Chapter XI (5)

I call my place Woodchuck Lodge, as I tell my friends, because we are beleagured by these rodents. There is a cordon of woodchuck-holes all around us. In the orchard, in the meadows, in the pastures, these whistling marmots have their dens. Here one might easily have woodchuck venison for dinner every day, yea, and for supper and breakfast, too, if one could acquire a taste for it. I tried to dine on a woodchuck once when I was a boy, but never have felt inclined to repeat the experiment. If one were born in the woods and lived in the woods, maybe he could relish a woodchuck. Talk about being autocthonous, and savoring of the soil--try a woodchuck! The feeding habits of this animal are as cleanly as those of a sheep or a cow--clover, plantain, peas, beans, cucumbers, cabbages, apples--all sweet and succulent things go to the making of his flabby body; yet he spends so much of his time in pickle in the ground that his flesh is rank with the earth flavor. He is not lean like a rabbit or a squirrel, nor so firm of muscle as a ’coon or a ’possum; he is little more than a skin filled with viscera. He is busy all summer storing up fat in his loose pouch of a body for fuel during his long winter sleep. This sleep appears to begin in late September, or after the first white frost. This year I saw my last specimen on the twenty-eighth of the month as he was running in great haste to his hole. Evidently he does not like the pinch of the cold. He is a fair-weather animal and is the epicure of the meadows and pastures. While the apples are still mellow on the ground, while the red-thorn is still dropping its fruit, and the aftermath is still fresh in the meadows, my woodchucks turn their backs upon the world and retreat to their underground chambers for their six months’ slumber. I know of no other hibernating animal that retires from the light of day so early in the season. His active life stretches from the vernal equinox to the autumnal equinox, and that is about all. Half the year he is under ground, and at least half of each summer day. No wonder his flesh is rank with the earth flavor. He appears to live only to accumulate his winter store of fat. Apparently he comes out of his den in summer only to feed, and maybe occasionally to bask in the sunshine. He is never sportive or discursive like the birds and squirrels. Life is a very serious business with him, and he has reduced it to the lowest terms--eat, breed, and sleep. If woodchucks ever engage in any sort of play, like other wild creatures, I have never seen them, though I once had a tame young ’chuck that would play with the kitten.

The woodchuck probably sleeps more than half the time in summer; he economizes his precious fat. Only once have I seen his tracks on the snow. This was in late December; and following them up, I found the woodchuck wandering about the meadow like one half demented. Something had evidently gone wrong with him. Apparently he had not succeeded in storing up his usual amount of fat. He showed little fight, and we picked him up by the tail, put him into the sleigh, and brought him home. A place under the barn floor was given to him, but he did not long survive. All the glory of the fall, the heyday of the ’coon and the squirrels, the woodchuck misses. No golden October, no Indian summer for him; he has had his day.

Though the woodchuck’s muscles are flabby, his heart is stout. The farm-dog can kill him, but he cannot make him show fear or dismay; he is game to the last. Twice I have seen him from my porch at Woodchuck Lodge put on so bold a front, and become so aggressive, when surprised in the middle of a field by a big shepherd-dog, that the dog did not dare attack him, but circled about, seeking some unfair advantage, only to be met at every point with those threatening, grating teeth. In one case the woodchuck was far from his hole, and he kept charging the dog and driving him nearer and nearer the stone wall, where his own safety lay. An observer inoculated with the idea of animal reason would have said that the tactics of the ’chuck were premeditated; but I am sure he was too much engrossed with the task of defending himself from the jaws of that dog to do any logical thinking or planning. It was only the fortunes of battle that finally brought the hunter and the hunted near the hole of safety, when, seeing his chance, the woodchuck made a sudden, successful dash, too hurried, I fancy, even to whistle his usual note of defiance. In the other case, the dog was of a still more timid nature, and when the surprised woodchuck showed fight, he concluded that he had no business at all with that particular ’chuck, which actually chased him from the meadow. I can still see the woodchuck’s bristling, expanded tail as he drove fiercely after the fleeing dog, which, with a tail anything but threatening, escaped over the wall into the road.

I find that one may be the principal actor in a little comedy, and not see the humor of it at all at the time. I know the humor of a race I had with a ’chuck last summer in my orchard was quite lost upon me till it was over, and the ’chuck was in his hole, and I was back upon my porch recovering my wind. The ’chuck was a hundred yards or more from his den when I leaped over the fence from the road and surprised him. I pressed him so closely that he took refuge in an apple-tree. Instantly seeing his mistake, as the missile I hurled struck the tree, he sprang down and rushed for his hole, a hundred and fifty feet away. But I got there first. The ’chuck paused twenty feet to one side and regarded me intently, defiantly. We stood and glared at each other a few moments, while I recovered my breath. I wanted the scalp of that “varmint.” I knew that he would make himself believe that I had planted my garden for his special benefit, and I wanted to anticipate that conclusion. I was weaponless. Twenty or more feet from me, on the opposite side from the ’chuck, I saw a stone that would answer my purpose. I calculated the chances; so did the woodchuck; I sprang for the stone and the ’chuck sprang for his hole, and was in it as my hand touched the stone. He had won! As I sat on my porch, the recklessness and absurdity of a man more than threescore and ten running down a woodchuck came over me; and I have not yielded to such a temptation since.

