472 



Wool Prices in 1899. 



imports, the annual level of 8d. to 8fd., which prevailed for 

 six consecutive years, was broken by a rise to 8*9 id., or 

 within a fraction of the full 9d. per lb., which this quota ol 

 our supplies last averaged in 1892. But even this rise, which 

 the Customs valuation reveals, is only one of one halfpenny 

 per lb. over the 1898 average, and means no more in the 

 aggregate than an advance of under 6 per cent. 



Measured, not by the average but by the changes in the 

 level of prices at the beginning and the end of the twelve 

 months, both Leicester and half-bred English wools appear 

 from the weekly tables of the Economist to have begun the year 

 at no more than yd. per lb., and to have been quoted even a half- 

 penny below that figure from the beginning of July to the end 

 of November, and only for the last six weeks of the year to 

 have risen to 8d. to 9|d. or iod. per lb. The South Down 

 values, which began the year with quotations similar to 

 those at which the other sorts left off, began to rise earlier 

 in the autumn, and were quoted as ranging from gd. to as 

 much as is. 2d. per lb. in December. Lincoln wools, to which 

 a temporary change of fashion in favour of " lustre " goods 

 lent a slight and temporary "boom" in 1895-96, experienced 

 in the past year very little improvement from the low level to 

 which they had again relapsed, for although the price for hog 

 wool touched ghd. in December, and for wether wool 8|d., the 

 belated rise was not enough to lift the year's average value 

 from the minimum record above quoted. 



It is obvious, therefore, that such growth as there was of 

 wool values in 1899 only materially affected the higher 

 grades in the market. And this is nearly as true of the 

 imports as it is of the domestic clip. The best types of 

 merinos may, as the trade reports show, have been 60 per 

 cent, higher in December than in January, 1899, and, in a few- 

 instances, the better cross-bred wools shared in their prosper ity, 

 bat the coarser Australasian and other imported cross-bred 

 varieties, the proportion of which in our yearly supply steadily 

 increases, have hardly fared much, if at all, better than the 

 ordinary English wools. The lesson of the year, apart from 

 the perennial one of possibility and of hope enforced by see- 

 ing a price recovery of any sort, is therefore the old teach- 



