fice boys through a course of
instruction in postal rates between Europe and the United States?"

When I asked him the reason he said: "We sometimes get twenty letters
from America in one mail and each comes under a two cent stamp. This has
been going on for years despite our repeated protest about it. Some
months my firm was required to pay from ten to fifteen dollars in excess
postage."

Now the amount of money involved in this transaction is the slightest
feature: it is the chronic laxity and carelessness of the American
business man that gets on the Frenchman's nerve.

Here is another case in point: A well known French firm has been writing
weekly letters for the past eighteen months to a New England factory
trying to persuade the Manager to mark his export cases with a stencil
plate and in ink rather than with a heavy lead pencil, as the latter
marking is almost obliterated by the time the shipment arrives at Havre.
In fact, this French firm went to the extent of sending a stencil and
brush to New England to be used in marking the firm's cases. But the old
pencil habit is too strong and a weekly hunt has to be instituted on the
French docks for odd cases containing valuable consignments of machine
tools. Vexatious delays result. It is just one more nail that the
heedless American manufacturer drives into the coffin of his French
business.

These incidents and many more that I could cite, are merely the
approach, however, to a succession of mistakes that make you wonder if
so-called Yankee enterprise gets stage fright or "cold feet" as soon as
it comes in contact with French commercial possibilities. Let me now
tell the prize story of neglected trade opportunity.

Last spring the American Commercial Attache in Paris made a speech at a
dinner in Philadelphia. He painted such a glowing picture of trade
prospects in France that the head of one of the greatest hardware
concerns in America, who happened to be present, came to him afterwards
with enthusiasm and said: "We want to get some of that foreign business
you talked about and we will do everything in our power to land it. Help
us if you can."

The Attache promised that he would and returned to his post in Paris. He
studied the hardware situation and found a tremendous need for our
goods. He was about to make a report to the hardware manufacturer when
an alert upstanding young American breezed into his office and said:

"I have been looking into the hardware