A RETROSPECT 7 



process made a large fortune in less than seven years, 

 and immediately built a big refinery on the banks of 

 the Thames. Here was a striking instance of the often 

 disregarded maxim, that if you want, in industry, to 

 profit from a new invention you must do it at once. 



But the importance of the fact in this particular 

 chapter is that it greatly conduced to the remarkable 

 progress of the industry on the Clyde. The increase 

 already stated was sufficiently striking, but the success 

 continued for twenty years. The yearly average for 

 the five years 1877-81 was 248,429 tons, and for 1882-86 

 240,852 tons. Then came a terrible relapse. The 

 quinquennial yearly averages which followed have 

 been : 



1887-91 228,733 tons 



1892-96 170,373 



1897-1900 124,874 



Thus we see that the first spurt from 75,000 tons 

 in 1860 to 136,000 tons in 1865 reached to 240,000 tons 

 in 1882-86, and then fell away until the average for 

 1897-1900 is only 125,000 tons, a figure actually lower 

 than that of the first burst more than thirty-five years 

 before. 1 This is almost incredible. Consumption in 

 the United Kingdom had gone up by leaps and bounds, 

 the Greenock refiners had constantly improved their 

 manufacture, their sugar was as popular as ever, and 

 they could certainly work as cheaply as any refiners 

 in the world. 



1 This lamentable fall in the Greenock sugar refining industry 

 was entirely the result of the new European bounty-fed com- 

 petition. British markets, and every small port on the coast, 

 were flooded with foreign refined sugar, sold frequently at prices 

 below the cost of production, Since the abolition of the bounties 

 by the Brussels Convention, in 1903, the industry has recovered 

 and now flourishes, as will be seen by the figures given in the 

 Appendix IX. 



