Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/361

Rh therefore, "now a reputation to overcome as well as a reputation to establish.

Germany faced the problem, when almost without foreign trade some forty years ago, with a thoroughness born of extreme need and a wonderful appreciation of opportunities. She organized, through governmental and trade agencies, for trade, even as she organized her fighting forces of war. She sent out, at government expense, as the agents of all the people, to develop her industries, her payrolls and her wealth, men carefully chosen from the respective trades into each of the great foreign markets. These men made exhaustive studies of the requirements of each market. They sent home samples of goods used, together with lists of responsible buyers and quantities purchased. These samples were placed in commercial museums; the information distributed, sometimes very freely and at other times confidentially, where it would do the most good. Our governmental agency for this work is naturally the Department of Commerce and its Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. Following the German example, it is for this department to discover precisely what farm implements, for instance, are used in the Argentine; to secure samples and place them, for example, in the Field Museum in Chicago, the center of the farm-implement industry, where the makers frequently gather from all parts of the country. Imagine the change of attitude of the men who have been careless of the single distant individual who wants a plow, when these men can take their foremen and others to Chicago and there see exact samples of various tools and learn fully of buyers who all told use $50,000,000 annually of these tools. Such information visualizes vividly an entire market and delightful opportunities. It leaves the very minimum of hazard as respects packing or any other feature. The single government expense is utterly inconsiderable as against the individual expense and the hazard of mistakes if each of two hundred manufacturers is to go by himself for this information.

With such information as a basis, there would be need of restraint rather than of encouragement as the American industry goes after the market thus disclosed.

The Department of Commerce after this fashion sent an expert in the cotton trade to China some years ago. He sent home 5,800 samples with a world of definite, necessary information, with many surprises. Among other things England had been sending millions of yards annually of an extremely thin and open cotton fabric loaded with sizing that gave it apparent weight and character. Some of our manufacturers had felt too proud to make anything that seemed to them so valueless. It was disclosed, however, that this cloth was for only two purposes, to clothe the dead and to wear next the skin to prevent the scratching of the very coarse outer garments worn by the poor. Our cotton makers were greatly stimulated, but for a time unable to take