Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/362

358 full advantage of the information because of the Boxer uprising and the boycott of American goods. There are, however, a few American factories running exclusively on cotton goods for the Orient.

So the Department of Commerce has been eager for years to give this service and has been giving it in such very limited measure as its funds permitted.

We may take a lesson from the Department of Agriculture. When Secretary Rusk succeeded Secretary Morton in this department, he first looked the department over and said to Secretary Morton, "What is the good in all this, anyway, Mr. Secretary?" to which Secretary Morton replied, "Why, you've got the appropriations." The department was in its infancy. There seemed little to do but distribute the funds. It has grown, however, until it uses with great wisdom $17,000,000 annually, and $4,000,000 of this amount for purely development work, searching out new cereals from all over the world, studying soils, fighting pests, and in the most intimate way serving every last farmer in the land. And it gets a thousand times better returns on this $4,000,000 than it ever got on the little sums appropriated in the earlier days. So the vision has come to the Department of Commerce and to its friends throughout the country. It can give no service to American manufacturers, but the service is of value to all other citizens. Against the $4,000,000 given the Department of Agriculture for purely development work the Department of Commerce until recently was given only $40,000, but recently, with no thought of war but solely of the general welfare, Congress gave to the department $50,000 to lead in the development of the markets of South America with their annual imports of $1,043,000,000, of which we have been favored with only seventeen per cent. So it gave the department $100,000 with which to develop the trade of all the rest of the world with its annual purchases of some three and a half billions of dollars, and another $100,000 for the establishment of some fourteen commercial attachés in the great capitals of the world.

There is no American but wishes that the present war would stop to-morrow, and it is well to note that the vision came to us of foreign opportunities and of the demands that foreign trade may properly make upon us before there was any thought of war. The present Secretary of Commerce and all with whom he cooperates have long cherished the vision and begun the larger development in such excellent manner as may well make Congress wish to extend the appropriations as fast as the department, with its conservative judgment, will ask for them.

In similar spirit and with the same vision, substantially, all of the business organizations of America, large and small, cooperated in the establishment of a central organization, or clearing house, known as the Chamber of Commerce of the United States, and in this central organization, with its headquarters in Washington, American business two