ished, had made her the emporium of the world. But already Great Britain has achieved industrial coördination. Peace will find her with a new economic system, working efficiently to accomplish her traditional purpose. Moreover, in comparison with Germany and France, Great Britain's human resources have hardly been touched. But her people, women as well as men, have been disciplined to strive together for a common end.

These are the forces that we must meet not only in foreign trade, but in our own markets. France and Great Britain have borrowed immense sums from us. They can pay that debt with American securities still held by them. But they will not do this if they can help it. They will pay what they owe us and also try to replace the losses of the war by filling our markets with their products and by crowding us out of foreign markets. The other warring nations will do the same thing.

Thus it is that with our lack of business organization which, even with the aid of up-to-date laws, it will take us years to overcome, the protection of American industry becomes an emergency. In the period so close upon us protection becomes more than a policy of national prosperity; it becomes also a policy of national safety.

A new tariff must be made without delay, high enough to meet the revolutionized industrial conditions of Europe, elastic enough to meet the swift and well planned trade movements of rival nations. Even free traders cannot fail to see the necessity for this, at least until we can ourselves work out the organization of American industries and business on modern lines. If we never before had had a protective tariff we should be forced to create one now.

But we must see to it that the law is drawn by informed and honest men. It must not cover fraud and theft in the name of protection. While economic conditions produced by war demand a higher tariff than would have been wise or just in former times, this new tariff must be as clean as it is scientific. There is no place in Congress for the lobbyist, the log-roller, and the bargainer in schedules-no place for mere partizans without knowledge or skill.

The administration points to our prosperity. Where is it? In Massachusetts? Yes. In California? No. In Connecticut? Yes. In Oregon? No. In Pennsylvania? Yes. In Washington? No. In the Mississippi Valley? Yes. In the western mountain states? No. Certain sections have industrial inflation, but other parts of the country have depression. Genuine prosperity must be nation-wide.

But our so-called prosperity to-day is sectional. It appears only in spots. It is a spotted prosperity-spotted and stained. Wherever the war has directly reached the sources of production, business is good;

elsewhere business is bad. We must have a tariff that will protect all parts of the country alike in peace as well as in war, and make our prosperity genuine, steady, and national.

The capture of foreign trade is only less necessary than the preservation of our home markets and it will be harder to accomplish. Yet it must be done. We were making a surplus before the war; that surplus will be greater after the war. Unless we sell it abroad, we will have congestion at home. This means lower wages, idle men, tighter money-all the elements of a panic. An unsold surplus is the blood clot in the heart of business.

For a long time the nations at war cannot buy from us, except in special lines, more than a small part of what they were buying three years ago. We must win and keep our just share of those markets which our great rivals once monopolized. Our immediate field of trade expansion is South America, the Orient, Africa, the undeveloped and backward countries of the world. We have been mad that we did not turn every energy to securing those markets when war called our rivals from them. Instead of building up this normal trade which would have lasted and increased, we turned our energies to making munitions, an abnormal trade which will suddenly end, leaving hundreds of thousands of men without work, millions of capital unemployed, and disrupting still more our disorganized business. But the folly is committed and we must face our hard task not with mutual reproaches, but with stout hearts, united wills, and constructive minds.

Experience of the great commercial nations has shown that trade with undeveloped countries means the investment of capital to bring out their resources, banking institutions to handle credit and exchange, lines of merchant ships to carry goods. How can we expect our trade in South America to grow in normal times when goods must be carried on foreign ships to foreign ports and retransported on foreign ships; when payment must be made through foreign banks instead of American. banks; when our rivals have fine systems for extending the credit and we have none; when the governments of our competitors encourage and protect the foreign enterprise of their business men and our government not only discourages similar efforts of American business men in the same field, but insults them for their pains?

Yet just that is what the administration did in the case of the first systematic attempt of American business men, with government approval, to plant the seeds of American trade and enterprise in the Orient. During the Presidency of William H. Taft, American capital arranged for loans to build great Chinese railways that would open immense resources,. create new trade with millions of people and carry

western civilization to those still living in the atmosphere and surroundings of a forgotten age.

The government sanctioned the venture; it was the wisest act of that administration. Yet one of the first things Mr. Wilson did as President was to halt this American advance and declare to the world that the American government would not protect or even recognize American investments abroad. And this keynote to the foreign commercial policy of the administration was struck suddenly without notice to the American investors, without warning to American business, and even without consultation of the Cabinet.

Capital is as timid as it is useful, and, no matter what the possible profits on its investments, or how great the benefit to the Nation from which it comes, if it cannot have security it will not plant and raise the harvest which may be destroyed or which others my gather. Great Britain has about five hundred and fifty million dollars invested in fifty-three international banks with hundreds of branches while the United States has but one international bank with only six million five hundred thousand dollars of investment. Germany's foreign banking facilities before the war were more nearly perfect though not so numerous as those of Great Britain. France had and now has an admirable system of financing and encouraging trade with her immense possessions. Yet we, with a larger domestic banking capital than Germany, France and Great Britain combined, must depend on the financial agencies of our rivals even for exchange.

