Knowledge that Transforms

In 19 ii for the first time newsprint paper was admitted free of duty from Canada. Since then it has remained on the free list. During this same period the United States has moved from self-sufficiency in its newsprint paper supply to dependence on Canada for more than one-third of the paper it uses for printing its newspapers. Hence it is of significance to consider what would be the effect of removing the duty on the present relations of Canada and the United States with respect to newsprint paper. Provisions of the tariff law.-The United States act of July 26, i9Ii, providing for reciprocity with Canada upon the passage of similar legislation by Canada, put newsprint paper, imported into the United States from Canada, on the free list. This was accomplished by Section II, which was unconditional and independent of the reciprocity provision of the act, and which remained on the statute books of the United States. The benefit of this section of the act was extended two years later by court construction to Germany and certain other European nations under most-favored-nation treaties.' This extension to other countries besides Canada of the privileges of sending newsprint, as well as wood pulp and other cheap grades of paper, duty free into the United States, is of interest as one of the rare instances of the United States granting substantial concessions to other countries because of her most-favored-nation treaties. A little later, in I9I3, newsprint was placed unconditionally on the free list by the tariff act of I913, which is in force at the present time (June, I922). Growth of the Canadian industry.-Placing Canadian newsprint on the free list has been a factor in the great expansion of

A knowledge of the character and construction of British legislation in the taxation of estates and successions is essential to an understanding of the Succession Duties of the various Canadian Provinces. Of the death duties in the United Kingdom the probate is the oldest. For practical purposes it was abolished by the Finance Act in i894, but the principles of its incidence apply to the estate duty. As administered by the early ecclesiastical courts it was imposed upon only so much property of the deceased as was locally situated within the jurisdiction of the court. For the court to declare property liable to probate was to affirm that it was locally situate in its area of jurisdiction. For example, the courts held that shares in a canal company should be probated in the diocese where the transfer office was located;' that foreign personal property of a person dying domiciled in England was not liable to probate duty;2 that duty paid in England on shares of a railway situate in Scotland with its transfer office also in Scotland was wrongly paid and must

The export practices of other continental countries have not been subjected to as close or as critical examination as those of Germany, so that there is available but scanty material upon which to base conclusions as to the prevalence of dumping in these countries.But the combination of circumstances which especially favored the development of export dumping in Germany on a systematic and extensive scale, namely, the growth of large-scale manufacturing industries operating under unified or syndicated control and enjoying high tariff protection in the domestic market, were not present to nearly the same degree in the remainder of the Continent.In most of the continental countries manufacturing for export was either comparatively unimportant or was largely confined to the production by small concerns of individualized products under conditions not far removed from the handicraft stage.It is not to be expected, therefore, that dumping should be found to be as prominent in the export trade of these countries as of Germany.Such evidence as is available appears to justify the conclusion that in these countries dumping in the export trade was practiced on an extensive scale only by such producers as were operating under conditions closely similar to those governing the syndicated German industries, namely, large-scale machine industry, syndicated control, and a protected domestic market.In some respects conditions most closely resembling those of German manufacturing industry were to be found in Belgium.There were in this country many important large-scale manufacturing enterprises, organized into producers' syndicates closely modeled after the German kartells.But these syndicates exported so large a proportion of their total output, and the domestic market in many cases was relatively so unimportant, that there was little to be gained from an attempt to maintain domestic prices on a permanently higher level than those prevalent in the important export markets.Moreover, the Belgian tariff was too low, and the Belgian market too close to Germany, France, and England, to permit of the maintenance of prices in the domestic market substantially higher than the export prices-often dumping prices-of the producers in these countries.The conditions were in these important respects unfavorable, therefore, to the practice by Belgian producers of dumping on a systematic and substantial scale.'Some of the most important of Belgian industries nevertheless found it practicable to resort to dumping either intermittently or on a permanent basis, and in several instances export bounties, both to direct exporters and to domestic manufacturers buying materials for further use in manufacture for export, were employed.Among the industries which resorted more or less systematically to dumping were the iron and steel, coal, cement, plate glass, canned vegetables, and earthenware syndicates, all of them among the leading industries of Belgium.2Because the domestic market was relatively unimportant for some of these industries, Belgian dumping occasionally took the form of the sale of Belgian products at lower prices in distant foreign markets than in other export markets which were closer by and were "standard" markets for Belgian products.3I Cf.G. De Leener, L'Organisation Syndicale des Chefs d'Industrie, Brussels, I909, II, 274, 433.Cf. especially, p. 433: "La Belgique, a defaut de protection douaniere suffisante, present peu d'exemples caracterises de la pratique du 'dumping."' 2 For evidence of Belgian dumping, see U.