90 ROWE— THE UNITED STATES AS [April 24, 



It is true that the President restricted himself to a declaration 

 against " concessions," and it would seem that to his mind this term 

 involves the idea of special privilege or monopoly. The nearest Eng- 

 lish equivalent of the Spanish word "concession" is our own legal 

 term " franchise." It is true that in many of the countries of Central 

 and South America such franchises include the grant of monopolistic 

 privileges. It is also true that under the cloak of such franchises 

 many abuses have been committed, but we must bear in mind that 

 the unsettled political conditions prevailing in many of these coun- 

 tries and the exceptional risks to which foreign capital is subjected, 

 have made it necessary to offer exceptional inducements in order to 

 attract foreign investors. If we stop to reflect on the extraordinary 

 inducements which were offered to foreign capital during the early 

 history of the United States, and on the great service which such 

 capital rendered to our national development, we can readily see that 

 any policy, the effect of which is to discourage foreign investments 

 in Central and South America, cannot help but retard the develop- 

 ment of those sections of the continent. We may deplore the fact 

 that in many of the republics of the American continent there has 

 been a wasteful and at times a corrupt distribution of franchises and 

 special privileges, but it is a serious question whether it is either our 

 duty or our right to undertake to determine or even to suggest the 

 standards or conditions to which the investment of foreign capital 

 should conform. 



At all events, let us not close our eyes to the fact that the formu- 

 lation of this policy has aroused serious misgivings throughout the 

 countries of the American continent, as it is looked -upon as an 

 unwarranted assumption of control over their liberty of action. In 

 Europe the President's pronouncement is regarded as confirmatory 

 of a suspicion, which has been growing within recent years, namely 

 that the United States 'has embarked upon a national policy, the pur- 

 pose of which is to reserve the less advanced countries of the Ameri- 

 can continent for the economic exploitation of American capital. 



Whatever the ultimate judgment on the appropriateness of the 

 principles or the wisdom of the policy formulated in the President's 

 Mobile speech, it should be made clear that this new orientation of 



