310 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In leather and leather goods, Germany leads, while France appears to 

 be rapidly losing her former supremacy. 



Apart, however, from their bearing on any particular country, a 

 review of all the circumstances connected with the multiplication of 

 restrictions on international commerce, which the majority of civilized 

 nations have united in creating in recent years, fully justifies the Brit- 

 ish Commission and other European authorities in regarding it as a 

 most influential agency in occasioning almost universal economic dis- 

 turbance. It has been progress backward — progress in the direction 

 of that sentiment of the middle ages, which held that, as commerce 

 benefited one country only as it injured some other, it was the duty 

 of every country to impose the most harassing restrictions on its com- 

 mercial intercourse. Or, in other words, increased knowledge respect- 

 ing the forces of Nature, and a wonderful subordination and use of 

 the same having greatly increased and cheapened the abundance of all 

 useful and desirable things, the majority of the world's legislators and 

 statesmen have seemed to have considered it incumbent upon them to 

 neutralize and defeat the beneficent results of such abundance. And 

 the most comforting assurance that progress will not indefinitely con- 

 tinue to be made in this same direction, is to be found not so much in 

 the intelligence of the masses or their rulers, as in the circumstance 

 that existing restrictions on commerce can not be much further aug- 

 mented without such an impairment of international trade as would be 

 destructive of civilization. 



As the restrictions on trade within the last eight or nine yeai's 

 have not been all imposed at one time, but progressively, and as their 

 influence has accordingly been gradual, the world does not seem to 

 have as yet fully appreciated the extent to which the exchange of 

 products between nations has been thereby interrupted or destroyed. 

 But as the case now stands, Russia practically prohibits her people 

 from any foreign purchases of any iron or steel ; Germany and 

 Austria, of cereals ; Belgium, of cattle and meats ; Russia, Austi'ia, 

 Germany, France, Belgium, and Holland, of sugar ; France, of pork ; 

 and Brazil, of rice. The imports of Russia, as before pointed out, 

 decreased twenty-five per cent in the three years from 1883 to 188G ; 

 those of France from $160,981,000 in 1881 to $127,457,000 in 1885 ; 

 and those of Austria during the same period from $251,230,000 to 

 $219,273,000. Between France and Italy trade has been interrupted 

 to almost as great a degree as mutual governmental action will admit ; 

 while the value of the exports of the United States to France which 

 amounted in round numbers to $100,000,000 in 1880, had become re- 

 duced in 1886 to $40,090,000. The one objective of the restrictive 

 commercial legislation of all countries in recent years has been mainly 

 the United States ; and it has already affected the former agricultural 

 supremacy of the country in the markets of the world ; the exports 

 of cattle from the United States, comparing 1886 with 1881, having 



