Shifting Scenes in Foreign Trade

Abstract

THE SUBJECT on which I am asked to address you-Shifting Scenes in Foreign Trade-is one which comprehends the major aspects of our present day problems as a trading nation. To Napoleon is ascribed the remark that a chief concern of an army commander was to know what lay behind the hill. While the airplane has solved that difficulty in modern warfare, there remain realms of human enterprise in which only conjecture can be made of the future that lies beyond the distant horizon. It calls for deep study, keen insight into affairs and the gift of prophecy to visualize what the future has in store for the American foreign trader when the war-drums cease to beat and a Peace Conference determines once more the political and economic boundaries between nations. The experience gained by the aftermath of the previous Great War enables us to lift a corner of the veil and to gain some knowledge of the direction in which we should employ our energies at the present time in an effort to chart a safe course in our foreign commercial relations by which our domestic economy may be strong to resist the worst consequences of another prolonged war in Europe. As a result of the previous war, farreaching structural changes in national economies throughout the world have made the task more difficult of restoring our trade to its normal channels. When the present war cast its baleful shadows over the world, we still were in the doldrums of a post-war reckoning of losses in trade and employment which, with all our resources, we have failed to liquidate. On top of this now is cast the added respo sibility of maintaining our comerce in a time of war and of exercising vigila t watch over our international interests as a neutral nation. With about fifty per cent of our trade required to be o a cash-and-carry basis and almost fifty per cent of our shipping barred from war zones, and with this large portion of our trade transformed by our Neutrality Act from a buying into a selling mark t for goods indispensable to the belligerents, our problems have become more complicated and the retention of our oversea trade one of doubt and uncertainty as to the future. It behooves us, therefore, to fortify our national economy against a future which, in the light of past experiences, may tax all our resources in efforts to protect our stake in world trade. We can make no greater contribution to the cause of democracy and world peace than to strengthen our own national defenses against the inevitable economic consequences of another impoverishing war in European countries that have been our leading markets for the sale of our agricultural and industrial surpluses. To understand fully the problems of today, we must have a clear conception of the background against which we trace the changes that have taken place in the pattern of our foreign trade over the past two decades. At the close of the last century the United States had completed its task of internal economic organization. Industrialization had reached a stage when it was necessary to find new markets for accumulating surpluses. On the eve of the Great War of I914, the United States already was third on the list of