Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/811

Rh manufacture of fabrics, and which must obviously have an effect on the price of raw silk equivalent to an increase in its supply.

—Good medium jute declined on the London market from £17 per ton in 1874 to an average of £11 10s. in 1886, or more than 32 per cent. The increase in exports from British India was from 5,206,570 cwt. in 1876 to 10,348,909 cwt. in 1883, or 98 per cent.

—The recent price experiences of nitrate of soda (Chilian saltpeter) have been very curious. The supply of this article, which corresponds to the more valuable nitrate of potash (true saltpeter), is practically limited to one locality on the earth's surface—a rainless, desert tract—in the province of Tarapaca, which formerly belonged to Peru, but has recently been annexed to Chili. It is cheaply and plentifully obtained, at points from fifty to ninety miles from the coast, by dissolving out the nitrate salt from the desert earth, which it impregnates, with water, and concentrating the solution by boiling to the point where the nitrate separates by crystallization. Up to the year 1845 it was an article so little known to commerce, that only 6,000 tons were annually exported; but as its value as a fertilizing agent in agriculture, and as a cheap source of nitrogen in the manufacture of nitric acid, became recognized, the demand for it rapidly increased until the amount exported in 1883 was estimated at 570,000 tons, or more than a thousand million pounds. To meet this demand and obtain the profit resulting from substituting skillful for primitive methods of extracting and marketing the nitrate, foreign capital, mainly English, extensively engaged in the business. A large amount of English-made machinery, and many English engineers and mechanics, were sent out and planted in the desert; additional supplies of water were secured, and a railroad fifty-nine miles in length constructed to the port of Iquique on the sea-coast, for the transportation of coal, provisions, and other material up, and the nitrate as a return freight down. So energetically, moreover, was the work pressed, that at the last and most complete establishment constructed under English auspices, the business, employing when in full operation six hundred men, was prosecuted unremittingly by night (by the agency of the electric light) as well as by day. The result was exactly what might have been anticipated. The export of nitrate, which was 319,000 tons in 1881, rose to 570,000 tons in 1883; and prices at the close of 1883 declined with great rapidity to the extent of more than 50 per cent, or to a point claimed to be below the cost of production. Such a result, threatening the whole business with disaster, led to an agreement on the part of all the interests concerned, to limit from June, 1884, to January, 1887, the product of every establishment to 25 per cent of its capacity. But notwithstanding these well-devised measures, prices have not been restored to their former figures, the average price per cwt. in London having been 10s. in 1886, as compared with an average of 14s. for 1867-77.