Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/648

640 to that of China.' East Africa and South Africa have already shown a marked preference for certain lines of American manufactures, but West Africa is for our exporters a new and more accessible market, the possibilities of which have heretofore attracted but little attention.

A glance at the accompanying map of the world, showing the distribution of our exports of manufactures, reveals the significant fact that, as yet, the widest range of consumption of our goods is found in the leading industrial countries, such as Great Britain, Germany, France, and their willingness conjoined with their greater capacity to take our products raises the interesting question whether our activity in competing for neutral markets, such as China, Africa, South America, etc., is not, for the present, restrained by the fact that our energies are largely employed in manufacturing for the European demand. The seriousness of our competition in the development of trade in countries which, as yet, are but imperfectly exploited will begin to be fully felt, it would seem, only when the European demand shall have slackened or we shall have more than met its requirements. In that case, our exporters would undoubtedly address themselves more systematically and with greater energy to trade regions which our European rivals are now so industriously seeking to control. There is food for thought also in the possible consequences to our European trade of a rivalry on our part which may be so crushing as to greatly impair the purchasing power of those who are now our best customers. If we permanently cripple their chief industries, we deprive them, to a greater or less extent, of the means of buying from us, and the consumption of our food supplies and our raw materials, as well as of our finished goods, may be greatly curtailed. The solution of the problem may perhaps be found in the gradual specialization of commerce and industry, according to the peculiar capacity of each competing nation—the survival, in other words, of the fittest conditions for this or that country—and the gradual subsidence of competition into healthful exchange.