II

Where cattle and woodchuck thrive, there thrive I. The pastoral is in my veins. Clover and timothy, daisies and buttercups indirectly colored my youthful life; and if the dairy cow did not rock my cradle, her products sustained the hand that did rock it. Hence I love this land of wide, open, grassy fields, of smooth, broad-backed hills, and of long, sweeping mountain lines. The cow fits well into these scenes. It seems as if her broad, smooth muzzle and her potent tongue might have shaped the landscape; it is certainly her cropping that has brought about the hour-glass form of so many of the red-thorn trees, which give a unique feature to the fields. Her fragrant breath is upon the air, her hoof-prints are upon the highway; she may not yet have attained to wisdom, yet surely all her ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are paths of peace. Hence, when her ways and her paths coincide with mine, I thrive best. From Woodchuck Lodge I look out upon broad pastures, lands where dairy herds have grazed for a hundred years, never the same herd for many summers, but all of the same habits and dispositions. They all scour the pastures in the same way, scattering, searching out every nook and corner, leaving no yard of ground unvisited, apparently hunting each day for the sweet morsel they missed the day before, disposing themselves in picturesque groups upon the hills; never massed, except under the shade-trees on hot days; slow-moving, making their paths here and there, lingering under the red-thorn trees, where the fruit begins to drop in September; tossing their heads above the orchard wall, where the fragrance of ripening apples is on the air; in the autumn lying upon the cold, damp ground and ruminating contentedly, with no fear of our ills and pains before them; wading in the swamps, converging slowly toward the pasture-bars as milking-time draws nigh, with always some tardy, indifferent ones that the farm-dog has to hurry up; many colored--white, black, red, brown--at times showing rare gentleness and affection toward one another, such as licking one another’s heads or bodies, then spitefully butting or goring one another; occasionally one of them lifting up her head and sending her mellow voice over the hills like a horn, as if to give voice to a vague unrest, or invoking some far-off divinity to release the imprisoned Io--what a series of shifting rural pictures I thus have spread out before me! Such an atmosphere of peace and leisure over it all! The unhurrying and ruminating cattle make the days long; they make the fields friendly, the hills eloquent, the shade-trees idyllic. I wake up to hear the farmer summoning them from the field in the dewy summer dawns, and I listen for his call to them on the tranquil afternoons. One season an especially musical voice did the evening calling--a trained voice from beyond the hills. What a pleasure it was as we swung in our hammocks under apple-trees to hear the free, sonorous summons, and to see the response of the herd in many-colored lines converging down the slope to the bar-way!

When the meadows have gotten a new carpet of tender grass in September, and the cows are free to range in them, a new series of moving pictures greets the eye. The grazing forms have a finer setting now, and contentment and satisfaction are in every movement. How they sweep off the tender herbage, into what artistic groups they naturally fall, what pictures of peace and plenty they present! When they lie down to ruminate, Emerson’s sentence comes to mind: “And the cattle lying on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts.” As a matter of fact, I suppose no more vacant mind could be found in the universe than that of the cow when she is reposing in a field, chewing her cud. But she is the cause of tranquil if not of great thoughts in the lookers-on, and that is enough. Tranquillity attends her wherever she goes; it beams from her eyes, and lingers in her footsteps.

I sympathize with Whitman as he expressed himself in these lines:

“I think I could turn and live with the animals, they are so placid
and self-contain’d,
I stand and look at them, long and long.

“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or happy over the whole earth.”

III

If one has a bit of the farmer in him, it is a pleasure in the country to have a real farmer for a neighbor--a man whose heart is in his work, who is not longing for the town or the city, who improves his fields, who makes two spears of grass grow where none grew before, whose whole farm has an atmosphere of thrift and well-being. There are so many reluctant, half-hearted farmers in our eastern States nowadays, so many who do only what they have to do in order to survive; who leave the paternal acres to run to weeds or brush; the paternal fences to fall into ruins; the paternal orchards untrimmed and unplowed; the paternal meadows unfertilized, while the fertilizer wastes in the barn-yard; who get but one spear of grass where their fathers or grandfathers got two or three; and whose plaint always is that farming does not pay. What is the matter with our rural population? Has all the good farming blood gone West, and do only the dregs of it remain?

