nd for very large amounts of foreign exchange.
Estimates of how much European money is invested here are little better
than guesses. The only sure thing about it is that the figures run well
up into the billions and that several hundred millions of dollars'
worth of interest and dividends must be sent across the water each
year. There are, in the first place, all the foreign investments in
what might be called private enterprise--the English money, for
instance, invested in fruit orchards, gold and copper mines, etc., in
the western states. Profits on this money are practically all remitted
back to England, but no way exists of even estimating what they amount
to. Aside from that there are all the foreign holdings of bonds and
stocks in our great public corporations, holdings whose ownership it is
impossible to trace. Only at the interest periods at the beginning and
middle of each year does it become apparent how large a proportion of
our bonds are held in Europe and how great is the demand for exchange
with which to make the remittances of accrued interest. At such times
the incoming mails of the international banking houses bulge with great
quantities of coupons sent over here for collection. For several weeks
on either side of the two important interest periods, the exchange
market feels the stimulus of the demand for exchange with which the
proceeds of these masses of coupons are to be sent abroad.

4. Freights and insurance are responsible for a fourth important source
of demand for foreign exchange. A walk along William Street in New York
is all that is necessary to give a good idea of the number and
importance of the foreign companies doing business in the United
States. In some form or other all the premiums paid have to be sent to
the other side. Times come, of course, like the year of the Baltimore
fire, when losses by these foreign companies greatly outbalance
premiums received, the business they do thus resulting in the actual
_creation_ of great amounts of foreign exchange, but in the long
run--year in, year out--the remitting abroad of the premiums earned
means a steady demand for exchange.

With freights it is the same proposition, except that the proportion of
American shipping business done by foreign companies is much greater
than the proportion of insurance business done by foreign companies.
Since the Civil War the American mercantile marine instead of growing
with the country has gone steadily bac