Chapter 19

In the effort it is important to remember that there is much to live down in criticism of methods of the past. One Latin-American gentleman, an enthusiast for American commerce, exclaimed to me in despair: "Son hombres capazes de poner una hacha Collins con vidrios para ventanas," which means: "they (the American exporters) are capable of packing a Collins hatchet with window glass." Others told me how leading firms always stamped their letters for domestic and not foreign postage. The office boy simply would not learn geography. Nobody minded paying the deficit, but through local red tape this seeming trifle sometimes caused two or even three weeks' delay in the delivery of important letters.

Certain of our strongest firms have been calmly ignoring shipping directions. What did they care if the packages had to cross the Andes on mule back, and if mules could only carry packages of a certain size and weight? What did they care if the duty remission for materials on some Government contract, or the customs classification of a shipment, depended on adherence to specific directions? I could multiply examples of the most amazing casualness and careless disregard, of bad packing, of ungenerous credit, which have enraged the importer.

A European merchant, many years established in a South American city, and knowing the community, has been selling pianos in this way: The manufacturer would quote him a price and deliver the piano, giving him long credit at an ordinary rate of interest. The merchant would finally sell the piano on the installment plan, receiving interest at a higher rate on the deferred payments, the merchant trusting the buyer, the manufacturer trusting the merchant, both thus making good profits, and the purchaser being accommodated. This man found the American manufacturer entirely unwilling to deal in this way.

European houses on the spot, whether independent or financed by large home houses, give credits for as long, sometimes, as a year. They would not continue to do so if they lost by doing it. Often this fits the customs of the local domestic trade. In one country the local retailer is expected to be paid within eighteen months. Naturally, our exporters' demand for "cash down on receipt of documents," even when the customer is well vouched for, does not appeal to him.

He prefers to get long credit from a European house, and pay interest for it, rather than to borrow from his bank at high interest or sink his own capital to pay for American goods, long before he gets them, their price plus the profit of a commission house. Indeed, he is generally dissatisfied with the methods of American export trade as now conducted, which is almost exclusively through commission houses. These, it seems, might become more efficient through organization and more aggressive and scientific methods.

On the other hand, the export trade of certain of the big combinations is beginning to be pushed with commendable zeal and efficiency. Trade at large, to reach its greatest volume, must include the pushing of smaller lines of goods. These smaller lines, in the aggregate, would reach considerable sums, and it does not appear that there have hitherto existed efficient agencies for their marketing. To hold Latin-American trade we must equal our competitors in liberality of credits, in representation on the spot, and in other facilities.

There is no doubt that more American merchants resident in the trade centres would give valuable impetus to our commerce. Even our commission houses operating on the spot are so few that in handling many lines there is the greatest danger of their sacrificing the building up of a steady trade to the opportunities of unduly heavy profits now and then, and so damaging our general commercial interests. Then we must send many commercial travelers.

Just here, however, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that Americans sent to these countries to do business must above all be men of agreeable manners. In these countries many quite unworthy people have these: so a good man who lacks them is likely to be badly misjudged. They should have sympathetic personality and sufficient education, besides being men of sobriety and good character, and should be able to speak the language of the country.

All this will be expensive, but non-competing firms might join in sending men, or competing firms might, it is hoped, be guaranteed against the terrors of the Sherman law in order to join in sending a corps of representatives upon some basis of division of the field or the profits. Combination is even more necessary abroad to put forth the nation's strength in world competition than it is for efficiency at home. These men would be students and salesmen, and perhaps future merchants who would settle in these countries and emulate the patriotic groups of resident foreigners who in so many places help to form an atmosphere favorable to their countries' interests.

They would work to replace with our goods those now shut off by the war, but also to introduce dozens of lines of American products which are now comparatively hard to find in these markets. A number of strong firms might join to establish commercial houses or selling agencies in trade centres of certain groups of countries. Commission houses might do the same if they carried samples and instructed their clients in packing, credits, &c., but in each case there should be American houses on the spot which would carry general lines and supply to the eye that visible evidence of the goods themselves which is such a valuable form of advertisement.

In the establishment of American houses in these countries, as in many other respects, much may be learned from the Germans. They bring out carefully selected young men. These, if efficient, have sure promotion. The partners retire before old age to make room for those who work up. The inefficient are dropped. It is a little like the principle of a good foreign service.

