Evening star., 1915-11-28

WV may mean battle to the
death or a sullen and re-
luctant retreat
Dumping, the act could perhaps de-
stroy nation. Possibly, on the other
hand it could build nation up. At all
events. it can and it has destroyed
groups of men engaged In commerce
and manufacturing.
Although industrial countries have
long practiced dumping. to the distress
of capital and the injury of labor,
the word, in the sense that has given
it odium and notoriety, cannot be found
In the largest dictionary published in
the United States
Dumping is without literature. Here
and there. and only recently, at that,
one may see vagrant references to
it i'll somber articles and books on
economics. But its day is now at hand.
x
This winter the Senate and House of
Representatives viii ring with explana-
tons and denunciations of dumping.
II may he that even President Wilson
will elucidate and condemn it in his
December message to Congress and the
country.
business and in the same village, and
Doe should notify all of Roe's custom
ers that they could buy of him at, say.
cut of 80 per cent in his and Roe's
usual prices. and If Doe at the same
time withheld the discount from his
own customers, then Doe would be
Jumping and Roe, dumped on, would
suffer So would Roe's clerks.
Does purpose might be to reduce the
stock of merchandise in his store. or.
by underselling temporarily, to drive
Roe out of business. If the ruin of
Roe were Does object and should oc-
cur. then Doe, naturally. would raise
his prices to level higher than before
and recoup his losses. Moreover, he
would become a local monopolst.
So there are two kinds of dumping
one kind is employed to sell quickly
surplus of products; the other, to drive
competitor to the wall and thereby
get control of the market.
Sporadic dumping. Judge Gary of
the steel corporation calls the oCCa-
sonal efforts to relieve the pressure
on prices by selling at cost or under.
.'It is an uneconomic performance he
told committee of Congress. "and
does not develop continuous business.
pumping" answered DIR. Edwin E.
Pratt, chief of the bureau of foreign
and domestic commerce in Washing
ton, to an inquiry made by the author
of this article, lis the selling of prod
net in foreign country at lower
Sitting at his desk and carefully
choosing his words and putting them
on paper, DIR. Frank William Taussig,
professor of economics at Harvard,
wrote the following definition for one
of his books: Dumping l take to mean
the disposal of goods in foreign coun-
tries al less than normal prices"
This definition not being entirely sat
isfactory, DR.. Taussing recently gave
another. Dumping" so reads his lat
est utterance. lis the steady sale of a
commodity to a foreigner at a lower
price than to domestic consumers"
Dumping" replied Arthur E. Holder,
the legislative agent of the American
Federation of Labor. to the writer of
these lines, 'is getting rid of something
that you don't want
Most countries, possibly all countries,
have practiced dumping periodically.
The subject lately has become acute in
the United States, however, because of
the efforts of German monopoly to
destroy the American dyestuff indus
try.
The average man doubtless thinks
that dyes are of little Importance to
him. Quite to the contrary, dyes are of
direct interest to every one. Out of
cines. as we'll as explosives, photo
graphic necessaries and other chemi-
Gals
Likewise there is fear among govern
ment officers in Washington that at the
end of the war all of Europe will be-
gin a dumping campaign against the
United States Accordingly, laws are
to be enacted to prevent the demoral-
liza ton of the American market.
This country is rich, SO the argument