It is the man who makes the farm, as truly as it is the man who makes any other business; it is the man behind the plow, as truly as it is the man behind the gun, that wins the battle. A half-heart never won a whole sheaf yet. The average farmer has deteriorated. He may know more, but he does less than his father. He is like the second or third steeping of the tea. Did the original settlers and improvers of the farms, and the generations that followed them, leave all their virtue and grip in the soil? It is certainly true that in my section the last two generations have lived off the capital of labor and brains which their ancestors put into the land; only here and there has a man added anything, only here and there is a farmer who does not wish he had some other business. If such men had that other business, they would reap the same poor results. In the long run, you cannot reap where you have not sown, and the only seed you can sow, in any business that yields tenfold, is yourself--your own wit, your own industry. Unless you plant your heart with your corn, it will mostly go to suckers; unless you strike your own roots into the subsoil of your lands, it will not bear fruit in your character, or in your bank-account--all of which is simply saying that thin, leachy land will not bear good crops, and unless a man has the real farming stuff in him, his farm quickly shows it.

My neighbor makes smooth the way of the plow and of the mower. Last summer I saw him take enough stones and rocks from a three-acre field to build quite a fortress; and land whose slumbers had never been disturbed by the plow was soon knee-high with Hungarian grass. How one likes to see a permanent betterment of the land like that!--piles of renegade stone and rock. It is such things that make the country richer. If all New England and New York had had such drastic treatment years ago, the blight of discouraged farming never would have fallen upon them, and the prairie States would not have so far distanced the granite States. A granite soil should grow a better crop of men than the silt of lake or river bottom, though it yields less corn to the acre.

The prairie makes a strong appeal to a man’s indolence and cupidity; it is a place where he can sit at ease and let his team do most of his work. But I much doubt whether the western farms ever will lay the strong hands upon their possessors that our more varied and picturesque eastern farms lay. Every field in these farms has a character of its own, and the farms differ from one another as much as the people do. An eastern farm is the place for a home; the western farm is the place to grow wheat, pork, and beef. Oh, the flat, featureless, monotonous, cornstalk-littered middle West! how can the rural virtues of contentment and domesticity thrive there? There is no spot to make your nest except right out on the rim of the world; no spot for a walk or a picnic except in the featureless open of a thousand miles of black prairie--the roads black, straight lines of mud or dust through the landscape; the streams slow, indolent channels of muddy water; the woods, where there are woods, a dull assemblage of straight-trunked trees; the sky a brazen dome that shuts down upon you; there are no hills or mountains to lift it up. The prairie draws no strong distinct lines against the sky; the horizon is vague and baffling. Ah, my mountains are very old measured by the geologic calendar! Yet how foreign to our experience or ways of thinking it seems to speak of mountains as either old or young, as if birth and death apply to them also. But such is the fact: mountains have their day, which day is the geologist’s day of millions of years. My mountains were being carved out of a great plateau by the elements while the prairies were still under the sea, and while most of the Rocky Mountains and the Alps, and the Himalayas were gestating in the vast earth-womb. In point of age, these mountains beside the Catskills are like infants beside their great-grandfathers. Yet it is a singular contradiction that in their outlines old mountains look young, and young mountains look old. The only youthful feature about young mountains is that they carry their heads very high, and the only old feature about old mountains is that they have a look of repose and calmness and peace. All the gauntness, leanness, angularity, and crumbling decrepitude are with the young mountains; all the smoothness, plumpness, graceful flowing lines of youth are with the old mountains. Not till the rocks are clothed with soil made out of their own decay are outlines softened and life made possible. Youthful mountains like the Alps are battle-marked by the elements, and their proud heads are continually being laid low by frost, wind, and snow; they are scarred and broken by avalanches the season through. Old mountains, such as the Appalachian range, wear an armor of soil and verdure over their rounded forms on which the arrows of time have little effect. The turbulent and noisy and stiff-necked period of youth is far behind them.

Hundreds of dairy-farms nestle in the laps of the Catskills; and their huge, grassy aprons, only a little wrinkled here and there, hold as many grazing herds. Woodchuck Lodge is well upon the knee of one of the ranges, and the fields we look upon are like green drapery lying in graceful curves and broad, smooth masses over huge extended limbs. Patches of maple forest here and there bend over a rounded arm or shoulder, like a fur cape upon a woman. Here and there also huge, weather-worn boulders rest upon the ground, dropped there by the moving ice-sheet tens upon tens of thousands of years ago; and here and there are streaks of land completely covered with smaller rocks wedged and driven into the ground. It used to be told me in my youth that the devil’s apron-string broke as he was carrying a load of these rocks overhead, and let the mass down upon the ground. The farmers seldom attempt to clear away these leavings of the devil.

IV

My interest in the birds is not as keen as it once was, but they are still an asset in my life. I must live where I can hear the crows caw, the robins sing, and the song-sparrow trill. If I can hear also the partridge drum, and the owl hoot, and the chipmunk cluck in the still days of autumn, so much the better. The crow is such a true countryman, so much at home everywhere, so thoroughly in possession of the land, going his way winter and summer in such noisy contentment and pride of possession, that I cannot leave him out. The bird I missed most in California was the crow. I missed his glistening coat in the fields, his ebony form and hearty call in the sky.

