THE FOREIGN EXCHANGES 221 
adjusting and equalizing the payments between nations have been 
utilized and exhausted, specie will flow in payment of balances. 
When trade is following its ordinary peaceful course, in a world not 
racked by political or economic cataclysms, it is likely to flow in 
small volume, even in driblets. Each driblet, slight tho it be, af- 
fects a susceptible spot, and tends to be minimized by reaction in 
some other part of the delicate adjustment. But if there be a 
succession of such influences — if there be a continued lack of 
equilibrium between a country’s debits and credits — something 
more happens. There is then no way of resisting the inevitable 
readjustment. Sustained changes in the demand for goods, or 
continuing remittances on other than merchandise account, will 
show their consequences sooner or later in the international dis- 
tribution of specie. Then the question becomes one of changes in 
prices and money incomes, and involves the somewhat different 
(tho not unrelated) problems of sensitiveness considered in the 
preceding chapter. And the question arises, too, whether in the 
slow process of adjustment toward the eventual outcome there 
may not emerge, when the final survey has been completed and 
the last consequences have been verified, a residuum of unex- 
plained phenomena — puzzling occurrences that cannot be brought 
into accord with even the most guarded theoretical formulation. 
All these considerations emphasize once more the importance of 
the element of time. Thruout the present economic system, with 
its intricate specialization of industry, its persistence in the grooves 
of custom, its repeated disturbance by an imperfect money system, 
there must be time for the fundamental forces to bring about 
their results. These forces are modified, counteracted, strength- 
ened, by others of less strength but of more rapid operation; and 
they are themselves subject to change in the course of time. 
Hence the difficulty of tracing their operation in detail, and of see- 
ing just how they work; indeed, of ascertaining whether they 
work at all in the way that general reasoning leads us to expect. 
[t is only in outstanding and conspicuous cases that we can sub- 
ject the general reasoning to specific verification. One such case 
will be considered in the next chapter.