Page:Bearing and Importance of Commercial Treaties in the Twentieth Century, 1906.djvu/28

 as producers and distributors our prosperity is dependent. We must aim more at suppleness than memory in our education, more at reasoning than knowledge, more at self-dependence than books, more at skilful fingers, accurate eyes and quick mental calculation than the elementary smatterings prescribed by wholesale syllabuses—an education adapted to local wants, but especially adapted to produce first-class skilled workmen, as in France and Germany and the United States to which we are losing for want of them, many of our skilled industries.

Then we want facilities for the study of foreign languages and foreign countries, of foreign markets and their needs, men of technical knowledge and ability like the German commercial traveller. But all this is beyond the scope of this lecture, however useful it may be to discuss it, and though I am lecturing under the auspices of a faculty which is doing admirable work in this very direction.

Do we not also need a special department whose mission shall be to watch over the interests abroad of our trade treated as a national interest—a department at which all its details shall be centralized—a department directed by competent men, trained in the methods of business men who shall be selected for knowledge, acquired by study on the spot, of our business relations in every market of the world—masters of the technical language of our own time and of the language of the countries they will be called upon to deal with—a chosen body of energetic, well-paid men whose reputation will rest solely on the admirable work they do for their country.

Let technical and commercial education be understood to be an essential branch of the work of developing the