One advantage of sleeping out of doors, as we do at Woodchuck Lodge, is that you hear the day ushered in by the birds. Toward autumn you hear the crows first, making proclamation in all directions that it is time to be up and doing, and that life is a good thing. There is not a bit of doubt or discouragement in their tones. They have enjoyed the night, and they have a stout heart for the day. They proclaim it as they fly over my porch at five o’clock in the morning; they call it from the orchard, they bandy the message back and forth in the neighboring fields; the air is streaked with cheery greetings and raucous salutations. Toward the end of August, or in early September, I witness with pleasure their huge mass-meetings or annual congress on the pasture-hills or in the borders of the woods. Before that time, you see them singly or in loose bands; but on some day in late summer, or in early autumn, you see the clans assemble as if for some rare festival and grand tribal discussion. A multitudinous cawing attracts your attention when you look hillward and see a swarm of dusky forms circling in the air, their voices mingling in one dissonant wave of sound, while loose bands of other dusky forms come from all points of the compass to join them. Presently many hundred crows are assembled, alternately lighted upon the ground and silently walking about as if feeding, or circling in the air, cawing as if they would be heard in the next township. What they are doing or saying or settling, what it all means, whether they meet by appointment in the human fashion, whether it is a jubilee, a parliament, or a convention, I confess I should like to know. But second thought tells me it is more likely the gregarious instinct asserting itself after the scatterings and separations of the summer. The time of the rookery is not far off, when the inclement season will find all the crows from a large section of the country massed at night in lonely tree-tops in some secluded wood.

These early noisy assemblages may be preliminary to the winter union of the tribe. What an engrossing affair it seems to be with the crows, how oblivious they appear to all else in the world! The world was made for crows, and what concerns them is alone important. The meeting adjourns, from time to time, from the fields to the woods, then back again, the babel of voices waxing or waning according as they are on the wing or at rest. Sometimes they meet several days in succession and then disperse, going away in different directions and irregularly, singly or in pairs and bands, as men do on similar occasions. No doubt in these great reunions the crows experience some sort of feeling or emotion, though one would doubtless err in ascribing to them anything like human procedure. It is not a definite purpose, but a tribal instinct, that finds expression in their jubilees.

The crow seems to have a great deal of business besides getting a living. How social, how communicative he is--what picnics he has in the fields and woods, how absolutely at home is he at all times and places! I see them from my window flying by, by twos or threes or more, on happy, holiday wings, sliding down the air, or diving and chasing one another, or walking about the fields, their coats glistening in the sun, the movement of their heads timing the movements of their feet--what an air of independence and respectability and well-being attends them always! The pedestrian crow! no more graceful walker ever trod the turf. How different his bearing from that of a game-bird, and from any of the falcon tribe. He never tries to hide like the former, and he is never morose and sulky like the latter. He is gay and social and in possession of the land; the world is his and he knows it, and life is good.

I suppose that if his flesh were edible, like that of the gallinaceous birds, he would have many more enemies and his whole demeanor would be different. His complacent, self-satisfied air would vanish. He would not advertise his comings and goings so loudly. He would be less conspicuous in the landscape; his huge mass-meetings in September would be more silent and withdrawn. Well, then, he would not be the crow--the happy, devil-may-care creature as we now know him.

His little gaily dressed brother, the jay, does not tempt the sportsman any more than the crow does, but he tempts other creatures--the owl and squirrels, and maybe the hawks. Hence his tribe is much less. His range is also more restricted, and his feeding habits are much less miscellaneous. Only the woods and groves are his; the fields and rivers he knows not.

The crow is a noisy bird. All his tribe are noisy, but the noise probably has little psychic significance. The raven in Alaska appears to soliloquize most of the time. This talkativeness of the crow tribe is probably only a phase of crow life, and signifies no more and no less than other phases--their color, their cunning, the flick of their wings, and the like. The barn-yard fowls are loquacious also, but probably their loquacity is not attended with much psychic activity.

In the mornings of early summer the out-of-door sleeper is more likely to be awakened by the song-birds. In June and early July they strike up about half-past three. “When it is light enough to see that all is well around you, it is light enough to sing,” they carol. “Before the early worm is stirring, we will celebrate the coming of day.” During the summer the song-sparrows have been the first to nudge me in the morning with their songs. One little sparrow especially would perch on the telephone-wire above the roadside and go through his repertoire of five songs with great regularity and joyousness. He will long be associated in my mind with those early, fragrant, summer dawns. One of his five songs fell so easily into words that I had only to call the attention of my friends to it to have them hear the words that I heard: “If, if, if you please, Mr. Durkee,”--the last word a little prolonged, and with a rising inflection. Another was not quite so well expressed by these words: “Please, please, speak to me, sweetheart.” The third one suggested this sentence: “Then, then, Fitzhugh says, yes, sir!” The fourth one was something like this: “If, if, if you seize her, do it quick.” The fifth one baffled me to suggest by words. But in August his musical enthusiasm began to decline. His different songs lost their distinctiveness and emphasis. It was as if they had faded and become blurred with the progress of the season.

