Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/120

112 raw material have to be imported from abroad. How is the thing done? Obviously the main provision for the wants of the new people is effected by themselves. They exchange services with each other, and so procure the major part of the comforts and luxuries of life which they require. The butcher, the baker, the tailor, the dressmaker, the milliner, the shoemaker, the builder, the teacher, the doctor, the lawyer, and so on, are all working for each other the most part of their lives, and the proportion of exchanges with foreign countries necessary to procure some things required in the general economy may be very small. These exchanges may also very largely take the form of a remittance of goods by foreign countries in payment of interest on debts which they owe, so that the communities in question obtain much of what they want from abroad by levying a kind of rent or annuity which the foreigner has to pay. If more is required, it may be obtained by special means, as, for instance, by the working of coal for export, which gives employment in this country to about 200,000 miners, by the employment of shipping in the carrying trade, by the manufacture of special lines of goods, and so on. But the main exchanges of any country are, and must be, as a rule, at home, and the foreign trade, however important, will always remain within limits, and bearing some proportion to the total exchanges of the country. Hence, when additions to the population, and how they are to live, are considered, the answer is that the additions will fill up proportionately the framework of the various industries already in existence, or the ever-changing new industries for home consumption which are always starting into being. These are the primary outlets for new population even in old countries like the United Kingdom and Germany. Of course, active traders and manufacturers, each in their own way, are not to take things for granted. They must strive to spread their activities over foreign as well as over home markets. But looking at the matter from the outside, and scientifically, it is the home and not the foreign market which is always the more important.

The same may be said of a country in a somewhat different economic condition from England and Germany, viz., the United States. I can only refer to it, however, in passing, as the facts here are not so clearly on the surface. Contrary to England and Germany, which have no food resources and resources of raw material capable of indefinite expansion, the United States is still to a large extent a virgin country. Its increasing population is therefore provided for in a different way for the most part from the increase in England and Germany. But even in the United States it has been noticeable at each of the last census returns that the increasing population finds an outlet more and more largely, not in agriculture and the extraction of raw materials, but in the miscellaneous pursuits of industry and manufacture. The town population