4 Minnie Throop England 



market, and trust to gradually increasing the price until it is 

 remunerative. Finally, the American business man is quick to 

 pick out the efficient man in his business and promote him, while 

 the Englishman is liable to allow prejudices of castes, nation- 

 alities, precedents, or family connections to influence promotions 

 at the expense of efficiency. Van Cleave, 5 on the subject " What 

 Americans must do to make an Export Business " says : " We 

 must make better goods than our European competitors. We 

 must improve our methods so that we can sell those goods as 

 cheaply as our competitors sell inferior goods, or cheaper. We 

 must do this notwithstanding the lower prices which Europe's 

 employers pay for labor. . . . We must equip our laborers to do 

 more work than the Europeans do in the same length of time, 

 and do it better. 



" To this end we should establish manual training departments 

 in all our public schools, in which boys, beginning at the age of 

 ten or eleven, could learn to handle all the tools used in the ordi- 

 nary mechanical trades, and we should provide trade high schools 

 in which boys who pass through the manual training branch of 

 the primary schools could become first-class mechanics." 



Again, trade is unquestionably influenced by the geographical 

 position of countries. Canada, for example, gets about 70 per 

 cent of her imports from sources outside of the British Empire, 

 and the larger part of this, or 56.7 per cent of the total imports, 

 comes from the United States. 7 Nor does trade in the West 

 Indies follow the flag, but continually drifts towards its natural 

 market the United States. 8 It is well recognized by European 

 countries that the geographical position of the United States gives 

 that country an advantage over them in West Indian, Mexican, 

 South American, Canadian, 9 and also Asiatic trade. For the same 



5 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 29 : 



34-35- 



a Cf. Flux, " Flag and Trade," in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 

 62: 524. Caillard, " An Empire in the Making," in Monthly Review, 18: 43. 



7 Caillard, op. cit., 38. 



8 Cf. Bigelow, Children of the Nations, 305-306. 



8 Cf. Root, Trade Relations of the British Empire, 60-61. 



180 



