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INTERNATIONAL TRADE 
as if they were the acts of God, so to speak, concerning which it 
is beyond human ken to find explanation. Sometimes they are 
referred to as if simply the result of historical circumstances. 
They happened so, came to be so; it is otiose to inquire whether 
they might have been otherwise. One outstanding merit of the 
abstract theory is that it does consider why the facts are so and 
not otherwise. It gives a reasoned explanation of the differences 
in money incomes between different countries, of the causes which 
make wages and prices higher in some than in others, of the bearing 
of the differences on the material prosperity of the exchanging 
regions. The theory may not be a complete one; it may not be 
even a sound one. But it does grapple with the problems, and is 
the only one that has ever done so. What has been propounded 
in opposition by critics has evaded the problems, constructed 
nothing.! 
These general remarks may be supplemented by some considera- 
tion, again very general, of the case in which differences of wages 
and prices are most conspicuous — the relations between West- 
ern Europe and the Orient. How far can it be said that these 
marked contrasts conform to the deductions of theory? How far 
do they serve as verification, how far suggest problems still to 
be solved ? 
Recall the general lines of the theoretical analysis. The case 
would appear to be one of differences in absolute costs; this much 
seems to be indicated by the great disparity between the money 
incomes and monetary standards of the two regions. India — 
taking this country as the largest of the tropical countries, and for 
so long a period the most important — has an absolute advantage 
11t is surprising that, in the very latest German systematic compendium, so 
keen and well-equipped an economist as Wieser should fall into errors of the kind 
noted in this and the preceding paragraphs. He imputes it as a defect of the 
“ classical quantity theory’ that ‘‘ the value of money is supposed to equalize itself 
internationally by an automatic process. Gold, like every other commodity, seeks 
the places where it has the highest value and flows thither from the places of lower 
value.” And a further error is said to be that abstraction is made of the historical 
restriction to which individuals are subject — restrictions which above all affect 
human beings themselves and stand in the way of “an equalization of their culture 
in kind and in extent.”” Grundriss der Sozialkonomik, Vol. I, Theorie der Gesell- 
schaftlichen Wirtschaft, p. 433 (1914). Such versions of the doctrines of the 
Ricardian school are the exact opposites of their real content.