FOREWORD BY JOSEPH FRENCH JOHNSON, DEAN OF NEW YORK UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF COMMERCE. America is at a transition stage. Our national estate is no longer undeveloped. Our public domain has practically been distributed to private settlers. Our farms have reached their maximum productivity in cotton, wheat and corn. Our mines have been opened and greatly developed. Our population is rapidly increasing, more rapidly than our domestic food supply. All the forces that made Europe an industrial and exporting region are operative upon us. We are becoming increasingly a manufacturing nation, drawing to an ever greater extent upon foreign raw materials and in a growing measure supplying finished goods to other parts of the world. Our imports of crude raw materials rose from 22 per cent. of our total imports in 1890 to 35 per cent. in 1913, and our exports of manufactures, ready for consumption, rose from 16 per cent. in 1890 to 31 per cent. in 1913. In the same period our imports of manufactured goods declined relatively. The tendency to industrialization of the United States has been accentuated by the war. As a nation, our minds and vision must be turned abroad, toward the seas-the lanes of commerce between the parts of the world. The development of foreign markets for American goods before the war had been achieved by our industrial statesmen, the men who think in terms of continents. The conditions resulting from the war have greatly increased our industrial facilities and opened new markets to us that had been closely held by the other nations that arrived first on the ground. Whether we shall retain part of our gains depends on many factors. Primarily, we need men. An increased personnel in foreign trade is a basic prerequisite. Without the human element our foreign trade machinery must lack driving power and initiative. The conduct of our commerce abroad is a national matter. There is in the United States no mine so remote, no farm so isolated as to be unaffected by the ebb and flow of our foreign trade. Any influence such as this book may exercise that will teach Americans to think in international terms will not only redound to the nation's welfare in the field of commerce, but will add to the prestige of America in international affairs, which, let us hope, will make for greater righteousness among the nations. INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE CHAPTER I SOME PRINCIPLES OF COMMERCE AND AMERICAN TRADE POLICY America is at a crucial and plastic stage of development. In the field of trade, more than in any other perhaps, the policy of the Government and the attitude of our merchants can fortify or shatter the anti-Prussian ideals, which our elders have uttered, and our youths died to establish, the standards of justice rather than of power, the principle of service rather than of dominion. It would be a sorry day in the history of America if in the conduct of our commerce we bartered the ideals of a Washington, or a Jefferson, of a Lincoln or a Wilson, for the doctrines of a Frederick the Great, a Kaiser Wilhelm, a Nietzsche, or a Bernhardi. American ideals at work in the Revolution of 1776 created this federated republic and in the Civil War welded it into an indissoluble union. But these spiritual forces were not selfishly confined to ourselves. Little liberated Cuba is the product of these influences, the fruit of a new kind of political penetration. The returned Boxer indemnity to China represents the spiritual conquest of a willing foreign people. America's rôle in the great war and her attitude at the peace table are not a fragment of a national policy. In an age of world politics they are the fruition of purposes born on this continent in the colonial era, and consciously pursued throughout 143 years of national de |