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Record  and  Guide.





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ESTABUSHED-^ IWPH 21^^ 18S8,

Dp/SteD to Bm- Estate . Buildi)/g %crfiTECTURE .KousEHoiD DEeciF|ATioil,
BUsit/ESs Atfo Themes ofGe]>1er&L If/TEFtEst.

PRICE,  PER  YEAR   IN   ADVANCE,  SIX   DOLLARS.

Published eviry Saturday.

Telephone,......Cobtlandt 1370

Communications should lie addressed to

C. W. SWEET, 14-16 Vesey Street.
J, 2. LINDSET. Buaineas Manager.

Brooklyn Office, 276-282 Washington Street,

Opp. Post Office.

"Mntercd at the Post-offlce at New York, iV. F., as second-class matter."





Vol. LIII.





JANUARY 20, 1894.





No. 1,349





SECRETARY CARLISI-E h.as found courage to do the thing
1^ he ought to have done a year ago, namely, to issue bouds
to protect tlie Treasury surplus; but it will not iirofit any one
to complain of the delay if the results now are as .satisfactory as
they shoulil be. There is no doubt that the ofleriiig will be
largely over-subscribed, indeed it is said to be so already, and
it is uot likely that the banks will jiut obstacles in the wa.y of
their customers getting gold to pay for their bonds, as seems
to be the idea iu some quarters. It is as much to the interest
of the banks as to any one that the condition of the Treasury
should be made good, and from this view alone they may be
expected to assist the procurement of the gold mcessary to pur¬
chase the bonds. During all the past ye.ar the b.anks have never
done anything but protect themselves, aiiil doubtless they will
in the same spirit of self-care see that this loan is not a failure.
It is absolutely necessary that the supply of gold in the Treasury
should be increased; every iuterest iu tho country, of which
banking is ouly one, demands it. The banks which existed all
last summer owing to the indidgence of the public are surely
not going either actively or passively to .allow that public to be
injured. Judged from the results in the stock market the action
of the Treasury is having beneticial results already. While the
market is in no wise an active oue and prices do not advance
rapidly it has an appearance of strength unusual to a
professional market. The professional operator is a buyer
or a seller indift'erenty as occasion offers, and, as
in a trading market the outsider is mainly a seller, the
preponderance of influence is tow.ards lower figures. Recently,
however, prices have been strong, even when there has beeu no
advance. With the n;itional treasury put into a lie.althy condi¬
tion and, as .an Improvement in the condition of general business
seems now to be coming, even though very slowly, the hesitation
of capital that stands in the way of an advance in the prices of
investments and speculative securities should disappear. The
bond transactions are already growing larger, with prices
advancing, and tliis only needs some such encouragemeut as
indicated .above to develop into a regular buying movement
that, once begun, will soon spread through the list.





THE amount of new capital issued in Great Britain last year
was equal to only about five-eighths of what it was in 1892,
half of what it was in 1891, a third of that of 1890 and a fourth
of thiit of 1889. This .shows not ouly the depression iu tiuancial
afl'airs that existed there last year, but also how suspicious the
investing public has become since the Baring failure of new
enterprises put forward to capture capital. The falling off from
year to year shows conclusively that promoters receive less aud
less encouragement. The London Bankets' clear.ances, too,
show for the year 1893 that the proportion of loss iu
business was very much larger ou the Stock Exchange thau
in general trade, but the returns irom particular trades
show ex en thiit to have been very great, France has a
party which is carrying on a campaign for increased
protection to agriculture which has some of the revolutionary
features to be expected, but what wiU be of most importance on
this side is the demand it contains for a prohibitive import duty
on wheat. Our populists are outdone by the proposers of a bill
now in the Chamber of Deputies, which provides, iu relation to
mines, that when a strike has lasted two months and no arbitra¬
tion has succeeded in settling the dispute, the State shall take
possession of the mines, with or without compensation, and
either work them itself or concede them to a new company or
to au association of workmen. Naturally, this has affected the
price of mining shares. The bill as described in the
foreign prints practically proposes that the State shall
indorse    any    claims   the   miners   may   set   up   against