The little birds are insignificant and unobtrusive on the great background of nature, yet if one learns to distinguish them and to love them, their songs may become a sort of accompaniment to one’s daily life. In May, while I was much occupied in repairing and making habitable an old farm-house, a solitary, mourning, ground-warbler, which one rarely sees or hears, came and tarried about the place for a week or ten days, singing most of each forenoon in the orchard and garden about the house, and giving to my occupation a touch of something rare and sylvan. He lent to the apple-trees, which I had known as a boy, an interest that the boy knew not. Then he went away, whether on the arrival of his mate or not I do not know.

JOHN BURROUGHS
]

A butternut-tree stands across the road in front of Woodchuck Lodge. One season the red squirrels stored the butternuts in the wall of one of the upper rooms of the unoccupied house, to which they gained access through a hole in the siding. When we moved in, in the summer, the squirrels soon became uneasy, and one day one of them began removing the butternuts, not to some other granary or place of safety, but to the grass and dry leaves on the ground in the orchard. He was unwittingly planting them by the act of hiding them. The automatic character of much animal behavior, the extent to which their lives flow in fixed channels, was well seen in the behavior of this squirrel. His procedure in transferring the nuts from his den in the house to the ground in the orchard, a distance of probably one hundred feet, was as definite and regular as that of a piece of machinery. He would rush up and over the roof of the house with a nut in his mouth, by those sharp, spasmodic sallies so characteristic of the movements of the red squirrel, down the corner of the house to the ground by the same jerky movements, across some rubbish and open ground in the same manner, alert and cautious, up the corner of a small building ten feet high and eight long, over its roof, with arched tail and spread feet, snickering and jerking, down to the ground on the other side, dashing to the trunk of an apple-tree ten feet away, up it a few feet to make an observation, then down to the ground again, and out into the grass, where he would carefully hide his nut, and cover it with leaves. Then back to the house again by precisely the same route and with precisely the same movements, and bring another nut. Day after day I saw him thus engaged till apparently all the nuts were removed. He probably did not know he was planting butternut-trees for other red squirrels, but that was what he was blindly doing. The crows and jays carry away and plant acorns and chestnuts in the same blind way, thereby often causing a pine forest to be succeeded by these trees.

The red squirrel is only an irregular storer of nuts in the autumn. In this respect he stands half-way between the chipmunk and the gray squirrel, one of which regularly lays up winter stores and the other none at all.

How diverse are the ways of nature in reaching the same end! Both the chipmunk and the woodchuck lay up stores against the needs of winter, the latter in the shape of fat upon his own ribs, and the former in the shape of seeds and nuts in his den in the ground; and I fancy that one of them is no more conscious of what he is doing than the other. Animals do not take conscious thought of the future; it is as if something in their organization took thought for them. One November, seized with the cruel desire to go to the bottom of the question of the chipmunk’s winter stores, I dug out one after he had got his house settled for the season. I found his den three feet below the surface of the ground--just beyond the frostline--and containing nearly four quarts of various seeds, most of them the little black grains of wild buckwheat--two hundred and fifty thousand of them, I estimated--all cleaned of their husks as neatly as if done by some patent machine.

How many perilous journeys along stone walls and through weedy tangles this store of seeds represented! One would say at least a thousand trips, beset by many dangers from hawks and cats and weasels and other enemies of the little rodent.

The chipmunk is provident; he is a wise housekeeper, but one can hardly envy him those three or four months of inaction in the pitchy darkness of his subterranean den. His mate is not with him, and evidently the oblivion of the hibernating sleep, like that of the woodchuck and of certain mice, is not his. The life of the red and gray squirrels, who are more or less active all winter, seems preferable. They lay up no stores and are no doubt often cold and hungry, but the light of day and the freedom of the snow and of the tree-tops are theirs. Abundant stores are a good thing for both man and beast, but action, adventure, struggle are better.

THE FOREIGN TRADE OF THE UNITED STATES

(“THE TRADE OF THE WORLD” PAPERS)

BY JAMES DAVENPORT WHELPLEY

Author of “The Commercial Strength of Great Britain,” “Germany’s Foreign Trade,” etc.

Queen Elizabeth was the founder of the school of “dollar diplomacy,” and to this day her memory is revered by the merchant gilds of London. This great queen paid much attention to the welfare of industry at home, and sent trade adventurers abroad to open avenues of foreign commerce; and in the degree with which the rulers and governments of all lands have observed the necessities and development of the material interests of their respective countries have nations flourished or marked time.

Through a peculiar misuse of the term, the foreign policy of the United States has been termed “dollar diplomacy,” whereas, partly because of national tradition and partly through lack of skill and experience, the diplomacy of America has less relation to the extension of foreign commerce than that of any other great modern nation. American diplomacy has been governed more by altruistic ideas, the protection of foreign peoples against themselves and others, the elimination of money tributes and indemnities, the recognition of new governments without conditions, and arbitration of international troubles as a neutral nation. In these and in many other ways America has played her part in various international controversies; but in the general scramble for selfish advantage in all these affairs she has taken little or no successful part. Yet American diplomacy has been called that of the “dollar,” and has been credited in the minds of many of her own citizens, as well as by foreigners, with a mercenary basis.

