CANADA 
231 
the loans once for all in buying additional goods in the lending 
country. The Canadians, for example, might have devoted the 
whole of the funds put at their disposal by the British lenders 
to the purchase in England of rails, locomotives, iron and steel, 
machinery. Did they do so? 
Evidently not. An examination of the import statistics shows 
that the commodity imports and exports took no such simple 
course. They indicate a series of transactions more complicated, 
and more interesting to the student of international trade. 
As between Great Britain and Canada, imports from the former 
did indeed increase, but not more than did the exports from 
Canada to Great Britain. And the relation between the imports 
and exports of these two countries remained virtually unchanged. 
Before the great borrowings began, Canada’s exports, in the latter 
part of the 19th century, to Great Britain had exceeded her 
imports. They continued to do so between 1900 and 1913. The 
agricultural growth in the Canadian West led to an increase of 
grain exports to Great Britain so great that it quite equalled the 
increase of imports into Canada from that country. There was 
no net excess of commodity imports from Great Britain. But 
in Canada’s trade as a whole an excess of imports did appear, and 
on a large scale; there was a great inflow of goods from other 
countries. And this inflow took place chiefly from the United 
States. During our period the total imports into Canada from 
the United States exceeded those from Canada into the United 
States by no less a sum than 1700 millions of dollars. Some 
excess of imports came into Canada from still other countries; but 
the amount from the other countries (300 millions in all) was small 
in comparison to that from the United States. In the main, it 
was from the United States that Canada got the goods which 
constituted the substance of what her loans yielded. 
In part, it is true, the United States had a relation to Canada 
similar to that of Great Britain; she too was a lender. The 
Canadian loans in the United States during the period amounted 
to something over 600 millions. Probably the greater part of 
what was thus borrowed in the United States was spent there at