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INTERNATIONAL TRADE 
hERva LTE 
RE 
strengthening or mitigating this one influence and always veiling 
it. Hence in such a country it is peculiarly difficult to trace the 
concrete working of the forces of international trade. There is 
nothing like the sensitiveness of the deposit-using countries, in 
which a great structure of credit money rests on a slender basis 
of reserves. There is the persistent steadiness of a circulating 
medium in which actual gold is used in a great mass of daily trans- 
actions. 
It is not necessary to go further in the consideration of the 
monetary conditions of other countries of Continental Europe. 
Most of them, as they stood in the gold-standard days, presented 
features resembling the French. When the specie supply was less 
abundant, as for example in Ttaly and Austria, there was greater 
sensitiveness to gold movements. But it was then a sensitiveness 
rather of the standard of circulation than of the circulating medium 
itself, and raised questions more akin to those of trade under incon- 
vertible paper than to those of trade with free gold movement. 
Where the gold supply was abundant and the metal was freely 
used in every-day payments, as in Germany and Belgium, there 
was resemblance to the French type, yet with variants. The 
German situation of pre-war days had some features of its own. 
Note issue was regulated and restricted; deposits and postal- 
checking accounts were coming into steadily greater use; the 
habits of the people in using money were changing almost as fast 
as population and industrial growth. The general result was that 
the monetary system, tho by no means so sensitive to specie flow 
as that of England — indeed, meant to be protected from dis- 
turbance by a deliberate bank policy — yet was less sluggish than 
that of France. But, to repeat, it is not necessary to go farther in 
this sort of description. What has been said suffices to show how 
great are the differences between countries, how complex and 
heterogeneous are the several monetary systems. Obviously it is 
needful to bear in mind the nature and the mechanism of these 
systems in any attempt to follow the working of the forces analyzed 
in the pure and simple theory — operating, as those forces must, 
thru specie movements and thru price changes. 
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