THE UNITED STATES, II. 1900-1914 295 
relatives at home to pay their passage money and join the first 
comers in the land of plenty and freedom. All in all, the total of 
the remittances made in these two ways rose to surprising sums. 
Their quantitative importance was hardly suspected until a careful 
investigation was made in 1907, when it appeared that the annual 
outgoings of this sort were not less than $200,000,000, and had been 
for several years at some such figure! They became still greater 
in the years immediately following. Thruout the opening years of 
the century they constituted a very large item in the international 
balance of payments, and virtually a new one. 
There were other changes also in the international balance sheet : 
changes, however, which were more in the nature of modifications 
of familiar items. Their character and extent is best shown by a 
comparison of accounts as we find them from time to time. It is 
not possible to follow the items year by year, or indeed to have 
much confidence in the precise accuracy of many of the figures. 
For the entire period preceding the Great War, the statistical 
material is less abundant and less trustworthy for the United 
States than it is for Great Britain. None the less the drift of the 
main changes, and the general consequences for the balance of pay- 
ments, can be made out with sufficient clearness. I give statements 
which have come to my attention for certain yvears.2 
1) 1868-69 
Cr. Net Exports 
Gold Exports 
New Loans 
286.5 
37.5 
200.0 
39 
Dr. 
Net Imports 
Interest 
Freights 
Tourists 
a 
402.7 
80.0 
24.0 
25.0 
531.7 
! The matter was brought to the attention of economists and the financial public 
by a remarkable article contributed by Mr. C. F. Speare to the North American 
Review for January, 1908. A graphic account of the remittances by Italians to 
their home country, and of the social and economic consequences, is in R. F. Foers- 
ter’s Italian Emigration of our Times (1919) Chs. 20, 22. 
? No. 1is from the Report of D. A. Wells as Special Commissioner of the Revenue 
for 1868-69. No. 2 is from a memorandum prepared by Sir George Paish for the 
United States Monetary Commission of 1909. No. 3 was laid before the Senate 
Committee on Currency and Banking in 1913 by a New York banker, Mr. J. F. 
Kent (see the published Hearings before that Committee, p- 2979). All the figures 
represent more or less of guesswork; they are serviceable chiefly as indicating 
the general drift during the period. This drift is brought about also in the second 
set of figures at the bottom of p. 296.