The people of a nation have it within their power to advance the interests of their foreign commerce in two ways: one by intelligent legislation at home, and the other by intelligent diplomacy abroad. The shipment of merchandise from one country to another means to the selling nation a foreign market for the raw material, the employment of labor to the extent of from thirty to ninety per cent. of the selling value of the goods, and the payment for this material and labor by foreigners in money or its equivalent. It is a clear gain in every phase of the transaction. There is an old frontier adage, which originated in the early days of the Western boom, to the effect that “outside money makes the camp.” It is a homely expression that summarizes the advantages of an export of two billion dollars’ worth of goods with a comprehensiveness equal to its original application. It is not too much to say that anything in the shape of legislation or of increased facilities which assists the outward flow of the products of labor is of unquestioned advantage to the producing nation. An unnatural, though perhaps comprehensible, attitude of suspicion toward successful export has come about in the United States. This has led to hostility toward special rail and water-rates for export, lower prices for bulk foreign business, niggardliness of national expenditures for diplomatic representation and for the work of the Department of Commerce and its foreign-trade bureau. It might almost be said that the great and growing figures of foreign trade, issued triumphantly every year by the government statisticians, have been achieved despite the obstructions placed in the path of their progress.

The growth of those figures in their largest aspect is due to organized private effort, the methods and operations of which are a sealed book to the government official or the general public, and which unfortunately have shared in the recent and sweeping condemnation of the business methods of all big corporations. There has been no sifting of the wheat from the chaff, the good from the evil, with most deplorable results, for which both public and corporations are to blame. The natural result has been that in attempting to regulate the home activities of “big business” their foreign activities have been hindered and even checked. Lost ground in foreign directions is more difficult to regain than at home, for certain artificial and natural barriers always exist, which favor home markets, while foreign trade meets well-equipped rivals at least on equal terms, and often with a handicap.

In the year 1913 the people of the United States are entering upon a radical change in the national attitude toward domestic and foreign commerce. There is a partial reversal of policy toward home industry; there is also an important experiment afoot in diplomacy. It is too early to say just how radical these changes will be in the final reckoning, or what may be the outcome. It is quite possible that increased freedom of trade may bring good results at home; and if Congress recognizes the need of a commercial diplomacy auxiliary to that of the litterateur, the reformer, the peace-advocate, the missionary, and the general uplifter of mankind, and the administration provides competent, permanent, and resident commercial diplomats or attachés to all important American missions, a threatened disadvantage may be turned into a victory. At present, however, American foreign trade is the foot-ball of national politics.

Private enterprise, with its able American representatives abroad, is the only real guard against serious damage possessed by this great asset of the nation. The advance of American foreign commerce may be likened to a more or less friendly conflict with an allied army of foreign competitors. This is specially true of American trade, for it is generally a new-comer, and is regarded with dislike and antagonism to such an extent as to induce combinations of rivals to resist its advance.

The strongest efforts of American diplomacy should be directed to Russia and China to bring about a commercial entente between the United States and these two countries. The future of China as a market for foreign enterprise and merchandise will develop slowly, it is true, but the results will in time prove stupendous. In view of this, firm foundations should be laid for the structure of international trade, which will inevitably develop in the course of years. In the case of Russia there is no time to be lost. Here is a great area of wonderfully productive territory inhabited by scores of millions of people. Education is spreading among these people, and their wants are multiplying. Such foreign trade as has found a lodgment there is of the kind America wants, and will need more and more as her productiveness increases and the oversupply of home markets becomes more noticeable. England, Germany, France, the Low Countries, and those of Scandinavia are losing no time. Political, financial, commercial, and industrial bonds are being forged with all possible rapidity to this awakening nation of industrious people. American interests in Russia are already large, but their existence is due to private and not national initiative. As a nation we have not only done much to discourage the betterment of intercourse with Russia, but have even actually threatened the existence of American interests therein by inviting antagonism instead of friendly coöperation. It is not too late to remedy this unfortunate attitude, but the situation needs prompt, wise, and fearless handling by those responsible for the foreign policy of the United States.

American foreign commerce rests on a basis of international friendship. Once established, the needs of the respective countries determine the extent of international trading, modified as it must be, however, by conditions of transportation and such fiscal restrictions as may be imposed. Leaving the matter of price and quality to be dealt with by the industrial exporter, as must be the case, the influence of the Government remains as the most important outside factor in determining the prosperity of this trade. Under the control of the Government come the treaty-making power, with its bid for favorable reception of American products; the official attitude toward facilities for the manufacturing of exports and toward transportation; and assistance in gathering information for exporters. The important, but more technical, details of foreign commerce can safely be left to private enterprise in its effort toward profitable trading. There is no doubt as to the good intention of government officials and of those who vote the money for their work: it is, of course, that American consumers shall benefit.

