THE UNITED STATES, II. 1900-1914 299 
flown out of the United States in consequence of the country’s 
heavy remittances on invisible accounts. Prices would have 
fallen there as compared with prices elsewhere, exports would have 
been stimulated and imports checked, and the balance of payments 
finally settled thru an excess of exports. This is the “orthodox” 
process by which the United States would have met the heavy 
payments for interest, tourist expenses, immigrants’ remittances, 
and the like; this is the mechanism which would have brought 
about the definitive excess of merchandise exports. 
The actual conditions were very different, and were very com- 
plex. While the United States was producing and also impounding 
very large amounts of gold, very large amounts were also being pro- 
duced in other countries, notably in South Africa. The enormous 
addition which was being made to the entire world’s monetary stock 
of gold was distributed among the several gold-standard countries 
by an irregular and devious process, with ebbs and flows for each 
and every country. The process of distribution was affected by 
the circumstance that the United States was itself a producing 
country. Moreover, it was a country growing rapidly in popula- 
tion and wealth, such as might be expected under any circumstances 
to absorb an increasing proportion of the world’s gold. If there 
had been no gold mines at all within her own borders, some share 
of the newly accruing output in other regions would have gone this 
way. The extent of the share so coming in would have depended 
on her general position in international trade. Tt would have been 
larger if the barter terms had tended to become more favorable, 
smaller if they had tended to become less favorable. Tt is a curious 
result, but doubtless an accidental one, that the net outcome for 
the whole period should be the retention by the United States of 
precisely that amount which her mines produced. 
I turn now to the barter terms — the substantive outcome. On 
this aspect of the situation, the data have been carefully sifted. 
We are able to state what was the course of prices for imported and 
exported goods, what the net barter terms of trade, what the gross 
barter terms. The charts on pp. 300, 301, show the main move-