Having reviewed the industrial and trading conditions of the other
great commercial nations of the world, it should now remain for us to
review these conditions in the United States. But the United States is
so large a country, and its trading and industrial interests are so
diversified and extensive, that it would be impossible for us in the
limits of our space even barely to touch upon all these interests. So
that with respect to the "Trade Features of the United States" we
shall simply confine ourselves to one part of the subject--namely, the
character, extent, and importance of our foreign trade. And we shall,
further, have to restrict ourselves in the main to our exports. These
will be found to be principally not manufactures, but the products of
our great agricultural, mining, and forest industries. The total value
of the manufactures of the United States amounts in round numbers to
the immense sum of $10,000,000,000 annually, a sum considerably more
than a third (it is thirty five per cent.) of the total value of the
annual manufactures of the world. But only a very small portion of
this vast output is exported. The greater portion of it is used to
sustain the still vaster internal trade of our country, a trade which
amounts to more than $15,500,000,000 annually, an amount not far short
of being one third of the total internal trade of the world, and not
far short of being twice the internal trade of Great Britain and
Ireland, the country whose internal trade comes next to ours. Our
exports, therefore, are not in the main manufactured goods, but
breadstuffs, provisions, and raw materials, the production of our
farms, our plantations, our forests, and our mines. But principally
they are the products of our farms and our plantations, for with the
exception of cotton we do not export much raw material. Nearly all the
raw material we produce (other than cotton) we use in our own
manufactures. And even this is not enough, for in addition we have to
import considerable quantities of raw material for our manufactures
from other countries, the principal items being raw sugar, raw silk,
raw wool, chemicals of various kinds including dye-stuffs, hides and
skins, lumber, tin, nickel, and paper stock.