There are two points of view, however, well illustrated in the attitude of the British and the United States Government, respectively, as to the direction in which governmental efforts may be extended in the furtherance of foreign trade. The British Government pays great attention to the diplomatic end of the business, and lets private enterprise follow up any advantage gained. The United States Government spends vastly more money and effort upon the details of trade, but in many cases unfortunately attempts to build upon a shifting and insecure foundation, in that the relations of the two countries may be weak diplomatically, or there may be lack of knowledge or understanding as to the general conditions to be met. For some American consul to inform American manufacturers through the State Department of great openings for the sale of goods does not mean necessarily that these goods can be sold; for in some cases American competition would find itself hopelessly handicapped by the superior trade diplomacy and knowledge of its adversary, thus nullifying any possible superiority in goods or prices.

From a practical point of view, to analyze American foreign trade in detail would be an endless and useless task. It has grown to be what it is through exports of food-stuffs and raw materials, followed naturally by the surplus products of manufacturing. Of imports the same may be said, reversing the order of the progression. The land furnished the material, and labor came at its call from all parts of the world. The logical result of plenty of material, a constantly increasing supply of labor, combined with national ingenuity and a climate conducive to the development of nervous energy, is the production of more or less finished merchandise in such quantities as to keep half the ships of the world in daily use carrying it to and fro. Whether governmental intervention has helped or hindered has been the subject of controversy since this commerce began, and will continue until commerce ends; but out of it all must come a certain amount of wisdom, gained through experience, which should be of practical benefit to those on whom rests the responsibility of official coöperation with private adventure in foreign lands.

The three great foreign trading nations of the world are England, Germany, and the United States, in the order named. In 1912 the foreign commerce of England amounted to a little less than $6,000,000,000, that of Germany to more than $4,600,000,000, and that of the United States to nearly $4,200,000,000. The total foreign trade of these three countries is proportioned approximately between imports and exports as follows:

England Germany United
States

Imports 60 per cent. 54 per cent. 43 per cent.
Exports 40 “ “ 46 “ “ 57 “ “

These figures mean that the United States is still a debtor nation. If the imports of gold brought the imports level with the exports in value, which they do not, but far from it, the figures would indicate that the American people were getting cash for their goods instead of merchandise, as would be the case if merchandise exports and imports were equal. The most considerable factors that annually balance this trade are the payments of interest and principal on American securities held abroad, remittances by American immigrants to foreign lands, money spent abroad by American tourists, and payments made to foreign-owned vessels for freight-charges on goods carried to and from America. There are several other factors in this balance, but the four named are the most considerable. In the case of England and Germany, as well as many other prosperous countries whose foreign-trade sheets show an excess of imports over exports, this excess represents the profit on trading abroad, and the inflow of returns upon capital invested abroad. In other words, these nations are creditor, or money-lending, communities. The imports of all money-lending countries, like France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, and others, considerably exceed the exports, while the exports of all borrowing, developing, or unequally developed countries, like Russia, the United States, Argentina, Rumania, and many others, exceed the imports, as the foreign investor must be paid his interest, and the only source of money for such payment is eventually either the product of the soil or of industry.

One hundred years ago, when the population of the United States was about seven millions, the American people imported annually considerably less than $100,000,000 worth of merchandise, less than ten per cent. of which came in free of duty. In 1912, when the population was more than ninety millions, the importations amounted to nearly $1,700,000,000, of which about fifty-four per cent. entered duty free. The average ad valorem rate of import duty on dutiable goods one hundred years ago was about forty per cent., and on the total imports, dutiable and free, it was about thirty-five per cent. In 1912 the average ad valorem on dutiable goods was about the same as one hundred years before, and on the total imports, both dutiable and free, it was about nineteen per cent. The progress of American foreign trade in one hundred years is recorded as follows:

_Year_ _Imports_ _Exports_ _Total Foreign
Trade_

1810 $85,000,000 $67,000,000 $152,000,000
1830 63,000,000 72,000,000 135,000,000
1850 174,000,000 144,000,000 318,000,000
1870 436,000,000 393,000,000 829,000,000
1890 790,000,000 858,000,000 1,648,000,000
1912 1,818,000,000 2,363,000,000 4,181,000,000

In one hundred years the population has increased more than thirteen times, and the foreign trade more than twenty-five times. In 1810 the per capita foreign trade of America was about $21, and in 1912 it was nearly $40. These latter figures are really much more significant than appears at first glance, for the population of America, as estimated in 1810, was composed of a larger proportion of effective producing units than in 1912. Few but white people were counted, the percentage of women and children was smaller, and virtually every white American was self-supporting. The estimate of to-day includes, therefore, a much larger percentage of human beings who, though counted as units in population, are not so potential in the material activities of the nation. The $40 per capita of 1912 is much more significant of the growth of American foreign interests, therefore, than merely the increase from the $21 of 1810 appears.

