FOREIGN COMPETITION 31 



the country. In the great wars of a century and 

 more ago our ancestors were left in a position to 

 carry on with success, since they mainly depended 

 upon the Navy, and the Navy had been provided for. 

 Their descendants, in the Governments of the past 

 century, satisfied with the increasing imports and 

 trusting to the changed economic conditions, made 

 no further provision in this matter ; nor can they 

 be fairly blamed, since the most vivid imagination 

 could not have pictured the conditions under which 

 the present war was to be fought. 



The last two factors in the period under con- 

 sideration are the termination of the American 

 Civil War in 1867 and the formation of the German 

 Empire in 1871. Each event was followed ty a 

 very rapid increase in the population and commerce 

 of these countries, increases which brought them 

 into competition with Great Britain, till then the 

 greatest industrial country in the world. The 

 growth of these countries had its effect on the timber 

 supphes, and by 1885 both of them were annually 

 using enormous amounts of timber.' We had to 

 face this competition, and timber prices gradually 

 rose. Experts recognized that the suppUes were 

 mainly coming from primeval forests, and that 

 their comparative cheapness was due to the fact 

 that the areas being felled were the accessible ones 

 near the seaboard or on the banks of rivers and 

 streams — that, in fact, the major part of the produce 

 was reaching the markets by water carriage alone. 

 Already by 1885 it was being asked how long this 

 state of affairs could last ! 



