THE INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS OF THE UNITED STATES The Importance of Europe in the Foreign Trade of the United of the most marked characteristics of the foreign trade of the United States is the extent to which it depends upon Europe. ' Previous to the Great War about two-thirds of the exports from this country went to Europe (Fig. 94), or twice as much as to all the rest of the world combined, and half our imports came from Europe. All parts of Europe by no means shared equally in the trade of the United States, for the little group of countries bordering the North Sea took seven-eighths of our exports to that continent, and supplied far the larger part of our European imports. About two hundred million people in Britain, France, Germany, and their small neighbors were more important in the foreign trade of the United States than were the entire thirteen hundred million of the rest of the world. This fact goes far toward explaining the frequent complaints that the American business man does not satisfy the preferences of his non-European customers in South America and Asia, for example. Every business man makes the greatest effort to satisfy his best customers, and hitherto Europe has been far and away our best customer.
The Kind of Trade Carried on by the United United States Department of Commerce divides articles of foreign trade into (A) crude foodstuffs including food animals, (B) foodstuffs partly or wholly manufactured, (C) crude raw materials for use in manufactur ing, (D) partly manufactured materials for further use in manufacturing, and (E) manufactured goods ready for the consumer. Fig. 94 shows that previous to the Great War the most important goods that we sent to Europe were crude raw materials for use in manufacturing, especi ally cotton. We sent Europe twice as great a value of this sort of goods as Europe sent us. The same was true of crude food materials such as wheat and meat, while of more or less manufactured foodstuffs such as flour, canned meat, and lard, we sent the Europeans three times as much as they sent us. On the contrary the two continents exchanged partly manufactured goods to about equal values, while Europe sent us vast quantities of manufactured goods ready for the consumer, the value of Europe's cloth and other such products being twice as greafl as the value of the shoes, typewriters, harvesting machinery, and other manufactured goods, which we sent in return.
On the other hand manufactured goods were our main exports to the other parts of the world, while partly manufactured goods were also highly important. The greatest items which we imported from those parts of the world were crude raw materials and foodstuffs, which form nearly two-thirds of the total. The contrast between our trade with Europe and with the rest of the world is summed up in the following approximate annual averages for 1909 to 1913 expressed in millions of dollars: The way in which the figures for Europe grow smaller from (1) to (4) while those for the rest of the world grow larger indicates that up to the Great War the United States was a relatively undeveloped country compared with Europe. It was a source of food and raw materials for that continent and a market for its manufactured goods. On the other hand, for the rest of the world, the United States was a relatively highly developed country, which served them as a source of manufactures and as a market for raw materials and food.
How the Trade of the United States with the Continents has Changed.—The conditions which have just been outlined for the period before the war still prevail to a considerable extent, but impor tant changes are in progress. These are illustrated in Figs. 95 and 96 which show the percentage of the total imports and exports of the United States which were derived from or sent to each of the continents from 1870 to 1921. It should be clearly understood that the total' volume of trade with each of the continents is now larger than at any previous time. In the diagrams a general fall of any of the lines does not necessarily mean that the ,total trade has fallen off, but merely that a given continent's percentage of a constantly increasing total has diminished.