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INTERNATIONAL TRADE 
the industry first was undertaken on any considerable scale, and 
where it has grown steadily, has some special advantages on non- 
irrigated lands. Nature has given to a good part of its beet dis- 
trict the required combination of climate and precipitation. 
These physical causes, serving as they do to give the beet sugar 
industry of the far West some degree of comparative advantage, 
have been reinforced by the fact that the competing product (cane 
sugar) encounters transportation obstacles in reaching the center 
of the country from the sea-board. Hence the beet sugar industry 
has here shown a great growth under the stimulus of protection. 
The growth is striking when compared with the absence of any- 
thing of the kind in the main agricultural region, which yet has 
climatic conditions similar to those of European countries where 
beet sugar production flourishes without any tariff support at all. 
It would carry us too far afield to inquire whether the net result 
is that the Western sugar producers are in a position to compete 
with other sources of sugar supply without protection. Apparently 
some part of the industry is independent of such support, but by 
no means all of it. These are questions of the balancing of forces, 
and concrete problems important for the legislator, which lie out- 
side the field of the present investigation.! The case is significant 
for our purposes as an illustration of the way in which the inter- 
play of physical and human factors combines to bring about or to 
take away a comparative advantage. 
Essentially the same sort of situation, and the same explanation 
of what at first sight appear to be anomalies, are found in flax 
culture. Flax being an agricultural article, one might expect it 
to be produced with ease and with success in a country preéminent 
in agriculture. Yet in fact it never was produced in considerable 
quantities in the United States, and it quite dropped out of sight 
before the middle of the nineteenth century — that is, as soon as 
the country entered on its characteristic agricultural and industrial 
development. Attempts to stimulate its production by protective 
1 For an excellent account of various sugar producing regions, cane as well as 
beet, from which the United States is supplied, see P. G. Wright, Sugar in Relation 
to the Tariff (1924).