solution recently adopted by the National Foreign-Trade
Council: "That the American tariff system, whatever be its underlying
principle, shall possess adequate resources for the encouragement of the
foreign trade of the United States by commercial treaties or agreements,
or executive concessions within defined limits, and for its protection
from undue discrimination in the markets of the world." In short, we
must have a flexible and bargaining tariff.

We must train our men for foreign-trade fields; they must know alien
languages as well as needs; we must perfect processes of packing that
will deliver goods intact. With these goods, we must sell goodwill
through service and contact. Secondhand-business getting will have no
place in the new rivalry.

Our money, too, must go adventuring, and courage must combine with
capital. Our dawning international banking system, which first saw the
light in South America, needs world-wide expansion. Dollar credit will
be a world necessity if we capitalise the opportunity that peace may
bring us. No financial aid should be so welcome as ours, because it is
nonpolitical.

This trade machinery will be inadequate if we have no merchant marine.
Chronic failure to heed the warning for a national shipping will make
our dependence upon foreign holds both acute and costly.

Our trade needs more than a government professedly friendly to business.
It requires a definite co-operation with business. An advisory board of
practical men of commercial affairs would be of more constructive
benefit to the country than all the lawmakers combined.

Here, then, is the protection against organised European economic
aggression, the armour for the inevitable trade conflict. Unless we gird
it on, we shall be onlookers instead of participants.

III--_American Business in France_

Two Americans met by chance one day last summer at a little table in
front of the Cafe de la Paix in Paris. One had arrived only a month
before; the other was an old resident in France. After the fashion of
their kind they became acquainted and began to talk. Before them passed
a picturesque parade, brilliant with the uniforms of half a dozen
nations, and streaked with the symbols of mourning that attested to the
ravage of war.

"There is something wrong with these Frenchmen," said the first
American.

"How is that?" asked his companion.

"It's like this," was the reply. "I have sold goods from the Atlantic to
the