I think the most minute study should be given, first, to the nearer countries, say those north of the Equator, including the republics of the Caribbean. Each country must be separately studied. Primarily, there will be found a cry, sometimes desperate, for capital. Public works, concessionary and otherwise, have stopped for lack of funds from Europe. New developments in railroad building, mining, harbor works, plantations, are arrested. Where European credits have been customarily used to handle crops, there is distress, and no less so in cases in which such credit has previously been given by ostensibly American houses operating really with European capital.

American capital may come to the rescue by advances upon good security through local banks. It can establish banks or buy controlling interests in existing banks, many of which pay their stockholders 15 per cent. or more. It can relieve the stagnation and make profitable investment by an active campaign for public and private contracts and for sound and fair concessions, not visionary or get-rich-too-quick schemes.

Supposably, the repairing of the destruction brought by the war will make European capital scarce for some years, but an effort will doubtless be made to retain for it its former preponderance in these countries; and so it is important that, whatever the war's effects upon our own money markets, use should be made of such an opportunity as does not come more than once.

To be sure, the scarcity of money in the United States makes this difficult, but the same worldwide money scarcity will secure an especially high rate of interest in Latin America, where even in normal times money can often be placed on excellent security in some of the countries, and at a rate very high indeed compared to that prevailing now in the United States. For safe investments with such a margin of profit, it is to be hoped that money, even if dear at home, will be forthcoming.

Undoubtedly the purchasing power of these republics has been hard hit by the cutting off of credits and markets by the war, as their Governments have been hard hit through the falling off of revenues from import duties. Some of the Governments will require foreign loans. Capital, I repeat--and I mean really American capital--is the urgent need. We are not asked to make them a present of capital to buy our goods with, but if we do not help finance them and buy their products they will have nothing with which to buy our goods.

The situation invites us to give capital and credit to take the place of the European supply which has failed. One need not fear that the returns will be uninviting, for Europe would hardly have been supplying credit and capital to Latin America as a mere matter of amiability. Thus our capital must regenerate Latin-American prosperity, while our bankers, merchants, and manufacturers are engaged in making solid, permanent arrangements, not opportunistic ones, to take possession of a great share in the present and still more in the growing future development and commerce of these countries. Capital, then, and credit are the first requisites.

The war has had the effect of making the Latin-American countries realize for once the economic importance to them of the United States. The products of some, like the tin of Bolivia and the nitrates of Chile, have been going almost entirely to Europe. Several republics suffer the more acutely in proportion to their previous failure to cultivate financial and commercial relations with the United States.

They now feel this and are compelled to a mood receptive to our advances. More, they are forced to seek new markets for their goods just as they are forced to buy some of ours. In this way there should come about new exports to the United States, and there should spring up there the corresponding new industries and habits of consumption, to the ultimate benefit of all the countries concerned.

Meanwhile, the United States is the only present economic hope of a number of the republics. It is to be hoped that our capitalists and business men will realize the responsibilities as well as the opportunities of profit in the rôle they are asked to play, and that their response to their new opportunities will be one of courage, thoroughness and intelligence, and one also of quiet patriotism.

II.

POLITICAL POTENTIALITIES.

Turning from the opportunity to the lesson, from the commercial and economic aspects of this question to those that are political in the large sense, one's imagination is appalled at the potentialities of the yet unknown results of so vast an upheaval. Yet we must envisage some of these if we are to be prepared for their effect upon us. We must be ready for the impact of the resultant forces of these great dynamics. We must be ready everywhere, but nowhere more than in our relations with Latin America, in the zone of the Caribbean, and wherever the Monroe Doctrine as still interpreted gives us a varying degree of responsibility.

The war's first effect upon our Latin-American relations is to compel through commercial and financial rapprochement a larger measure of material interdependence, more contact, and, we may hope, a substitution of knowledge for the former reciprocity of ignorance. All this makes for better social and intellectual relations, good understanding and friendship, and so for political relations much more substantial in the case of many of the republics than the rather flimsy Pan-Americanism celebrated in eloquent speeches and futile international conferences.

There is little in Pan-Americanism of that kind. The "raza Latina" of eloquence is not itself homogeneous; still less so is the population of the whole hemisphere. And with Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and Santiago we have, of course, far less propinquity than we have with the capitals of Europe. But what we really can do is to build up, especially with the nearer republics, real ties of common interest and good neighborhood, and with the distant ones ties of commerce and esteem.

