to grasp it with intelligent persistence and determination. South America is ready to take American goods in very large quantities as soon as we are ready to take time to give attention to her needs. As Mr. Lincoln Hutchinson aptly says:
There is no quick and easy remedy; money must be spent, thoroughly equipped export managers must be employed, export houses specializing on South American trade must be established, efficient travelers must be sent out, technical experts employed, agencies established, credits be given, minutiae of orders attended to, and, above all, trade connections adhered to in spite of allurements of the home market, if we would succeed in the face of our competitors. Halfway measures can accomplish but little, and that only temporary.
Germany teaches her young business men Spanish or Portuguese and sends them out to learn conditions in the field. American universities long ago learned the advantage of adopting Germany's thoroughgoing methods of scientific research. American business men have hitherto failed to realize the importance of adopting Germany's thorough-going methods of developing foreign commerce. It is high time that they took a leaf out of the experience of the "unpractical" universities.
Finally, a word of caution to those in search of information regarding the history, politics or geography of South America. The most unfortunate result of the seven centuries during which Arab, Moorish or Mohammedan rule dominated a part or the whole of the Spanish peninsula, is the truly Oriental attitude which the Spaniard and the Spanish American maintains towards reliable information, or what we tall "facts." The student of the East realizes that orientals, including Turks and celestials, have no sense of the importance of agreeing with fact. They have, furthermore, a great abhorence of a vacuum. If they do not know the reply to a question they answer at random, preferring anything to the admission of ignorance. If they do know, and have no interest in substituting something else for what they know, they give the facts. When they have no facts they give something else. They not only deceive the questioner, they actually deceive themselves. The same thing is true to a certain degree in South Americans. Sometimes I have thought they were actually too polite to say "I don't know."
In South America as in the East it is of primary importance to reach the men who know and to pay no attention to any one else. No one really knows, who is not actually on the spot, in contact with the facts. The prudent observer must avoid all evidence that is not first hand and derived from a trustworthy source.
I do not bring this as a charge against the South Americans. I state it as a condition which I have found to be nearly universally true. So far as the South Americans are concerned it is an inherited trait and one which they are endeavoring to overcome. They are not to be blamed for having it, any more than we are to be blamed for having inherited traits from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors which are unpleasant to
