ABSTRACT
Businessmen everywhere felt the crisis, and most of them wanted remedies. Although repeal helped prevent sharp price increases following bad harvests, there was simply enough grain produced in the world to provoke a major agricultural crisis. In conclusion, four countries have been subjected to a set of questions in an attempt to find evidence relevant to differing explanations of tariff levels in the late nineteenth century. In each country, we find a large bloc of economic interest groups gaining significant economic advantages from the policy decision adopted concerning tariffs. Had farmers supported protection in Britain or opposed it in Germany and France, we could also offer a plausible economic interpretation for their behavior. Agriculture, notes Gerschenkron, could respond to the sharp drop in grain prices in two ways: modernization or protection. The interests of the industrial work force were pulled in conflicting directions by the divergent claims of consumer preoccupations and producer concerns.
