See also League of Nations Armaments Year-Book (Geneva, 1928). (G. G. A.) According to the last (193o) census, of the total population of inhabitants, 41.3% were sustained by manufactures and mechanical pursuits, 23.1% by agriculture, 8.7% by trade, 5.5% by transportation, 5.3% by the professions, 3.2% by the hotel industry, and the rest, 12.9%, by incomes derived from other sources. As these proportions clearly show, Switzerland is pre ponderantly an industrial country. In so far as such statistics are internationally comparable, it would seem that only Great Britain and Belgium are more dependent on manufacturers for their ex istence and their prosperity. The fact is all the more surprising as the Swiss subsoil is practically barren of all useful minerals and as the country, entirely landlocked, is without direct access to overseas markets.
Table I on the following page, based on the census of 193o, shows the number of persons gainfully engaged in the principal Swiss industries and the proportion they represent of all persons employed in the country.
While the building trades, which comprise a great variety of different occupations, the wood, food, drink, tobacco, clothing, stone and earth, power, gas, and water, paper, rubber and leather industries and the graphic trades cater mostly to the home market, the others are primarily export industries. Table II, in which the various products are arranged in the order of their value as exports in 1937, shows the present situation and that which prevailed in 1929, on the eve of the depression, on the morrow and on the eve of the World War, and at the beginning of the present century.
main fact which is brought out by our table is the extreme in stability of Swiss industry due to the corresponding instability of the world situation with which it is intimately bound up. While the World War, in paralyzing production in several of the com peting states, gave rise to a real boom in most Swiss manufactures, the great depression, with the consequent depreciation of all foreign currencies and restriction of all foreign imports, has dealt the industries of the country a very severe blow.
For the last eighty years at least. the rural population had been steadily declining. Even the war and the agrarian protectionist tendencies which have more effectively asserted themselves since, than before, have done no more than to retard what seems to be an almost inevitable development. The following figures show that since the beginning of the present century this decline has been not only relative but also absolute: For over a century, Switzerland has been becoming increasingly dependent upon imports for her food supply, especially for her bread stuffs. This has led to an artificial promotion of the pro duction of grain, for which the country is not naturally fitted, the results of which are shown in the following table: The second of these two tables, in the light it throws both on the present situation of the principal Swiss exporting industries and on their evolution since the beginning of the century, reveals several striking facts. In the first place—not, it is true, a revela tion—it clearly shows that Switzerland's industrial structure is based on human, social and political, and not on any natural ad vantages. Practically all raw materials, be they minerals or vegetable or animal fibres, are imported and, except in the case of aluminium and artificial silk, hydraulic power, the only source of energy to be found in the country, plays no decisive part in the productive process. The second fact which this table indicates and which a closer and more detailed analysis of Swiss industrial ex ports would show still more clearly, is that they consist almost exclusively in high grade, expensive commodities. Deprived of an appreciable home market, stifled by the protectionist policies of all their clients abroad, and burdened with heavy transportation charges, Swiss manufacturers cannot indulge in mass production. They can thrive only if they produce wares which will find pur chasers even if expensive and which present a very high value in a reduced volume. That is the case of intricate producers' goods such as complicated machinery, durable consumers' goods such as watches or boots and shoes, and luxury products such as fine silks, embroideries, perfumes and other articles of interest mainly to the feminine world. This highly qualified nature of Swiss manufacture explains the third feature revealed by our table. As industrial technique progresses and as fashions vary, all pro duction involving the use of intricate machinery and destined to satisfy luxury tastes is inevitably subject to violent fluctua tions. Thus, while the first of these two factors has favoured the development of the chemical, mechanical, aluminium and artificial silk industries, the second has crippled the silk and silk ribbon industries and, in combination with the construction, ex port and establishment abroad of very high grade embroidery machinery, all but killed what, at the beginning of the century, was the second branch of Swiss manufactures. Finally, the fourth As Switzerland does not export any appreciable quantity of cereal foodstuffs, these figures show that she remains today as she was before the war, essentially dependent upon foreign grain for the sustenance of her population. But they also show that, in spite of an increasing population, she has not become increasingly so. The heavy bonus paid to domestic producers of wheat has un doubtedly had an effect, as observant travellers through the Swiss countryside may have noticed and as is confirmed by these figures. But self-sufficiency in grain, already abandoned at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the population was about half what it is now, is today absolutely out of the question.