Page:Forgotten Man and Other Essays.djvu/68

60 (B) Sugar Bounties.

79. The worst case of all, however, is sugar. The protectionists long boasted of beet-root sugar as a triumph of their system. It is now an industry in which an immense amount of capital is invested on the Continent, but cheap transportation for cane sugar, and improvements in the treatment of the latter, are constantly threatening it. Mention is made in Bradstreet's for June 28, 1885, of a very important improvement in the treatment of cane which has just been invented at Berlin. Germany has an excise tax on beet-root sugar, but allows a drawback on it when exported which is greater than the tax. This acts as a bounty paid by the German taxpayer on the exportation. Consequently, beet-root sugar has appeared even in our market. The chief market for it, however, is England. The consequence is that the sugar, which is nine cents a pound in Germany, and seven cents a pound here, is five cents a pound in England, and that the annual consumption of sugar per head in the three countries is as follows: England, sixty-seven and a half pounds; United States, fifty-one pounds; Germany, twelve pounds. I sometimes find it difficult to make people understand the difference between wanting an "industry" and wanting goods, but this case ought to make that distinction clear. Obviously the Germans have the industry and the Englishmen have the sugar.

80. No sooner, however, does Germany get her export bounty in good working order than the Austrian sugar refiners besiege their government to know whether Germany is to have the monopoly of giving sugar to the Englishmen.