THE SELLING OF THE SURPLUS 



Pacific ports. It will be years, perhaps, before 

 we know who wins. The trade of the Orient is 

 the prize fought for. It is a prize worth the 

 winning. Logically tributary to these Pacific 

 coast cities is a traffic estimated, in round 

 numbers, to be about two billions of dollars a 

 year, fully two-thirds being import trade from 

 other countries. The American ports are 

 nearer by thousands of miles than the nearest 

 nation worth considering commercially. In 

 1904 the United States had less than nine per 

 cent of this trade. To make the situation seem 

 all the more incongruous, the United States is 

 not only logically tributary and nearer than 

 any competing nation, but is the best equipped 

 nation on the globe, all things considered, to 

 supply these Orientals with what they must 

 buy away from home. Take it in the line of 

 our agricultural products which are in demand 

 in the Orient. No other nation has so great an 

 arable territory so contiguous to transporta- 

 tion, with a population so well trained in the 

 development of the products of the earth. 



The outlook, when Chinese boycotts come, 

 may sometimes be dark. The American, so 

 swift in some ways, has been so slow to see his 



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