What figures are relevant when we wish to compare foreign and domestic trade? First we must make clear the purpose for which the comparison is to be made. If we are concerned with the calls made by foreign and domestic trade on the money market, we should make use of a different method of comparison than that which will be here employed. The purpose of the comparison here undertaken is to determine how much of our American labor, land and capital is at work producing for the foreign consumer, as compared with the land, labor and capital in America producing for the American consumer. The comparison here undertaken is concerned with the question which is usually uppermost in the minds of those who undertake such a comparison, namely, _how important_ is our foreign market to us? Obviously, for such a comparison as this, we should not count a given case of eggs twelve times merely because it changed ownership twelve times in getting from farm to breakfast table. Items of export and import count only _once_ in the figures for export and import. We must find a figure for domestic "trade" in which items count only once, allowing no turnovers of the same goods to swell the total, if we wish to make our figures comparable. The method proposed for making this comparison, for a long series of years, is a modification of the method used by the writer in an article in the _Annalist_ of Feb. 7, 1916. A figure based on the bank deposits of _retail merchants_ in Kinley's 1909 investigation was there taken as properly comparable with the export and import figures. The final sale to consumer by retailer is "the one far off divine event" toward which the whole productive process moves. Everything else in production and exchange looks forward to this. Ultimately, from the demand of the final consumer comes all the demand that is directed toward the agencies of production, even though the laborer sees his immediate market in the person of the employer, and the capitalist or landlord sees his immediate market in the person of the active business man. The figure reached for retail trade by the method then employed was $34,500,000,000 for 1909. This figure was too high, as shown in Chapter XIII above, and the figure reached now for retail _deposits_ by the same method is $32,000,000,000. Even this figure is too high, however, as I there concluded, to represent retail _trade_, and I shall use it only as a check on King's figure for _the total income of the United States in 1910_, which I shall use as a base figure instead of my own. King's figure for the total income of the United States in 1910 is $30,500,000,000.[303] I take this figure as including all that the American people spend for consumption, with retailers, physicians, hotels, theatres, etc., and also their net savings for the year. Part of this they spent for foreign products. The rest they spent at home. This residue spent at home gives us a figure which we may properly compare