Page:Carl Schurz- 1902-03-09 Foreign Commerce.pdf/4

 as the export resources of foreign countries, and giving the commerce of their German home the benefit of their studies and experiences. The company I met was, as I was informed, by no means an exceptional one. It rather represented the rule among that class of business men, whose education is scarcely considered complete without the foreign course. Do you not think that, when we hear of German commerce crowding out that of other nations in many parts of the world, this fact may in some measure be owing to the systematic care with which the study of foreign markets is cultivated? Now, if our young merchants, married or unmarried, devoted a little less time to Fifth Avenue, Newport and Paris, and a little more to Buenos Ayres, Rio, Valparaiso, Shanghai, Zanzibar and similar places, thus enlarging their mercantile education too, would not that be likely to do our foreign commerce a world of good?

The third condition to be complied with is certainly not of less importance: that we should be able to offer our goods in the foreign markets at prices at least as low as those at which other people offer goods of the same kind and quality. This is so self-evident that I should deem it almost insulting to business men of sane mind to argue it before them, had we not of late been told by great statesmen that the demand for cheapness is un-American. This doctrine is new and unique, and it may have a certain patriotic charm to the seller of goods. But in foreign commerce we have to do with ignorant, mean-spirited, grovelling foreigners who, when we offer them an article at fifty cents, and somebody else offers the same at forty, will actually be contemptible enough to give the forty cents thing the preference. We may despise and pity them, but we can hardly expect to convert them. Whether we like it or not, we have to accept the fact that he who offers abroad his merchandise at the lowest price, other things being equal, will have the business.

Now, the surplus of our agricultural products has to be shipped abroad to be sold at the world's prices, determined by the world's competition, and if those prices are low, and the farmers' profits are still more reduced by the comparatively high prices of almost all he has to buy at home, we deplore his misfortune, and should be willing to remedy it by wise measures of public policy. It seems our farmers themselves, have at last begun to understand the case. We export, also, some of our manufactured products which compete successfully in the foreign market. A majority of them consists of those articles whose principal value is contributed by labor—our intelligent, energetic, efficient American labor, aided by superior machinery and inventive ingenuity; articles representing that striking, important and natural combination: the best labor, commanding the highest rate of wages, and producing at the lowest cost. A large exporting merchant tells me that when he finds a manufactured article 65, or in some cases even 60 per cent. of