Ix.—: Dumping.

Dumping is the Chamberlainists’ favourite argument. The slang term is used to describe the export by a protected industry of goods at or below cost price, which it sells at a much higher price in the home market. Dumping has been employed by the German cartels, but, as Raffalovich has shown in his book on Trusts, Cartels, and Syndicates, at a severe cost to their countrymen. It was said that when the great American trusts found their home markets restricted they would inundate Europe with their products; but this has not been the case. When the United States Steel Corporation became depressed, it did not invade England.

England, say the Protectionists, is the dumping-ground of all nations; but the relative proportion of manufactures to total imports gives them the lie. When the French cotton spinners from the Vosges dumped their cottons in Manchester, they did it to their own loss, and they recognised that a repetition of the process would be their ruin. Mr. Chamberlain and his satellites have all repeated Mr. Byng’s dumping theory, but they have either cited no fact or cited them incorrectly. A typical instance—Mr. Alexander F. Acland Hood, Conservative Whip, said at a Unionist meeting at Wellington, at the end of November, 1903: “One of my friends has done a lot of business in the glass trade. Now in France there is a tariff against him. The State Railways carry glass free from Paris to Calais.”

As a matter of fact the railway from Paris to Calais does not belong to the State, the tariff is 22 francs per metric ton, and the State gives no bounties on the export of glass.