International balances of trade are but aggregates of individual balances. The favorableness or unfavorableness of either kind depends upon difficulties of collection. If, for illustration, an individual has a credit balance in his account at a bank, it is a favorable balance provided he may “check it out” at will in payment for products or services; but to the extent that obstacles to his “checking out” are put in his way, the balance has an unfavorable aspect. If the obstacles be prohibitive--a 100 per cent stamp tax, for illustration,--the credit balance would be decidedly unfavorable. It would be unfavorable in less degree only as the stamp-tax was reduced from 100 per cent, down to 50 per cent or 25 per cent or 1 per cent. The depositor would have sold more value than he could buy; that is, he would have “exported” from his products more than he could “import” from the products of others. A like conclusion is inevitable in the aggregate of world trading. To the extent that exports of Wealth are not offset by imports of Wealth, to that extent every trading balance is unfavorable. The Economic benefit of credit balances of all kinds, whether individually or in community totals, depends upon ease of collection. V. AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE PRODUCTIVE PROCESS By means of the primary and the subsidiary categories described and illustrated in this Lesson, all the tangled data of the Productive Process in Economics may be readily unraveled. Consider for further illustration the Productive phenomena involved in so simple a specimen of Wealth (Artificial Objects) as a needle in the hands of a house-wife engaged in mending family clothing. She bought the needle at a retail store along with many other needles gathered together in a bunch--a “paper of needles.” How did that “paper of needles” get into the stock of the retail store? It came with other commodities from a wholesale store. How? By a railway train, on the complicated structure and management of which, as well as upon the roadbed, the track and the station houses, a great variety of Labor had been expended. Where and how did the wholesale store get that needle? Directly or indirectly, and by similar complicated methods of transportation, from a needle factory. How did the needle factory get it? Its workers made it. How? By means of machinery, Artificial Products--Wealth used as Capital for the production of further Wealth. Of what did those workers make the needle? Steel. Where did the steel come from? From transformations of iron in a steel mill. The iron? From iron ore. The ore? From natural deposits in the earth.