kward, until now the greater part
of our shipping is done in foreign bottoms. Aside from the other
disadvantages of such a condition, the payment of such great sums for
freight to foreign companies is a direct economic drain. An estimate
that the yearly freight bill amounts to $150,000,000 is probably not
too high. That means that in the course of every year there is a demand
for that amount of exchange with which to remit back what has been
earned from us.

5. Tourists' expenditures abroad are responsible for a further heavy
demand for exchange. Whether it is because Americans are fonder of
travel than the people of other countries or whether it is because of
our more or less isolated position on the map, it is a fact that there
are far more Americans traveling about in Europe than people belonging
to any other nation. And the sums spent by American tourists in foreign
lands annually aggregate a very large amount--possibly as much as
$175,000,000--all of which has eventually to be covered by remittances
of exchange from this side.

Then again there must be considered the expenditures of wealthy
Americans who either live abroad entirely or else spend a large part of
their time on the other side. During the past decade it has come about
that every European city of any consequence has its "American Colony,"
a society no longer composed of poor art students or those whose
residence abroad is not a matter of volition, but consisting now of
many of the wealthiest Americans. By these expatriates money is spent
extremely freely, their drafts on London and Paris requiring the
frequent replenishment, by remittances of exchange from this side, of
their bank balances at those points. Furthermore, there must be
considered the great amounts of American capital transferred abroad by
the marriage of wealthy American women with titled foreigners. Such
alliances mean not only the transfer of large amounts of capital _en
bloc_, but mean as well, usually, an annual remittance of a very large
sum of money. No account of the money drained out of the country in
this way is kept, of course, but it is an item which certainly runs up
into the tens of millions.

6. Lastly, there is the demand for exchange originating from the paying
off of the short-term loans which European bankers so continuously make
in the American market. There is never a time nowadays when London and
Paris are lending American bankers less than $100,000,000 on 60 or 90