io Flux, Fall in Prices during the past Twenty Years. 



allow for such changes of quality. Were the movement 

 of the kind now referred to sufficiently great, the lines of 

 import prices and of export prices from the Economist 

 calculations would rise and fall respectively, and might 

 even be made to coincide with the price-line deduced 

 by Sir Rawson Rawson. 



Were we to assign the whole of the divergence actually 

 shown to the first cause mentioned, we should arrive at a 

 conclusion as to the meaning of it precisely opposite to 

 that deduced if the second be supposed to be the power- 

 fully operating cause. Probably both causes are at work 

 and each contributes a share to the result, leading to the 

 conclusion that the average prices of imports have fallen 

 less, of exports more, than is revealed in the Economist 

 calculations, but that the export prices have fallen less, 

 import prices more than is shown by the tonnage statistics 

 of Sir Rawson Rawson. 



That, in the exports, the first of the causes has been 

 strongly operative is shown by a calculation based on 

 the last-named authority's estimates. He has called 

 attention to the fact that a largely-increasing proportion 

 of the export tonnage is concerned in carrying coals. If 

 his estimate of ioo tons of shipping to 150 tons of coal 

 exported be employed (for want of the records of ships 

 clearing with coal I am compelled to use it, and it may 

 not be necessary to seek such accuracy as the use of 

 those records would give) we find that about twenty 

 years ago one-half of the shipping cleared was needed to 

 carry the coals exported, while, lately, three-fifths of the 

 whole are engaged in that trade. If we eliminate the 

 value of the coals from the value of exports and the 

 ships conveying them from the tonnage cleared, the fall 

 of value of exports per ton of shipping appears entirely 

 changed. The average value is more than doubled, and 

 the resulting price-curve is thrown upwards since 1886 



