It ought to be quite clear, especially in the case of an island like Great Britain, that it _loses_ what it sends out and _gains_ what it brings in. Yet people get muddled about even this very simple proposition, because the individual trader thinks of his transactions as an individual sale. He does not consider the nature of trade as a whole. The individual trader, for instance, who makes locomotives and exports them, gets paid, let us say, £10,000 for each locomotive. In point of fact this means that in the long run he or someone else in England will exercise £10,000 worth of demand for foreign goods. But the individual trader does not usually think of that; he thinks only of his own transactions, and he would be very much surprised if he were told that his sending the locomotive abroad was, _regarded in itself, and apart from the import which it assumed_, a loss to the country of £10,000 worth of wealth. You often hear people in political arguments talking as though the falling off of exports from a country were a bad thing and the increase of imports also a bad thing. It cannot be so in the long run. The excess of imports over exports is the national profit on the whole of its foreign transactions, and any country which is exporting regularly more than it imports is paying tribute to foreigners abroad, while every country which regularly imports more than it exports is receiving tribute. Of course, if you consider only a short period of time, the falling off of exports may be a bad sign; for it may mean that the corresponding imports will not be gathered. If in this country we saw our exports regularly falling year by year we should be right to take alarm, for this would almost certainly mean that a corresponding falling off in imports would sooner or later take place also, and that therefore our total wealth would be diminished. But considered over a sufficient space of time, it is obvious that the excess of imports over exports is a gain and that the excess of exports over imports is a loss.