The first step we must take to build up American foreign trade is to get rid of an administration which has declared that it is opposed to American investments abroad and which has refused to protect American property anywhere on earth. American enterprise will not venture into other lands while it knows that it will suffer the fate that has befallen it in China, in Mexico, and even on the free and open seas. What American railroads will be built in any quarters of the earth, what American banks established, what American commercial houses founded, with the administration's mismanagement of Mexican affairs, written in letters of flame and blood, before the eyes of mankind?

What hope is there for our foreign trade under an administration which permits American lives to be sacrificed, American mail to be rifled, American ships and cargoes to be seized even when plying between American ports, American firms to be blacklisted and kept off the oceans, the export business of American houses destroyed for the benefit of foreign export houses, American trade forbidden except under written permission of a rival commercial power? When our government was not ten years old it retaliated with force rather than submit

to a fraction of the injuries to American trade that have been wrought without rebuke from us within the past few months.

The desertion of American rights on the ocean is but a weak repetition of our abandonment of them in Mexico. The strength of the administration in the Mexican question is that its malpractice of statesmanship has been so great that it cannot be described without seeming to exaggerate.

The administration found a de facto government stronger than any since the régime of Diaz. That government had been recognized by Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and other powers, upon the advice of their seasoned diplomatic representatives who had long been on the ground and knew the facts. Yet the administration did not content itself with refusing to recognize this de facto government, but ordered it to dissolve without a successor to take its place. The administration did this upon the pretexts that the de facto Mexican government had not gained power according to the Constitution and laws of that country and that the de facto President was stained with crime. Yet since then the administration has nonchalantly recognized a government in Peru set up in a single night by force and murder.

On purely moral grounds, these pretexts would make us the arbiter in every contested change of government on earth and involve us as the deciding party in every revolution that occurs in any land. Unless it be admitted that we have a peculiar interest and a special duty in Mexico, the theory on which the President says he acted would have required us to interfere in the bloody changes of power that have recently taken place and are still taking place in China. If the pretext that Huerta held the Presidency through intrigue and bloodshed is a sound reason for the administration's action, then the American government ought in like manner to have demanded that the King of Servia quit the throne to which he had been lifted by murder and conspiracy-unless it be admitted that we have a peculiar interest and special duty in Mexico.

If the administration answers that China and Servia are far away while Mexico adjoins our borders and that, therefore, we have an interest in and owe a duty to the neighbor country which we do not owe to distant lands, it condemns its own conduct. It abandons the moral ground for its action because morality does not depend upon distance. It admits that we have a peculiar interest and a special duty in Mexico, because it is adjacent to us.

What, then, is that peculiar interest and special duty? Was it to depose the only government in Mexico because our President did not like the Mexican President? Was it to choose now this factional leader and now that bandit chief to be king for a day? And after thus inter

fering and intriguing in Mexico until all government disappeared, and latent anarchy became active, did our peculiar interest and special duty require us to add to its fury? Was it our interest and duty to abandon American men and women to outrage and murder, American property to pillage and destruction, American rights to insult and mockery?

Did not our ordinary interest and common duty in Mexico require that American lives should be safeguarded, American property protected, American rights upheld? Was not a government necessary in Mexico strong enough to do these things? And when such a government no longer existed did not our sacred duty and supreme interest demand that we provide law, order, and competent authority?

But the administration looks upon Americans in Mexico as shifty adventurers, their investments as dishonorable hazards, their rights as fraudulent claims. Yet every American in Mexico went there on the invitation of that government and with the sanction of ours. In the last thirty years almost a billion dollars of American capital has been invested in Mexico. It was this money that developed Mexican resources. It was this money that built Mexican railways, opened Mexican mines, operated Mexican ranches, and gave employment to Mexican labor at wages many times higher than it ever had received before.

Along with this capital went thousands of Americans. They took their families with them. They were not Wall Street exploiters or gamblers of fortune. They were miners, ranchmen, engineers, railroad men, merchants, traders, and teachers. They were of the same stock as our pioneers who carved from what was once a part of Mexico the noble commonwealths of Texas and Utah, Nevada and New Mexico, Arizona and California.

American investments were made and American citizens established themselves in Mexico under a guaranty of safety, and upon the faith that over them was the shield of the United States. They had reason for that faith, not only because to protect the lives and property of their citizens in other lands is the settled and accepted policy of civilized nations, but also because the American government in solemn treaties with Mexico exacted the condition that American life and property in that country should be secure. When there was no longer any government in Mexico to fulfil those obligations it became our duty to restore law and order not only to safeguard American rights, but in the high interest of civilization itself.

There are hundreds of millions of European capital in Mexico and many British and German subjects. If Great Britain, France and Germany had not been at war the whole world knows that they would have said to us: "Take charge of Mexican affairs and restore law and order.