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Show ments and our high tariff wall. The fact is rather that the persistent export ex-port balance of merchandise which has amazed and alarmed us during these years has been for the most part merely normal food bus nes, on a quid pro quo basis. Enlarged or diminished dim-inished from year to year by net gold movements our excess of exports cf goods has been offset or balanced fairly evenly by the excess of payments pay-ments over receipts for services, particularly par-ticularly the pleasures which Americans Ameri-cans are now forced to import, or perhaps per-haps imbibe, abroad. In i act in every year from 1921 to 1927 the actual balance of all tangible trade, lumping lump-ing together merchandise, gold and services, was probably aga'nst us, and we have been importing more than ,ve exported." Here are some important facts vhich are unusually overlooked by the international advocates of free trade and European rights. If we sell abroad nore lhan we buy abroad, we are ' hrough our tourists and bus'ness men spending abroad a great deal more han European tourists and business nen are spending in the United States. It is also true that mill.ons in gold are being sent abroad each year by Americans of foreign birth and aliens in America, to dependent relatives in Europe. All of which of : course depletes our favorable trade: balance and justifies the statement! of Mr. Jordan above quoted. The bal-l ance of the trade theory will not hold in the modem days of fast ocean liners lin-ers and' a tremendous, foreign population popula-tion in the United States. WE SPEND MONEY ABOAD. The familiar cry of the international internation-al economists is that if we insist on protecting the American standard of living with a tariff to equalize the cost of production at home and abroad we will upset the balance of world trade, and eventually destroy our own prosperity. One answer to this, of course, is that the American market is more important" to our economic ec-onomic prosperity than any other single item which we can take into consideration. But the statement that 'we have too big a balance in our for-I for-I eign trade will not bear the light of I close scrutiny. In a recent address on American foreign investments and foreign trade Mr. Virgil Jordan, Cbuef Economist of the National In- dustrial Conference Board, declared: "It is equally a delusion that in i the years since 1922 we have been selling our goods abroad on the installment in-stallment plan, sustaining our huge volume of exports on credit and preventing pre-venting compensating imports cf commodities by our foreign invest- |