Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/363

Rh. The iron industry west of the Appalachian chain has grown with portentous rapidity, and in the year just elapsed the total production of iron in the United States for the first time exceeded the production in Great Britain. The bulk of the iron in the United States is made far away from the seaboard, and the greater part of the producers of pig-iron can defy foreign competition. A similar development has taken place in the South, where large beds of iron ore, not so rich in quality as those of the North, have yet the advantage of being situated close to great deposits of valuable coal. The result has been this extraordinary development of iron manufacturing, which may have surprising consequences in the future. If the means of transportation during the next two decades continue to improve as they have improved during the decades just passed, or if by an enlargement of the canals around Niagara Falls and around the rapids of the St. Lawrence river, the great iron region of the North is brought into easy water communication with the world at large, the United States is likely to become a great iron-exporting country, and eventually to take the place of Great Britain as the great purveyor to the world of this indispensable instrument of modern civilization. The far-reaching effects of this change on the distribution of the world's trade will easily suggest itself to the reader. Meanwhile, the change has had for its immediate effect to make the duties upon pig-iron of very much less consequence to the United States than they were twenty years ago or even ten years ago. The duty now has an effect only in maintaining certain furnaces and establishments which are situated near the Eastern seaboard, and which might be affected in their local market by the competition of British iron; although even to these it is not probable that the competition would have any considerable effect. No demands were made for an increase in the duty, which accordingly is left in the McKinley Act at the old figure ($6.72 per ton). Indeed, the only demands heard were for a lowering or entire abolition of the duty. It is felt in some of the cities on the Atlantic seaboard that the higher stages of the iron industry, for which pig-iron is a raw material, would be aided if the duty were abolished; since these cities are for all practical purposes nearer to England than to the WesternStates, which are now the centre of the domestic production of pig-iron.

Much more significant than the duty upon pig-iron is the duty upon iron ore, which is of practical effect in regard to those grades of ore which contain little phosphorus, and are therefore available for the manufacture of steel by the Bessemer process. The development of the great beds of iron ore of this quality in