278 
INTERNATIONAL TRADE 
Re 
Ri 
The same sort of thing may have happened in Adam Smith’s day. 
The “merchant” could sell to the English Government bills on his 
friends and correspondents abroad, and those bills would be duly 
met; the Government's remittances would be effected. The 
foreign drawees would be willing to bide their time, hold the bills or 
extend them, enlist their own business associates in gradually 
carrying out a series of troublesome but eventually profitable 
operations. In this case, also, doubtless it was the exportation of 
goods that constituted the last stage in the transaction. But that 
process of exportation set in gradually, had the appearance of being 
sporadic and uncertain, stood in no direct and visible connection 
with the British Government’s subsidies to the Continent. The 
economic historian may unearth one of these days evidence that 
will enable him to follow the course of these operations, both for 
Adam Smith’s time and for the Napoleonic period. The evidence 
at best could be only fragmentary and symptomatic; as indeed we 
have seen it to be for the comparatively recent and conspicuous epi- 
sode of the Franco-German indemnity. 
A suggestion of wider scope emerges. It is that not only in such 
exceptional cases as the Franco-German indemnity, but in others of 
more common experience, the underlying forces bring about their 
effects thru a gradual process — a movement here and a movement 
there, with cumulative pressure in the same direction. Specie 
rarely flows from country to country in great volume over a short 
period of time. So it is with goods; they ordinarily are exported 
and imported with regularity, not with abrupt changes one way or 
the other. When a sudden large movement either of money or of 
goods does take place, it is likely to be due to a temporary cause, 
such as a deficient harvest, or a financial crisis in one country not 
shared at the moment in another; conditions quite different from 
those to which we give chief attention in the theory of international 
trade. The long-run forces which are the more common and are 
mainly considered in the theoretical analysis take time for their 
operation. Specie is moving from country to country in small or 
moderate amounts every year, every month, almost every day. 
But sometimes the movement is preponderantly one way, some-