per man per annum. For Germany, the increase was from 261 tons in 1881 to 269 tons in 1883; and in Belgium, for corresponding years, from 165 tons to 178 tons per miner.
Recent inventions have also done much to reduce the amount of coal formerly used to effect industrial results, particularly in the case of blast-furnaces and coke-ovens. For example, at blast-furnaces, coal was formerly used for heating the boilers that furnished steam for blowing, hoisting, etc., and for heating the air which was blown into the stacks. Now, a well-ordered set of blast-furnaces does not use a single ounce of coal except what goes in to melt the ore. The whole of the heat used to produce the steam required in connection with the furnace, and for heating the stoves for making the hot blast, is obtained from the gases which rise to the top of the stacks in the process of smelting the iron, and which formerly was all thrown away.[1]
Petroleum.—Crude petroleum declined in the American market from an average of $3.86 (gold) per barrel in 1870 to 8712 cents per barrel in 1885, and 7112 cents in 1886, a total decline of over 80 per cent.
The American annual production (including Canada) increased during the same period from 5,510,745 barrels in 1870 to 30,626,100 in 1882, declining to 25,798,000 in 1886.
That the production and price experiences of the great staple fibers of commerce and consumption in recent years have not been dissimilar to those of the foods and metals, will also appear from the following:
Cotton.—Comparing 1860 with 1885, the decline in the price of American cotton (middling uplands) in the New York market has not been material. The year 1886, however, witnessed a decline to a lower point (81316) than has been reached, with one exception, since the year 1855; the exception occurring just after the failure of the Glasgow Bank in Scotland in 1878, the lowest quotations in both years being exactly the same. On the other hand, the increase in the world's supply of cotton in recent years has been very considerable, the American crop increasing from 3,930,000 bales in 1872-'73 to 6,575,000 in 1885-'86, or 67 per cent; while the supply of the world for the corresponding period is estimated to have increased from 6,524,000 bales to 8,678,000 bales, or at the rate of about 32 per cent. Such an increase in production would undoubtedly have occasioned a more marked decline in price, had it not been for a great and coincident increase in the world's consumption of cotton fabrics; which, in turn, was undoubtedly in consequence of a material decline in the cost of the same, as the result of improvements in machinery and methods of production; the equivalent of the labor of an operative in the factories of New England having increased from 12,164 yards in 1850 to 19,293 in 1870, and 28,032 in 1884, while the reduction in the price of
- ↑ Testimony of J. D. Ellis, chairman of John Brown & Co., Sheffield, British Commission, 1886.
