Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/794

774 cheaper facilities for transportation have undoubtedly contributed to such a result, it has been mainly due to an apparent desire, as M. Leroy-Beaulieu has expressed it, on the part of the Governments of France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, Holland, Italy, and Russia, "to make their national sugar industry the greatest in the world" by stimulating the domestic production of this commodity by the payment of extraordinary bounties on its exportation to other countries; or, in other words, by competing with one another in paying large sums for the purpose of speedily getting rid, at little or no profit, of one of the most valuable and highly-desired products of human industry.

On the other hand, in order to neutralize to some extent the exceptional advantages enjoyed through such an economic policy by the producers of beet-sugar in Europe, some of the cane-growing countries have felt obliged to encourage, by subsidies or tax-exemptions, their own sugar-production. In both Brazil and the Argentine Republic the manufacturers of cane-sugar have obtained a guarantee from the state of a five to six per cent return on their capital invested; while all the machinery needed in this industry may be imported free of duty. In the Spanish West Indies the home government has finally (1887) felt compelled to relinquish the export duties on sugars—the produce of Cuba and Porto Rico—which have long been regarded as almost indispensable on account of revenue necessities; while in South Africa and Australia the production of sugar has also been encouraged to such an extent that both of these countries will hereafter be undoubtedly included among the number of important sugar-exporting regions. In Central America, the British and Dutch West India Islands, Guiana, and India (which last produces more sugar than any other country) production has not as yet been artificially encouraged, and, with the exception of the levying of export taxes in certain localities, neither have any impediments been placed in the way of the natural growth of production. But at the same time it can not be doubted that the recent increased facilities for transportation and communication have, as before pointed out, been in the nature of a stimulus to the production of sugar, in common with all other commodities, and have opened up large and fertile sections of the earth, which a quarter of a century ago were practically inaccessible.

Under such conditions the increase in the production of sugar entering into the world's commerce, and available for general consumption, has been extraordinary. Mr. Sauerbeck estimates the increase from 1872-'73 to 1885-'86 to have been 68 per cent. Other authorities estimate the increase from 1853 to 1884, exclusive of the product of India and China, to have been at the rate of 30 per cent for each decade—or about 100 per cent compounded. In the Hawaiian Islands, where a remission of duties on sugars exported to the United States is equivalent to an export bounty of about 100 per cent, the domestic production of sugar has increased from about 12,000 tons in