Necessity for greater governmental effort in retention and expansion of our foreign trade

It is not possible to make to the Congress a communication upon the present foreign relations of the United States so detailed as to convey an adequate impression of the enormous increase in the importance and activities of those relations.  If this Government is really to preserve to the American people that free opportunity in foreign markets which will soon be indispensable to our prosperity, even greater efforts must be made.  Otherwise the American merchant, manufacturer, and exporter will find many a field in which American trade should logically predominate preempted through the more energetic efforts of other governments and other commercial nations.

There are many ways in which through hearty cooperation the legislative and executive branches of this Government can do much.  The absolute essential is the spirit of united effort and singleness of purpose.  I will allude only to a very few specific examples of action which ought then to result.  America can not take its proper place in the most important fields for its commercial activity and enterprise unless we have a merchant marine.  American commerce and enterprise can not be effectively fostered in those fields unless we have good American banks in the countries referred to.  We need American newspapers in those countries and proper means for public information about them.  We need to assure the permanency of a trained foreign service.  We need legislation enabling the members of the foreign service to be systematically brought in direct contact with the industrial, manufacturing, and exporting interests of this country in order that American business men may enter the foreign field with a clear perception of the exact conditions to be dealt with and the officers themselves may prosecute their work with a clear idea of what American industrial and manufacturing interests require.

CONCLUSION

Congress should fully realize the conditions which obtain in the world as we find ourselves at the threshold of our middle age as a Nation.  We have emerged full grown as a peer in the great concourse of nations.  We have passed through various formative periods.  We have been self-centered in the struggle to develop our domestic resources and deal with our domestic questions.  The Nation is now too matured to continue in its foreign relations those temporary expedients natural to a people to whom domestic affairs are the sole concern.  In the past our diplomacy has often consisted, in normal times, in a mere assertion of the right to international existence.  We are now in a larger relation with broader rights of our own and obligations to others than ourselves.  A number of great guiding principles were laid down early in the history of this Government.  The