Paying America in Kind In a letter to The Times,
Mr. R. D. Holt, the well- known ship-owner, makes a number of suggestions as to how Great Britain could pay her debt to the United States in kind. Assuming that we gave -the Washington Treasury a sterling credit on the Bank of England equivalent to the dollar debt, that Treasury could then act as purchaser of British goods and services on behalf of American citizens. E.g, if an American citizen wanted to travel to Europe by a British steamship, he would pay at Washington in dollars, which- the Treasury there would pocket, while the British steamship company would be reimbursed out of the Bank-of England credit. And so with half a dozen other classes of transaction, which Mr. Holt enumerates. The weak point about his list is that most of them are transactions which occur already ; and the payments in their existing form play an indispensable part in regulating the existing * exchange, and enabling us to pay for the • raw eaton, tobacco, petroleum, films, cars, cash registers, and patent oil stoves which we import froth the United State's. Additional Ainerican purchases in some form are needed for any solution. Of course, if Mr. Holt's seheme .caused more Americans to travel by Cunard boats and fewer by French, German,- or other foreign lines, it would to that extent help ; but such margins, however welcome to the Cunard, could not go far towards a total so large as the debt. His suggestion that we should build warships for the American Navy involves larger sums. But it has been made before ; and the Steel Trust would have a good deal to say before it was accepted.
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