SECTION CC. INFLUENCE OF THE BRANCHES OF INCOME ON THE PRICE OF COMMODITIES. In relation to foreign trade, in the narrowest sense of the term, fears were formerly very frequently expressed and are sometimes even now, which in the last analysis are based on the assumption that one country might be underbid by another in all branches of commodities.[200-1] This is evidently absurd. Whoever wants to pay for foreign commodities can do it only in goods of his own. When he pays for them with money, the money is either the immediate product of his own husbandry (mining countries!), or the mediate product obtained by the previous surrender of products of his own. To receive from foreign countries all the objects which one has need of, would be to receive them as a gift. It is just as absurd to fear that the three branches of income in the same country's economy should be all relatively high at the same time, and competition with foreign countries be thus made more difficult. Rent and interest especially in this respect have to demean themselves in ways diametrically opposed to each other.[200-2] When trade is entirely free, every nation will engage at last in those branches of production which require chiefly the productive forces which are cheapest in that country; that is which the relatively low level of the corresponding branch of income recommends to individual economy and enterprise. The merely absolute and personal height of the three branches of income has, as we have said, no direct influence on the price of commodities. In this respect, all these may be higher in one country than in another. Thus, for instance, English landowners, capitalists and workmen may be all at the same time in a better economic condition respectively than Polish landowners, capitalists and workmen, when the national income of England stands to its area and population in general, in a much more favorable ratio than the Polish.[200-3] [Footnote 200-1: Thus, _Forbonnais_, Eléments du Commerce I, 73. _J. Moser_, Patr. Ph., I, No. 2.] [Footnote 200-2: For a thorough refutation of the error that everything is dearer in England than in France, see Journ. des Econ., Mai, 1854, 295 seq. A distinguished architect assured me in 1858, that a person in London could build about as much for £1 as for from 6 to 7 thalers in Berlin; only the aggregate expense in both countries is made up of elements very different in their relative proportions.]