair- minded to fail to recognise that, for example, the decline in the latter part of the period under his consideration of England's per- centage of the commerce of the world was not due to her Free- trade system, but to the rise of other countries into industrial States. In fact, although in a preface to the English version of his work Professor Fuchs expresses the opinion that the states- man whom in 1893 he had deemed that England needed for her economic salvation "seems to have come at last "—yet, possibly, not in time—we cannot but think that that statesman would have made a much more effective exposition of a ease still essentially unsound if he had attended for a year or so the political economy classes at Freiburg. Miss Archibald's translation is very well done, and the publication of the English version of Professor Fuchs's work under the supervision of so good a Free-trader as Professor Smart itself constitutes a guarantee of the value of this presentation of ourselves as others see us.— Slighter in texture, but sound in principle and clear in state- ment, is Professor H. L. Bowley's Short Account of England's Foreign Trade in the Nineteenth Century, which obtained the Cobden Prize at Cambridge in 1892, and of which a revised edition has been brought out (Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 2s. 6d.) It is perhaps to be regretted that publishers' exigencies should have (apparently) prevented the rewriting of the last forty or fifty pages of this little book so as to bring it quite up to date, instead of throwing observations on the course of commercial events during the past twelve years mainly into notes in an appendix. But several of the diagrams by which the text is illustrated have been brought down into this century, and will be found very distinctly serviceable by many who are endeavouring to obtain a reasoned grasp of the subject,—including, as they do, an exhibition of quinquennial averages of our exports to various external markets between 1849 and 1903, the character of those exports during the same period, and so forth. We may add that Professor Bowley has a clear and helpful discussion of the subject of the balance of imports and exports ; and that, while making his economic views very plain, he is no undiscriminating optimist.
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