millions, are reckoned at all! What then becomes of his preposterous assertion that the wonder is, "not that in twenty-two years there has been a total excess of one thousand five hundred and ten million pounds sterling, but that it has not been greater"? Mr. Newmarch forgot to deduct what exceeds by one fourth the whole funded debt of this country, the colossal omission passed undetected, to be first publicly noticed in this place. A favourite argument of this gentleman had best be given in his own words, written in October, 1878. "The only real gauge of the state of foreign trade is the Foreign Exchange, and during the last twenty years the Foreign Exchange has been steadily in favour of this country." Compare this peremptory ruling with actual fact as related in the money article of the Morning Post, for May 24, 1882: "On the foreign exchange bills were generally in demand, and in consequence of the continual low rate of money here almost all the rates of exchange were unfavourable to this country."[1]
One more proof of reckless and ignorant treatment of these subjects by persons to whom the uninformed general public naturally look for light regarding them. In "City Notes" of the Pall Mall Gazette for January 8, 1881, occurs this comment upon the Board of Trade returns for the year 1880. "The disparity between the value of our imports and exports, which of late years had become so great as to alarm some dabblers in political economy, has been considerably reduced. Our imports, however, still exceed our exports by one hundred and eighty-seven million pounds, an adverse balance of trade which after all is more apparent than real," &c., &c. Now, in the first place, the adverse balance had in effect never been so high as in 1880 (it was but one hundred and fourteen millions in 1879), and in the second place it had not even then attained the frightful amount named, or anything like it, being one hundred and forty millions, not one hundred and eighty-seven millions. The Times, published ten hours earlier the same day, had shown it, with sufficient approximate correctness, as one hundred and twenty-seven millions.
Such marvellous mistakes and self-contradictions go unnoticed partly on account of the bewildering mass of numerals very few are able or care to understand, partly inasmuch as it is nobody's affair to spy them out; rather are powerful interests deeply concerned in endorsing the wrong conclusions drawn
- ↑ The bank rate from March 23 to August 17, 1882, was three per cent., the average rate of Mr. Newmarch's "twenty years" having been thirty-five per cent, higher.