The war may tend to cure certain rather self-centred countries of affecting the morbid view that the people of the United States are lying awake nights contriving to devour them, when, in fact, it would be hard to find in a crowded street in the United States one in a thousand of the passersby who knew more than the name, at most, of one of those very few countries referred to.

Europe's preoccupation with the war temporarily deprives such a country and its few misguided prophets whose monomania is dread of that chimera, the "Colossus of the North," of the pastime of nestling up to Europe in the hope of annoying us. It postpones, too, the hope of the morbid ones that we shall come to war with a powerful enemy. Now, perhaps, even these will appreciate the remark of a diplomatist of a certain weak country in contact with European powers, who once said: "If we only had the United States for a neighbor! What I can't understand is that your neighbors do not realize their good luck." Turning from these exceptional phenomena, the very fact of the war leaves the United States in a general position of greater political prestige.

Whatever the upshot of the European tragedy, its political and psychological consequences are likely to be great. If it result in new national divisions upon racial lines of more reality, who knows but that the awakened spirits of nationality will germinate fresh military ambitions? Or will the horrors of the war force political reforms and the search for assurance in more democratic institutions against any repetition of those horrors? And is popular government an assurance against useless war while men remain warlike even when not military?

Except from the successful countries or from those where disaster has brought such sobering change that men can return to work heartened with new hope, when the war is over there is likely to be a heavy emigration of disgusted people. Possibly even victory will be so dear that men will emigrate from a country half prostrate in its triumph. Many will come as the Puritans came, and as the bulk of our own excellent Germanic element came, and will cast in their lot with a new nation. We shall get a good share, but doubtless some will go to the republics of the far South, and some to the highlands of the tropics and through the canal to the West Coast. If so, this will tend gradually toward increased production and purchasing power, as well as toward a leavening of social, political, and economic conditions of life.

If the war were indecisive or left all the combatants more or less prostrated, peaceful immigration might give a big impulse to the gradual growing up of powerful States in the temperate zone of the extreme South. The situation there, and the evolution of our own power, make it perhaps even now fair to consider the question of regarding as optional in any given case the assertion by us of the Monroe Doctrine much below the equator, let us say, beyond which it may possibly be doubtful whether we have nowadays much reason for special interest.

But, even so, our relations to South America and our obligations under the Monroe Doctrine, in spite of the blessed fortifications of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, leave us where it is tempting fate to be without a navy of the first magnitude, and a big merchant marine. We have seen what happened to Belgium and Luxemburg. We have seen how even some of the most enlightened nations can still make force their god. Nations learn slowly, and there are perhaps some new big ones coming on, like China.

If the war is a fight to a finish, and the Allies triumph, we can imagine Russia, with its teeming millions of people, occupied for a while in the Near East; Japan consolidating her position in the Far East, an increasingly powerful neighbor to us in the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Pacific Ocean; France still a great power; and England as a world power of uncomfortably ubiquitous strength, able to challenge the Monroe Doctrine at will.

Or, let us suppose that Germany should triumph and that German emigration should swarm into the Caribbean countries, or into Brazil or some other country where there is already a large German colony--elated, triumphant Germans, not Germans disgusted by a disastrous war. Would Germany be likely to heed the Monroe Doctrine, or would it be only another "scrap of paper"?

In the present stage of civilization the safety of America should not be left dependent upon the forbearance of any power that may emerge dangerously strong from the war or that may otherwise arise. The obligations and rights of our Latin-American relations, under the Monroe Doctrine and otherwise, like our security and our efficiency as a force for peace and good in the world, demand a big navy, a merchant marine, and the self-discipline and safeguard of adequate military preparedness. The need of these and of a diplomacy of intelligent self-interest, continuity, and intense nationalism is the lesson brought home to us by the European war in its effects upon our Latin-American relations as well as upon our general position as a great power.

AN EASTER MESSAGE

By BEATRICE BARRY.

Into what depths of misery thou art hurled, Belgium, thou second Saviour of the World! Thou who hast died For all of Europe, lo, we bathe thy feet So cruelly pierced, and find the service sweet, Thou crucified.

But though we mourn thy agony and loss, And weep beneath the shadow of thy cross-- We know the day That brings the resurrection and the life Shall dawn for thee when war and all its strife Hath passed away.

