TRADE BETWEEN 1914 AND 1928 185 
between 1910 and 1913. The volume of imports and exports, 
however, did not mount at the rate indicated by the figures for 
value. ‘But as regards the problem of international payments 
—the mechanism of international trade—it is the money values 
that signify.’ 
The chief feature of trade at this time was the great develop- 
ment of government buying and selling under the pooling 
system, and the mobilization of Australian resources for the 
more effective waging of the war.! Here we are confronted 
by phenomena quite outside the range of normal experience. 
Both borrowing and exports take their place in a vast scheme 
of war finance in which economic principles and the ordinary 
canons of business are quite lost from sight. The volume of 
loans both at home and abroad, the rise of prices, and the 
increase in exports, assume a far more intimate relation than 
ever before ; but they are so bound up with the larger issues of 
world financial policy that, in many of their aspects, they almost 
cease to have purely Australian significance. Under these 
circumstances the problem defies satisfactory resolution into 
elements which can be correlated and interpreted as a verifica- 
tion of trade theory. 
It is when we come to examine the gold movements of the 
time in relation to the movement of commodities that the 
astounding character of the war operations stands revealed. 
That the disposition of Australian gold became, to a great 
extent, an Imperial matter during these years is scarcely to be 
doubted. At least the gold resources of the Commonwealth, like 
its products,? were mobilized and moved according to a policy 
of banking expediency that hardly admits of analysis in this 
essay. Consider the situation presented in the following table. 
During the early period which is characterized by an excess of 
imports gold is retained in large quantity when we should 
expect it to be moving out. Similarly, when the excess of 
merchandise imports before 1916 changes to an excess of 
Copland, Foreign Banking Systems, p. 83. ‘During the war when free gold 
movements were impossible, the exchanges were kept remarkably stable despite 
serious differences between the British and Australian price-levels, and considerable 
variations in the balance of payments. This was due in part to the special financial 
measures adopted by the British Government for purchasing Australian produce 
and assisting the Commonwealth Government.’ 
? For discussions of war-time control of marketing, especially of wool and wheat, 
see Economic Record, Special Marketing Supplement, February 1928. 
3710 at