VERIFICATION. INTRODUCTORY 155 
Great Britain continued to be the country of high wages and 
high expenses. The habitual standard of expenditure, the “cost 
of living” and what not, remained decade after decade higher than 
on the Continent. 
It is part of the same set of phenomena that neither high money 
wages nor low money wages, neither a high monetary scale nor a 
low one, count as factors in promoting international trade or in 
retarding it. An impression as common as the one just mentioned 
(that free trade must lead to an equalization of wages and prices) 
is that a country where wages and prices are high finds it difficult 
to export, while one where they are low finds it easy to export; and 
that, conversely, imports tend to flow especially from the coun- 
tries with a low monetary scale toward those with a high scale. 
The plain facts known to everyone are quite out of accord with 
any such notion. The surprising thing is that, plain and well- 
known as the facts are, the notion is so persistent. Goods move 
from the dear countries to the cheap countries, from those with 
high wages and great prosperity to those with low wages and hard 
conditions, quite as much as the other way. The money 
values of the goods that move the two ways are on the whole equal, 
the discrepancies being of minor moment and easily explicable 
in connection with the invisible items of international trade. 
The goods continue to be exchanged on the basis of an equalization 
of money values, decade after decade and generation after genera- 
tion, without check to their exportation from the dear countries 
or increase of their exportation from the cheap ones. 
Many familiar facts are thus quite in accord with the deduced 
theory; they stand as obvious verifications. Not only this: no 
other explanation of the facts has ever been offered. Commonly 
enough, even in pretentious books on economics, the variations 
in prices and money incomes between different countries are 
referred to as if they were ultimate data — a situation which 
the economist finds once for all, which he need not try to explain, 
and for which his only concern is with the conclusions or corollaries 
it suggests. Most German writers on international trade speak 
as if these phenomena were determined by inscrutable forces :