Especially was he ill-advised when, for the purpose of bringing into greater prominence my addiction to false statement, he burst out into italics in the following sentence: "_So far as the Custom House returns show, not one single ounce of foreign soap is imported into the United Kingdom, either from Germany or from any other country._" Because the German returns show an export of soap to England under three different headings. The correspondent should have provided himself with Green Books as well as Blue Books before he set out to demolish me. He would then have learned--what he should have known anyway, considering the attention he has given to the subject--that the English Custom House returns do not show everything.
This limited acquaintance with German statistics has caused the correspondent to go wrong on other occasions. For instance, in the fourth article he produces a table purporting to show our iron trade with Germany, in which the iron exports from Germany to England cut a very insignificant figure beside the English exports to Germany. To quote his own words in another place--"Most impressive! if only it were true." I had occasion the other day to get out a detailed list of the German exports to England of iron and steel manufactures in 1891; they reached a total of 109,956 tons. The correspondent gives 11,000 tons as the total of iron manufactures; the complete total of iron and steel manufactures, according to the source whence he obviously drew his information, was about 16,000 tons. The explanation is of course that the English returns do not always show the actual place of origin. (It doesn't matter much; competition in any other name hits just as hard, and Germany, after all, is but one rival out of many. I only used her as an instance of foreign competition generally.)
This particular table is, therefore, hopelessly wrong, and is certainly valueless for any purpose of destructive criticism. It is on this page that the correspondent brings against me a petty accusation of which he should have been ashamed. He says that I have "skilfully conveyed a false impression" by giving certain German figures in hundredweights and English figures in tons. Surely he had the wit to see that I was merely transcribing figures without stopping to translate them; and it is difficult to imagine he could think I was so witless as to adopt a silly sleight-of-hand trick such as that of which he accuses me, a trick which would not deceive a child in the lowest standard of a Board school.