ests to maintain this elder-brother-with-thestick policy, which typifies the new Monroe Doctrine.

International trade is largely a matter of sentiment, and the Monroe Doctrine does not sell any American-made goods.

Furthermore, Germany is getting around the Monroe Doctrine, and is actually making a peaceful conquest of South America which will injure us just as much as if we had allowed her to make a military conquest of the Southern republics. She is winning South American friendship, and has planted colonies, one of which, in southern Brazil, has three hundred and fifty thousand people in it, as large a population as that of Vermont, and nearly as large as that of Montana. She is taking pains to educate her young business men in the Spanish language, and to send them out equipped to capture Spanish American trade. We have a saying that "Trade follows the flag." Germany has magnificent steamers, flying the German flag, giving fortnightly service to every important port in South America, -ports where the American flag is practi

cally never seen. She has her banks and business houses which have branches in the interior cities. By their means she is able to keep track of American commerce, to know what we are doing, and at what rates. Laughing in her sleeve at the Monroe Doctrine as an antiquated policy, which only makes it easier for her to do a safe business, Germany is engaged in the peaceful conquest of Spanish America.

To be sure, we are not standing still, and we are fighting for the same trade that she is, but our soldiers are handicapped by the presence of the very Doctrine that was intended to strengthen our position in the New World. Is this worth while?

No one has appreciated the possibilities and the advantages of sincere hearty friendship with South America more than Mr. Root. After his return from South America he made a notable speech before the TransMississippi Commercial Congress at Kansas City, on November 20, 1906, in the course of which he said:

"This is only the beginning; the coffee and rubber of Brazil, the wheat and beef

and hides of Argentina and Uruguay, the silver and the nitrates of Chile, the copper and tin of Bolivia, the silver and gold and cotton and sugar of Peru, are but samples of what the soil and mines of that wonderful continent are capable of yielding. Ninety-seven per cent of the territory of South America is occupied by ten independent republics living under constitutions substantially copied or adapted from our own. Under the new conditions of tranquillity and security which prevail in most of them, their eager invitation to immigrants from the Old World will not long pass unheeded. The pressure of population abroad will inevitably turn its streams of life and labor toward those fertile fields and valleys. The streams have already begun to flow; more than two hundred thousand immigrants entered the Argentine Republic last year; they are coming this year at the rate of over three hundred thousand. Many thousands of Germans have already settled in southern Brazil. They are most welcome in Brazil; they are good and useful citizens there, as they are here; I hope that many more

will come to Brazil and every other South American country, and add their vigorous industry and good citizenship to the upbuilding of their adopted home.

"With the increase of population in such a field, under free institutions, with the fruits of labor and the rewards of enterprise secure, the production of wealth and the increase of purchasing power will afford a market for the commerce of the world worthy to rank even with the markets of the Orient as the goal of business enterprise. The material resources of South America are in some important respects complementary to our own; that continent is weakest where North America is strongest as a field for manufactures: it has comparatively little coal and iron. In many respects the people of the two continents are complementary to each other; the South American is polite, refined, cultivated, fond of literature and of expression and of the graces and charms of life, while the North American is strenuous, intense, utilitarian. Where we have less of the cheerful philosophy which finds sources of happiness in the existing conditions of life, they

have less of the inventive faculty which strives continually to increase the productive power of man and lower the cost of manufacture. The chief merits of the peoples of the two continents are different; their chief defects are different. Mutual intercourse and knowledge cannot fail greatly to benefit both. Each can learn from the other; each can teach much to the other, and each can contribute greatly to the development and prosperity of the other. A large part of their products find no domestic competition here; a large part of our products will find no domestic competition there. The typical conditions exist for that kind of trade which is profitable, honorable, and beneficial to both parties."

This being so, why spoil the game by an irritating and antiquated foreign policy which makes it easier for our competitors and harder for our own merchants?

IX

At all events, let us face clearly and frankly the fact that the maintenance of the Monroe Doctrine is going to cost the United States