Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 86.djvu/368

364 the men of the Argentine have their own very rare qualities and appreciations; that the people of Brazil differ from all others in other splendid respects, and so of the other nations. A cosmopolitan recognition of these national differences and values is evidence of that intelligence which is the basis of trade and of all other values.

But my paper is too long. I leave other considerations to others, emphasizing only these upon which I have dwelt so long: (a) the widest cooperative effort with a very considerable leadership in the government and its Department of Commerce; (b) intensive study of each market, with samples and specifications secured under the leadership of the department supported and supplemented by the various business organizations; (c) the establishment of commercial museums or centers where the precise goods needed in the various markets are displayed with descriptions and lists of buyers, at which places manufacturers and distributors may assemble for study and estimates; (d) industrial schools and trade training that will give skill and leadership to our working people quite as much as to their employers; (e) an appreciation and cordial good fellowship with those children of God who inhabit the various foreign lands, that catholic appreciation which we so greatly lack and which is a mark of intelligence and good character, which appreciation the nations we would rival have in superior measure, based upon long time proven experience.

Let us remember that other nations must live as well as ourselves. The nations that we would rival will always get their share of foreign trade and will make prices that will keep it, A man or a nation will work for half price, or less, if it can not do better. We must have entire good-will, and always will have, towards every other nation, and the measure of that good-will will be the measure of our own intelligence. In the due distribution of world trade there is and must be room for each of the warring nations equally with ourselves. We look not for temporary advantage, but rather for that superiority of accomplishment and development among our own people that will increase and hold, upon the basis of strict desert, an ever larger and larger share of the world's bounty.

The foregoing takes less account than some may wish of war's short lived and lurid opportunities based upon temporary distress and apparent ruin. We are acting with utmost promptness and with all our strength in out-of-hand benefactions to European non-combatants and in trade extension to all non-combatant nations who are in extreme distress for want of those trade relations that we can establish for them. These things are being marvelously well done now by our leaders in legislation and commerce. They are a magnificent precursor to the stable processes of peaceful times near at hand.