their employers. The shares of French iron and steel -works
are advancing in price. On the whole, what with Socialistic
views in Parliament and losses on the Bourse as a result of
trouble at home and bankruptcy abroad, affairs are no better in
France than they are here. The great powers have arranged a
customs modus vivcndi with Spain which avoids the trouble
anticipated as a result of the favoring treaties made with Hol¬
land, Norway and Sweden, Denm.ark aud Switzerland. N.aturally
the Sicilian outbreak -with sympathetic growlings in different
points on the mainland, make the Italian financial situation,
already bad enough, worse than ever. The continued decline in
Italian rentes is also a disturbing feature in Berlin, for the reasons
already given. There is <a happier feeling in some of the iron
find steel centres of the German empire, apparently based more
on expectations than actual business. Of any European money
centre the conditions in Vienna seem upon the whole to be the
most cheerful, probably because it has less of its neighbor's
securities than the others. Still, being a borrower more than a
lender, it ha* been called upon to take back a great many of its
own issues in the past year. It is estimated that Austria had to
pay up l.")0,000,000 florins in 1893 for its own paper returned
to it fiom abroad, and chiefly from Germany. In Austria, too,
the iron trade is reported to be improving.

AN examination of the returns of our foreign trade serve to
show what a large part of our present difficulties are due
to the lessened price we have received for our products. For
the fiscal year ending June Sllth last our exports show a deficiency
of $183,000,000 as compared with the previous year. This is
due more to the low prices at which they were shipped than to
the lessened .amount shipped. Our exports of wheat were withiu
34,000,000 bushels of the exports of 1892, which were the
largest on record. The price realized, however, shows a lament¬
able deficiency. Duriug 1893 191,000,000 bushels were
exported, realizing upon an average less than 80 cents
per bushel (79 9-10 cents) as compared with an .average
of $1 020-1,000 per bushel iu 1892, and for flour, slup-
pers realized on an average 41 cents per barrel less
iu 1893 than in 1892. Turning uow to petroleum we
tind that our shipments of this surplus product are the
Largest ou record. During 1893 we shipped 803,000,000 gal¬
lons, as compared with about 715,000,000 gallons the year
before, but the price realized shows a heavy shrinkage of 1 cent
a gallon upon the whole amount shipped, the average price
being .5 24-100 cents per gallon as compared with
6 20-100 cents per gallon the year before. In other
words, our shipments of petroleum to the outside world
have beeu 88,000,000 gallons greater in amount, but .about
$3,000,000 less iu proceeds realized. Our shipments of cotton
to foreign countries in 1893 were about four-and-.a-half million
bales (2,211,377,.'555 pounds) in 1893, as compared with 2,93,5,-
219,811 pounds in 1892. The average price realized in 1893
was 8 57-100 cents per pound as compared with 8 8-10 cents per
pound iu 1892. Of the decrease of the money realized upon our
exports, $183,000,000, about $175,000,000 may be set down to
a shrinkage in the purchasing power of our three leading st.aples,
wheat, cotton .and petroleum, and of that shrinkage decline in
price is as great, if not a greater factor thau decrease
iu quantity. Otu- tot.al product of silver from 1889
to 1892 has varied fi-om 50,000,000 to 58,000,000 ounces.
Duiing this whole period the government has bought and
taken out of the market 54,000,000 ounces, while the price has
fallen from $1 0734-100 per ounce to 62 cents per ounce. In
wheat we have t.aken 34,000,000 bushels out of the market,
.and yet have seen the price realized diop 23 cents per bushel;
in another staple we have taken over one million bales out of
tlie market, and yet have seen the price fall 23-100 of a cent per
pound, .and iu the effort to make up this colossal loss we have
not ouly had to give 88,000,000 gallons more of another but have
had to knock one cent per gallon off the price to do it.





THE great and genial Chauncey M. Depew seems not to
realize that the world has become smaller by reason of its
readier communications. There was a time when a traveler
on returning home coidd tell his friends that in far Cathay, or
some equally remote place,.men's heads were under the left
armpit, .and it took severttl centuries to expose the fiction. But
to-day a returned traveler who indulges iu "whoppers" finds
the contradiction staring him in the face when he opens his
newspaper next morning at breakfast and then, worse still, he
has to go the circuit of the office and the club, not to speak of
the interview, and offer lame aud humiliating explanations.
This, of course, is tho result of an extreme case of travelers'
mend.acity aud is not to be applied to the G. and G. C. Still he
is in rather au awkward position. When he left these shores a
few months ago he announced th.at the objective point of his
journey was Rome, and told iu detail how he was going to get
there and what he would do when once in the Celestial City, The
story he told on his .return was quite up to the value of thfl