Then, out of all her travail and her pain, Belgium, though crushed to earth, shall rise again; And on the sod Whence sprang a race so strong, so free from guile, Men shall behold, in just a little while, The smile of God.

Land of the brave--soon, by God's grace, the free-- Thy woe is transient; joy shall come to thee; It cannot fail. The darkest night gives way to rosy dawn, And thou, perchance, shalt see on Easter morn, The Holy Grail.

An Interview on the War With Henry James

By Preston Lockwood

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 21, 1915.]

One of the compensations of the war, which we ought to take advantage of, is the chance given the general public to approach on the personal side some of the distinguished men who have not hitherto lived much in the glare of the footlights. Henry James has probably done this as little as any one; he has enjoyed for upward of forty years a reputation not confined to his own country, has published a long succession of novels, tales, and critical papers, and yet has apparently so delighted in reticence as well as in expression that he has passed his seventieth year without having responsibly "talked" for publication or figured for it otherwise than pen in hand.

Shortly after the outbreak of the war Mr. James found himself, to his professed great surprise, Chairman of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps, now at work in France, and today, at the end of three months of bringing himself to the point, has granted me, as a representative of THE NEW YORK TIMES, an interview. What this departure from the habit of a lifetime means to him he expressed at the outset:

"I can't put," Mr. James said, speaking with much consideration and asking that his punctuation as well as his words should be noted, "my devotion and sympathy for the cause of our corps more strongly than in permitting it thus to overcome my dread of the assault of the interviewer, whom I have deprecated, all these years, with all the force of my preference for saying myself and without superfluous aid, without interference in the guise of encouragement and cheer, anything I may think worth my saying. Nothing is worth my saying that I cannot help myself out with better, I hold, than even the most suggestive young gentleman with a notebook can help me. It may be fatuous of me, but, believing myself possessed of some means of expression, I feel as if I were sadly giving it away when, with the use of it urgent, I don't gratefully employ it, but appeal instead to the art of somebody else."

It was impossible to be that "somebody else," or, in other words, the person privileged to talk with Mr. James, to sit in presence of his fine courtesy and earnestness, without understanding the sacrifice he was making, and making only because he had finally consented to believe that it would help the noble work of relief which a group of young Americans, mostly graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, are carrying on along their stretch of the fighting line in Northern France.

Mr. James frankly desired his remarks to bear only on the merits of the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. It enjoys today the fullest measure of his appreciation and attention; it appeals deeply to his benevolent instincts, and he gives it sympathy and support as one who has long believed, and believes more than ever, in spite of everything, at this international crisis, in the possible development of "closer communities and finer intimacies" between America and Great Britain, between the country of his birth and the country, as he puts it, of his "shameless frequentation."

There are many people who are eloquent about the war, who are authorities on the part played in it by the motor ambulance and who take an interest in the good relations of Great Britain and the United States; but there is nobody who can tell us, as Mr. James can, about style and the structure of sentences, and all that appertains to the aspect and value of words. Now and then in what here follows he speaks familiarly of these things for the first time in his life, not by any means because he jumped at the chance, but because his native kindness, whether consciously or unconsciously, seemed so ready to humor the insisting inquirer.

"It is very difficult," he said, seeking to diminish the tension so often felt by a journalist, even at the moment of a highly appreciated occasion, "to break into graceful license after so long a life of decorum; therefore you must excuse me if my egotism doesn't run very free or my complacency find quite the right turns."

He had received me in the offices of the corps, businesslike rooms, modern for London, low-ceiled and sparely furnished. It was not by any means the sort of setting in which as a reader of Henry James I had expected to run to earth the author of "The Golden Bowl," but the place is, nevertheless, today, in the tension of war time, one of the few approaches to a social resort outside his Chelsea home where he can be counted on. Even that delightful Old World retreat, Lamb House, Rye, now claims little of his time.

The interviewer spoke of the waterside Chelsea and Mr. James's long knowledge of it, but, sitting not overmuch at his ease and laying a friendly hand on the shoulder of his tormentor, he spoke, instead, of motor ambulances, making the point, in the interest of clearness, that the American Ambulance Corps of Neuilly, though an organization with which Richard Norton's corps is in the fullest sympathy, does not come within the scope of his remarks.