The one article of home-production left, which was open to foreign competition, is sugar. The erratic development of this industry in conjunction with the tariff has been so eventful, and so instructive from the economic point of view, that a rather lengthy review may be pardoned. This is practically a paraphrase and condensation of the extremely interesting, though, at times, somewhat exclamatory article written by M. Ricardo Pillado, the head of the Division of Commerce in the Argentine Ministry of Agriculture, 1906. Unfortunately, in attempting to follow some of the author's calculations it has been found quite impossible to verify his results or to see how he arrived at them. In some cases the figures are so obviously impossible in the light of the data that the only explanation seems to be a misprint. In order not to sacrifice the continuity of his account, these figures have been given as they stand. The fact that the article in question appears in a collection, derived from various sources, and republished officially at the Ministry of Agriculture, seemed to give additional justification for its presentation here without emendation. Writing at end of 1903, when the Brussels Convention had just condemned Bounties, and when the original heavy import duties and export drawbacks were still in force, he makes this preface to a general discussion of the whole working of the exaggerated protection of the Sugar Industry. "The fiscal protection of the Sugar industry, instituted in the year 1883, and maintained up to the present moment in all its intensity, has been the source of the gravest evils to the Republic, not merely through its immediate effect and its having admitted and secured the maintenance of an economic system so detrimental to the country, but also, in the sphere of credit, through the complications of which it has been the indirect cause. Every effort, therefore, tending to destroy to their very foundations the fallacies which have been the mainspring and origin of its birth and continuance up to the present day ought to be considered, in my opinion, as an act of patriotism and duty." M. Pillado is far from being a free-trader in the accepted English sense. "The protection which reasonably may be and, I will even say, ought to be afforded to national industries cannot," he goes on to say, "be identified with the favours which were lavished on the sugar industry." Although he is in favour of a moderate and strictly protective Tariff, he cannot reconcile the prevailing system with any economic theory whatever. The Sugar plantations and refineries are situated in the remote North West of the country, and the latter were practically in the hands of two powerful concerns. Owing to the expense of rail transport, under no circumstances could the sugar be transported to the coast to compete on equal terms with the imported ocean-borne article, and certainly not, with the additional freight, in European markets.