In the first place, the imports and the exports need not all be what are called “visible” imports and exports. Many of them may be, and some always are, “invisible.” The most obvious example of these are “freights,” that is, sums paid for the carriage of goods between one country and another. Thus, in the old days before the war you would find England importing more than she exported, and one of the principal reasons for the difference was that the imports were mostly brought in English ships. Thus if a man in the Argentine were sending 50 tons of wheat to England worth £500, England, after a long chain of trade with many countries, including the Argentine, would be exporting values against this £500 worth of wheat, which would be worth, say, not £500, but only £450. The difference of £50 was made up by the cost of bringing the wheat from the Argentine to England _in an English ship_. In other words, £50 worth of the total £500 worth of wheat stood for the sum which the man in the Argentine had to pay to the English sailors to bring his wheat over the sea. Further, a wealthy or strong country very often levied tribute upon a poorer or weaker one, and this tribute might take several forms. There was the tribute of _interest upon loans_. If English bankers had lent to people in Egypt a million pounds with interest at forty thousand pounds a year Egyptian production would have to export to England, either directly or roundabout through the chain of trade, forty thousand pounds’ worth of goods, against which England had not to send out anything. Another form of tribute--though a small one--is that paid in pensions. A man having worked all his life in the Civil Service in India (for instance) would retire upon a yearly pension of a thousand pounds a year; but this pension was levied upon the taxpayers of India, and if the man came to live in England and spent his pension there--as nearly all of them did--it meant that India had to export a thousand pounds’ worth of goods every year to England, against which England sent nothing back. In the same way the shareholder in some works or firms situated in a foreign country would, if he lived in England, cause an import to come in equivalent to his dividends or profits, and against that England would send out nothing. But the point to remember is, that _the mere volume of trade_ (that is, _the total of things imported and of things exported_) _is no indication of the wealth or prosperity of the country importing and exporting_. A country may be very wealthy, although it is doing hardly any international trade, because it may be producing within its own boundaries a great deal of wealth of a kind sufficient to nearly all, or all, its needs. Again, of international trade (and it is exceedingly important to remember this, because most people go wrong on it) _nothing increases the wealth of a country except the imports_.