The Annual Register (Volume 151) Paperback - 2201

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: So also was the state of rope-making and twine-spinning, which was mainly in the hands of one great concern. Tobacco and whisky suffered greatly from the Budget; the building trade was depressed. At the end of the year a Departmental Committee was appointed to inquire into the causes in the decline of the production of Irish flax. The total area of corn and green crops, including flax and fruit, in the year was 2,304,194 acres, a decrease?mainly in Ulster?of 11 per cent, on 1908. There was a decrease in flax and oats, and also in cattle, horses and pigs. The harvest was described by the Times as short and inexpensive, and satisfactory. SUPPLEMENTAEY CHAPTER. Finance And Trade In 1909. All the leading agricultural and industrial countries had very much the same story to tell of the trend of trade in 1909. The tale was one of depressed industries in the first six months and awakened activities in the second half of the year, so that economists who wished to add fuel to the burning question of fiscal policy, which broke out afresh at the end of the year, were faced with the problem of trying to prove to what an extent the depression was lessened or aggravated, and the recovery assisted or retarded by the tariff policy of each country. It must be confessed that it is difficult to separate from among other influences the precise effect of tariffs on national prosperity, but the effect is certainly more tangible than that of politics. In this country we were saturated with politics in 1909, and it was freely said by responsible observers that much wild platform talk had the direct effect of driving capital out of the country to the injury of home trade and the benefit of foreign enterprise. This statement was answered by the argument, which, of course, is unassailable, that the i...