358 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



full advantage of the information because of the Boxer uprising and 

 the boycott of American goods. There are, however, a few American 

 factories running exclusively on cotton goods for the Orient. 



So the Department of Commerce has been eager for years to give 

 this service and has been giving it in such very limited measure as its 

 funds permitted. 



We may take a lesson from the Department of Agriculture. When 

 Secretary Eusk succeeded Secretary Morton in this department, he first 

 looked the department over and said to Secretary Morton, " What is the 

 good in all this, anyway, Mr. Secretary?" to which Secretary Morton 

 replied, " Why, you've got the appropriations." The department was in 

 its infancy. There seemed little to do but distribute the funds. It has 

 grown, however, until it uses with great wisdom $17,000,000 annually, 

 and $4,000,000 of this amount for purely development work, searching 

 out new cereals from all over the world, studying soils, fighting pests, 

 and in the most intimate way serving every last farmer in the land. 

 And it gets a thousand times better returns on this $4,000,000 than it 

 ever got on the little sums appropriated in the earlier days. So the 

 vision has come to the Department of Commerce and to its friends 

 throughout the country. It can give no service to American manufac- 

 turers, but the service is of value to all other citizens. Against the 

 $4,000,000 given the Department of Agriculture for purely develop- 

 ment work the Department of Commerce until recently was given only 

 $40,000, but recently, with no thought of war but solely of the general 

 welfare, Congress gave to the department $50,000 to lead in the de- 

 velopment of the markets of South America with their annual imports 

 of $1,043,000,000, of which we have been favored with only seventeen 

 per cent. So it gave the department $100,000 with which to develop 

 the trade of all the rest of the world with its annual purchases of some 

 three and a half billions of dollars, and another $100,000 for the estab- 

 lishment of some fourteen commercial attaches in the great capitals of 

 the world. 



There is no American but wishes that the present war would stop 

 to-morrow, and it is well to note that the vision came to us of foreign 

 opportunities and of the demands that foreign trade may properly make 

 upon us before there was any thought of war. The present Secretary of 

 Commerce and all with wliom he cooperates have long cherished the vision 

 and begun the larger development in such excellent manner as may 

 well make Congress wish to extend the appropriations as fast as the 

 department, with its conservative judgment, will ask for them. 



In similar spirit and with the same vision, substantially, all of the 

 business organizations of America, large and small, cooperated in the 

 establishment of a central organization, or clearing house, known as the 

 Chamber of Commerce of the United States, and in this central organi- 

 zation, with its headquarters in Washington, American business two 



