Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

It is quite evident that the protective policy of several great nations, restricting their export trade with one another as compared with the trade each continues to do with the richest of the free-import countries, viz. Great Britain, has been largely instrumental in forcing freight-service and banking to the fore among our modes of payment for our imports. It is equally evident that the point of great insistence by Tariff Reformers, viz. that our recent trade with protected countries shows a slower growth than with non-protected countries, so far as it is correct, merely signifies this process of adaptation on the part of British trade seeking the lines of least resistance or greatest receptiveness for the movement of our exports.

§3. What we buy and what we pay with must be in a continual state of flux, under free exchange or under protection, unless the latter system leads to complete industrial isolation accompanied by stagnation in population and the arts alike of production and consumption.

The character and proportions of the foreign trade of a progressive nation must always be changing, and the more large, various, and profitable that trade is, the more numerous and important will be the changes. If then we examine the export trades of any country, we shall expect to find some of them dwindling and others growing. A dwindling export trade may, of course, signify the successful competi

tion of foreigners in their own markets or in neutral markets which we once held.

But it may mean something quite different, viz. either the increase of domestic consumption, which has at once raised the value of these goods and left no surplus for export, or that other trades have grown up with which we find we can more economically make our export payments. Both of these causes of the apparent decay of an export trade are prima facie indications of increased national wealth. In the case of the recent decline of the woollen and worsted export trade, both causes are doubtless operative. The largely increased consumption of wool in the manufacture indicates that a growth of domestic trade has checked the export trade; one reason for the decline of woollen exports is that our own people are becoming better clad. The other reason is that the woollen is our oldest manufacture, the greater improvements in mechanical inventions and in the development of markets therefore coming earlier it has reached a stage in which further reductions in cost of production are relatively slight; other newer industries have sprung up in which for a time our relative superiority of production as compared with other nations is greater than in the case of wool. It is at present more profitable for us to buy an increasing proportion of our imports with coal, machinery, and ships than with woollen and linen goods. The chief reason for the positive or relative decline of

most export trades which are the subjects of commiseration is, not the protective tariffs of foreign countries, but the competition of other British industries which have secured a larger proportion of our export trade for themselves. For though neither our export nor our import trade can rightly be regarded as a fixed inexpansive quantity, so that a new cheap British manufacture can only force a foreign market by displacing some other British export, our examination of the financial mechanism of international trade has made it evident that a selection of different kinds of import and export goods is continually being made by merchants in accordance with the rise and fall of prices for various kinds of goods in their own as compared with the several foreign countries. The practical problem which is being worked out at any given moment by the financial and commercial class in various foreign countries who call out British exports is how best to balance in terms of British exports the amount of British import values represented by bills of exchange in their hands. We saw that any increase or decrease of these bills in London must act on foreign and British prices so as to stimulate or depress British exports, and so to maintain a balance of import and export trade. As some British prices will fall or rise more than others, the foreigners who call out British exports will fasten more on those where the relative fall of price is greater, or the

relative rise of prices less. In this way foreign buyers are continually selecting some kinds of goods for our export trade, rejecting others.

The trades in which we are making more rapid progress as compared with foreign countries will naturally be favoured in this selection of exports from Great Britain. Behind this foreign selection, the competition of British trades among themselves may be said to determine the place they shall severally occupy in our export trade. At one time textiles, cotton, woollen, silk, linen in various changing proportions, form the greater part of our export values; then, partly in substitution, partly as a result of expansion, the metal trades take a more prominent place; later still, special metal trades connected with machinery forge ahead and vie with the closely related industry of shipbuilding and with coal to make the pace.

Taking our import trade as a given quantity, we thus see that the make-up of the return cargo of exports will be constantly shifting, as a result, partly of changes in foreign demand, partly of changes in the internal conditions of British industries as compared with one another and with the corresponding foreign industries. It will pay us better to send, and it will pay them better to receive, a different sort of cargo this year than we sent last year to represent each £1,000,000 of exports.

§4. But, of course, our import trade is not really a

fixed quantity. Just as an increased demand for foreign goods on our part compels foreigners to find British goods which they will buy in return (unless they can get British industries to use the goods they send as capital and to pay them interest alone), so an increased demand for British exports may issue from foreigners, who will thus oblige us to receive more imports (unless we in our turn prefer to increase our foreign investments). Imports and exports are, as we have seen, mutual determinants, so far as quantities of values are concerned: an increase or shrinkage of the one compels a corresponding increase or shrinkage of the other. If, then, even a fixed volume of export trade will be continually liable to changes of its make-up, a constant change of volume will impress an even greater fluctuation on the export trades.

5. The mystery made of investments as a factor in the balance contains nothing essentially mysterious. There is nothing in the financial mechanism for securing a balance of imports and exports to insist that either side shall pay immediately in full for everything it receives. A foreign government or a group of members of a foreign nation may borrow from a group of Englishmen without setting in operation any financial movement requiring foreigners immediately to restore a corresponding amount of wealth to England. A loan from England to a foreign government or a group

« AnteriorContinuar »