chimerical. A tariff that is on even for one year and may be off the
next is itself as disturbing a factor in industry as any exchange
fluctuations can be.

Nor is there, in the nature of things, any possibility of continuous
advantage in trade to any country through the low valuation of its
currency. The Prime Minister confesses that Germany is _not_ obtaining
any export trade as the result of the fall. Then the whole argument has
been and is a false pretence. The plea that the German manufacturer is
advantaged because his wages bill does not rise as fast as the mark
falls in purchasing power is even in theory but a statement of one side
of a fluctuating case, seeing that when the mark rises in value his
wages bill will not fall as fast as the mark rises, and he is then, in
the terms of the case, at a competitive disadvantage.

But the worst absurdity of all in the tariffist reasoning on this topic
is the assumption that in no other respect than wage-rates is German
industry affected by the fall of the mark. The wiseacres who point
warningly to the exchanges as a reason for firm action on fabric gloves
never ask how a falling currency relates to the process of purchasing
raw materials from abroad. So plainly is the falling mark a bar to such
purchase that there is _prima facie_ no cause to doubt the German
official statement made in June, that foreign goods are actually
underbidding German goods in the German markets, and that the falling
exchange makes it harder and harder for Germany to compete abroad. We
are dealing with a four-square fallacy, the logical implication of which
is that a bankrupt country is the best advantaged for trade, that
Austria is even better placed for competition than Germany, and that
Russia is to-day the best placed of all.