CANADA 
223 
but little effect in confusing the situation. In essentials the case 
is of a kind rare in economic experience, in that a single force was 
at work under conditions which enable us to trace its effects with 
certainty. The series of phenomena come as close to the conditions 
of an experiment — the deliberate isolation of a given force — as 
economic history can well supply. And there is the further 
favoring circumstance that the materials for tracing the outcome 
are ample, and have been analyzed with great labor and discrimi- 
nation by a competent hand. 
During the last decade or two of the 19th century — in the 
period immediately preceding that which we are to consider — 
the international trade of Canada had the features to be expected 
in a country which has borrowed in the past. The stage had been 
reached where interest payable on the old loans over-balanced 
such new loans as continued to be contracted. Canada’s com- 
modity exports then exceeded her imports. With the 20th 
century, a new period set in, and all this was reversed. Heavy 
loans were contracted, virtually all being connected directly or 
indirectly with the settlement and exploitation of the West — 
Manitoba, Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and the rest. 
Beginning at a modest rate, the loans enlarged steadily, until in 
the later part of the period (1908-1913) they rose to two, three, 
and (at the very last) five hundred millions a year. The total 
sum borrowed by this country of moderate size amounted to bil- 
lions of dollars in little more than a decade. The Great War, 
coming in 1914, suddenly stopped the movement. The experi- 
ment was then abruptly closed, so to speak, and could never 
again be renewed in quite the same simple and instructive 
fashion. 
! Professor Jacob Viner’s book on Canada’s Balance of International Indebted- 
ness, 1900-1913 (1924), of which this chapter is hardly more than an abstract, is a 
model monograph of its kind — exhaustive in the accumulation and analysis 
of the evidence, keen in the application of economic principles to the facts observed. 
[ feel satisfaction in having taken the initiative in suggesting the subject to Pro- 
fessor Viner; the extraordinarily successful outcome of the research is due to his 
indefatigable industry and high intellectual ability. 
Much is also due to Mr. R. H. Coats, Statistician of the Dominion of Canada. 
His report on Cost of Living (1915) supplied full and accurate material on price 
movements, arranged with unusual competence.