Speaking generally, the foreign trade of the United States has doubled every twenty years since 1830, regardless of wars, changes of government, administrative policies, the rise or decline of shipping interests, the increasing power of foreign competition, or the opening and development of competitive territory in other parts of the world. The development of industry in a country is usually written on the character of the imports and exports, and the changes that take place in the proportions of raw material and manufactured goods are most significant. In the case of the United States, these are strikingly shown in the more or less shifting percentages of a long period in the growth of the nation--a period fully covering the time the United States has figured to any marked degree in the economic affairs of the world. In the last eighty-two years American foreign trade has been roughly classified by percentages as follows:

_IMPORTS_

_1830_ _1870_ _1912_
Crude food-stuffs and
food animals 11.77 12.41 13.93
Food-stuffs partly or
wholly manufactured 15.39 22.03 11.86
Crude manufactured
material 6.72 12.76 33.63
Manufactures for use
in manufacture 8.22 12.75 17.77
Manufactures ready for
consumption 56.97 39.82 21.78
Miscellaneous .93 .23 1.03
------ ------ ------
100.00 100.00 100.00

The most noticeable features of the statement given above are that the importation of crude food-stuffs and food animals remain about the same in their relation to total imports, that the importation of partly manufactured food-stuffs has decreased, that the importation of materials for use in manufacture has enormously increased, and that the importation of manufactured goods ready for consumption has decreased by nearly two thirds. All of these figures, both of imports and exports, are based on values and not on quantities. The latter would be the most accurate measure of progress, as prices have changed materially--either fallen or increased, mostly the latter--on many important staples; but it would be virtually impossible to consider these matters from a point of view other than that of values, where everything is grouped under an inclusive total, and in all probability the change that might follow a quantitative analysis, rather than one based on values, would not materially alter any conclusions that might be drawn. The changes in American exports during the same period were by percentages as follows:

_EXPORTS_

_1830_ _1870_ _1912_
Crude food-stuffs and
food animals 4.65 11.12 4.60
Food-stuffs partly or
wholly manufactured 16.32 13.53 14.69
Crude manufactured
material 62.34 56.64 33.31
Manufactures for use
in manufacture 7.04 3.66 16.04
Manufactures ready
for consumption 9.34 14.96 30.98
Miscellaneous .31 .09 .38
------ ------ ------
100.00 100.00 100.00

The noticeable features of the record of American exports for the last eighty-two years are that the export of food-stuffs has decreased rather than increased in proportion to business in other commodities; that the export of crude manufactured material has greatly decreased, and in fact, with the exception of cotton, has become a negligible quantity; and that the export of manufactured goods ready for consumption has increased enormously. Exports of cotton are now the basis of American export of raw material. Whereas the total production of cotton in the United States in 1830 was only about 1,000,000 bales, in 1912 the United States furnished nearly 11,000,000 bales for export, valued at $625,000,000, amounting to fully five sixths of the value of all raw material for manufacturing purposes exported by the United States in that year.

The export of raw cotton in the case of the United States does not mean any appreciable backwardness of home manufacture. The importations of manufactured cotton goods are decreasing annually, so far as cloths are concerned. In 1912 less than $8,000,000 in cotton cloth was imported from abroad. The heaviest importation of cotton goods was in laces and such other things as are specialties of foreign manufacture, in many cases hereditary trades, or trades dependent upon cheap, trained female labor, such as is not available in America. America uses nearly 6,000,000 bales of home-grown cotton every year in her own factories, and supplies not only the home market with manufactured goods, but manufactures more than $30,000,000 worth for foreign sale, in competition with the great spinning and manufacturing countries of Europe. The growing of cotton is not a raw-material industry in the strict sense of the word, for, owing to peculiarities of climate, certain features of the American labor supply, and the great amount of money this staple crop brings from abroad and distributes in non-manufacturing districts, it possesses a peculiar and great economic value to the country. Coal, tobacco, petroleum, and timber are the more important of the crude materials exported from the United States in addition to cotton; but the total value of all these is, as stated, about one sixth of the whole.

The total value of the exports of domestic merchandise from the United States in 1912 was about $2,363,000,000. As stated, cotton stands at the head of the list. The iron and steel industry comes next; the farmers of the United States furnish the third largest amount of merchandise for export; and machinery of all kinds, oils, paper, fruit, and chemicals, are the leaders in American export. The most interesting changes that have taken place in American foreign trade in the last few years are those that indicate certain possibilities of the future; in fact, they are in a way prophetic of what is to happen in the economic life of the nation. In 1902 93,000 head of cattle were imported, and in 1912 the importations numbered 325,000. In 1902 about 327,000 head of cattle were exported, and in 1912 only about 46,000. This means that the American people have nearly reached the point where the home market absorbs all cattle grown in the country, and that in future other peoples, who in the past have been dependent upon the United States for their beef supply, must look elsewhere. The exportation of bread-stuffs has decreased materially, while importation has quadrupled, thus telling a story of shortage in food-supply, as did the change in the cattle movement. This same shortage is shown in like changes in the trade in meat products, dairy products, eggs, and nearly every other variety of staple food.