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Another channel of American trade is created by the presence of American engineers who operate public utilities in foreign lands as this railroad from Corinto to Granada is operated by J. G. White & Co., of New York

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BRITISH CAPITAL IN THE ARGENTINE The hydraulic station of the Light & Power Company of Córdoba, Argentine Republic. It is estimated that more than 13 billion dollars of British capital are invested in foreign lands

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In 1914. these gold and silver mines earned about 12 per cent. on an investment of about 2 million dollars of American capital; and in the thirty-four years they have been worked they have used many hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of American goods and machinery

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AMERICAN CONSTRUCTION AT AN AMERICAN MINE IN CHILE

Part of the leaching plant of the Chile Exploration Company at Chuquicamata. American materials are being used in the construction and equipment of the railroads, bridges, electrolytic tanks, warehouses, machine shop, carpenter shop, living quarters, and other buildings of this big property

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One of the properties of the Pearson Syndicate, which is one of the models from which Americans have learned that the financing of undeveloped resources in foreign lands helps to build a mutually profitable trade between the debtor and the creditor nation

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A PERUVIAN RAILROAD FINANCED WITH BRITISH MONEY The terminus, at Mollendo, of the Southern Railroad of Peru, one of the properties of the British-owned Peruvian Corporation which has made a big market for British railroad equipment and incidentally for many other British manufactures

all the mines worked and mills built that the demand required. What, then, was an Englishman to do if he had a few thousand pounds to spare especially if he wanted more than 3 per cent. and safety?

He did not have to seek the answer: it came to him in the mails from overseas when homesick younger sons in the Punjab, in the Australian bush, or in the Chilean Andes, "by the campfire, on a bucket upside down," wrote back of dazzling opportunities for gain that lay before them-virgin timberlands, the unexhausted riches of great mines, vast beds of fertile nitrate for the depleted fields of Europe all waiting for the Midas-touch of capital to turn their idle wealth into golden streams of profit for an industrious people. What the sons wrote the fathers believed: English companies were organized to build railroads, dig mines, sink oil wells, develop water powers in these distant lands. Along the trails the explorers had blazed came the engineers; after them came the builders. All were English. And when they built, they turned back home for their materials-English rails, English locomotives, English cars, English pumps, English drills, saws, dredges-English everything. They created out of nothing a market for the wares of London, for the manufacturers of Leeds and Birmingham. What more natural, once Birmingham, Leeds, and London grasped this fact, than that they should invest of their profits in more of these foreign promotions, to create more markets for goods on which more profits could be made? They did exactly that, and the product was that colonial empire and that colossal foreign trade on which Germany gazed with greedy eyes two years ago. India, Australia, South Africa, Canada-these are fruits of that commercial policy, hardy young offshoots of the old stock, nourished in their growth by British gold and repaying the debt in a trade that is as natural a benefit to Britain as the shade of a tree's leaves is a benefit to the roots from which the leaves draw the sap that feeds them.

The United States, meanwhile, had been a world to itself. Its England was New England and New York. They were its tight little isles of manufacture, thrift,

and surplus earnings. The prairies, deserts, mountains, and Far Western valleys were its South Africa, its Canada, its India. Its younger sons went overland instead of overseas. They, too, wrote back of dazzling opportunities for gain— in Michigan, Colorado, Montana, California. Their fathers also believed, and out of their faith sprang the Calumet & Hecla copper mines, the Pacific railroads, the agricultural development of the West, and all the other splendid expressions of the American spirit that so magically transformed the wilderness. This task was nearly done, but we were still absorbed in its final details, when suddenly the deafening uproar of the European war made us look anxiously about us to see where we stood in a world full of turmoil. As we looked over the garden wall of the Atlantic we saw Europe's fruitful industry abandoned, and Europe asking us to sell her everything she needed-not only weapons and ammunition but foodstuffs, clothing, machinery, all the products of our shops and farms. She, in return, had nothing to sell: her men were too busy fighting to create stuff to give us in exchange. Hence she offered pay in gold or in the return of the ownership of some of our own properties which she had acquired by the purchase of American stocks and bonds.

A NATION WITH TOO MUCH GOLD

Almost before we knew it, then, we had "money to burn"-literally tons of gold lying idle in the vaults of banks, to say nothing of millions upon millions of dollars' worth of our own securities, their owners all eager for a chance to put them to work earning interest. The recent enactment of the Federal Reserve Act only made our sudden riches more embarrassing, for that Act had so changed our system of banking that every $18 of gold in the banks created $82 worth of lendable credit, whereas formerly, of every $100, $25 had to sit in the vaults while only $75 went out to work in the form of loans. In other words, we not only had enormously more gold, but every dollar of it went a good deal further than ever before in financing new enterprises. That is the situation to-day.

Such a situation cannot last. Inter

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