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Show INTERNATIONAL TRADE An easterner with free trade inclinations recently told how Argentina Ar-gentina bought steel rails in Go many intending to use the rails to build a road to carry wool to the market, the wool being intended for Bradford, England. In the latter community the wool was to be made into blankets to be sold in the mining districts of the United States, where there was an increased demand for them, this beingdue to an increased demand for our metals in China. The periodical made the point that prosperity is the result of mutual demand and supply, that the whole world is better off when everybody is prosperous. "No one has really anything to gain by putting his competitors out of business," it was continued, "they buy our products with a share of the world's profits." All of which is true enough . International trade is a complicated compli-cated affair, and cannot be reckoned between any two nations as the above incident shows. It will not do, therefore, to say that Germany Ger-many cannot buy our raw materials because we have a high tariff against certain products, manufactured in Germany. For Germany may buy certain commodities from us, and sell the finished products in a third country, which may in turn send us something which we must import. For example, Germany may buy a million dollars' worth of material from us and sell two million's worth of a finished product to Brazil from whom we will buy an equal amount of coffee, and so on down the line with the various nations of the world, thereby there-by one of the pet assertions of the old-school free traders that we must buy from a nation in order to sell in return . It is true that we would gain nothing by attempting to put our international rivals out of business and that other nations buy our products with their share of the world's products. But it does not follow that we should throw our markets open to the unrestricted trade of the world, thereby forcing our producers to compete with a cheaper cost of production, based on a lower standard of wages and living. In doing that we would be dropping that which we have for some advantage which we might not get, and if we did get would not be worth what we had lost in acquiring it. The result of a general lowering of our tariff would not be an increase in our foreign trade, but a falling off in our domestic trade which would so cripple our producers that they not only would not gain' abroad but would be forced to close down because of the loss ' of the great home market . In order to compete with European countries in the markets of the world we must have well going, efficient producers at home and this we could not have were our producers compelled to battle in their great home market with cheap European competition . n |