That is enough about woollens. About jute a couple of sentences will suffice. In order to make the facts in this trade look worse than they are—there is nothing really bad about them—Mr. Williams first places German figures in marks side by side with English figures in pounds sterling, and then plays what can only be called the “percentage trick.” The German increase in eleven years, he says, is at the rate of 1,100 per cent., while the British is only 19 per cent. Remarkable! Yet Mr. Williams might have discovered from his own figures, if he had only taken the trouble to turn marks into pounds, that the German increase in eleven years was only £107,000, while the British increase was £412,000. In other words, our increase was almost four times as great as Germany’s, and our total is now £2,588,000, against their total of £117,000. Exactly the same percentage trick is employed by Mr. Williams in comparing German and English trade with Japan. In this case there is also an important error in his arithmetic; but let that pass. The trick consists in deluding the uncritical reader into the belief that German trade with Japan is increasing faster than our own, whereas during the period selected by himself for comparison our increase has been almost exactly double the German increase. It is by devices such as these that Mr. Williams has succeeded in filling his pages with gloomy statements and gloomier prophecies. To track him further along his tortuous path would be profitless. “Here ends,” he writes at the close of one of his most despairing and most deceptive chapters, “the tale of England’s industrial shame.” If candour should be an essential to fair controversy, there is other shame than England’s to be ended. CHAPTER V. OUR GROWING PROSPERITY.