GOVERNMENTAL INTERFERENCE. 305 



an extraordinary and artificial stimulus more sugar has been pro- 

 duced than the world was ready to absorb, even at the reduced prices 

 which the bounties made possible. The price of beet-root, and there- 

 fore of all sugar, has continued to decline, until the sugar-industry of 

 Continental Europe (with the possible exception of France), is suifer- 

 ing under the severest depression. Man}^ establishments have closed 

 or passed into bankruptcy, and it is now well understood that the only 

 profit available to the manufactories is that derivable from so much 

 of their product as is exported, which, in the case of Germany, repre- 

 sents more than half of the annual production. In a recent discussion 

 in the German Reichstag, Deputy Heine opposed the continuance of 

 the present bounty system in that country, upon the ground that it 

 was disastrous to the agricultural laborer, who had been compelled to 

 sacrifice all his land to the beet-cultivators. These cultivators, who 

 farmed upon a large scale, had effected many improvements in labor- 

 saving machinery, and thus reduced the laborer's wages to a minimum ; 

 so that in some districts the laborers were little better off than serfs. 

 At the same time the people of the sugar-producing states of Europe 

 uniformly pay more for what proportion of their own sugars they con- 

 sume than is paid by foreigners on the proportion exported. In Rus- 

 sia, where the depression is extreme, the manufacturers have petitioned 

 the Govei'nment, but thus far unsuccessfully, to restrict production by 

 law to whatever extent would be necessary to keep the price up to the 

 point at w^hich it stood when the domestic product was just sufiicient 

 to supply the home market ; or, in other words, to permit production 

 to continue at the producer's discretion, but not to allow him to sell 

 anything over the regulation amount in the home market. The dis- 

 aster which the extreme artificial reduction in recent years in the price 

 of sugars has brought to other great business interests and to the ma- 

 terial prosperity and even civilization of large areas of the earth's sur- 

 face, can not well be overstated. In Barbadoes (British West Indies), 

 in February, 1887, it was estimated* that the loss at that time on every 

 ton of sugar produced and exported to London was £1 155., and in 

 the absence of all profit on what is almost the sole industry of the 

 West Indies, it would seem as if civilization would disappear from 

 many of the islands, as indeed it already has in a great degree from 

 some of them — the island of Tortola, for example, which was, com- 

 paratively a few years ago, the seat of a profitable sugar-industry. In 

 the Spanish islands of Cuba and Porto Rico, the taxation of sugar, 

 mainly export duties, have hitherto constituted an important source of 

 revenue, but within a recent time Spain, as a condition for saving the 

 planters from ruin, has felt obliged to relinquish most of them. In 

 Java, the situation of the sugar-industry is so deplorable that, in order 

 to save it from destruction, with the consequent throwing of half a 

 million of Javanese laborers out of employment, and thereby increas- 



* "Barbadoes Agricultural Reporter," February, 1887. 

 VOL. xxxii. — 20 



