Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER H SOUTH AMERICAN MARKETS: COMMERCE AS AN INTERNATIONAL PEACEMAKER Commerce requires a knowledge of those with whom we would trade. One of the chief causes for international misunderstandings is the lack of appreciation by one nation of the real characteristics of the peoples of another nation — a lack of mutual acquaintance. Commerce makes for a better acquaintance, and therefore commerce is a peacemaker. The reason why our trade with South America lagged behind that of England and Germany is not far to seek, if one considers the appalling ignorance concerning our Southern neighbors that even yet prevails in our land, though not so generally as a few years ago. The chairman of a chamber of commerce meeting in a large New England city introduced me to the audience as coming "from Buenos Aires, a city whose population is over one hundred thousand." He was right; it has nearly two million. A plate-glass dealer wrote my Legation from Denver to inquire if the Buenos Aires shops used glass in their windows I Some of the cities of our country have not yet been fully svwakened to the value of foreign trade. Other cities, however, are already thoroughly aroused tothe advantages which the export trade has for the manufacturer, but the causes for such an awakening are widely different in the various cities. In Cincinnati, for example, one of the reasons for the general interest in and knowledge of foreign trade came about in this way. During the business depression in the autumn of 1907, the Fay-Egan Company was running on full time, although most of the other manufacturing plants of that city were not. A little while before the company had decided that a "Foreign Department" would look well on their star tionery and had therefore started to build up a small one. It had reac...