What an achievement it would be if the Young Giant of the West, who by strictly attending to his own business has developed into one of the greatest and richest nations of the world, could make others see the advantages and wisdom of following his example. We recognize the difficulty which confronts everyone who tries to prevail upon another to benefit by his experience, but perhaps nations, which are guided by disinterested patriots who have only the good of the people at heart and none of the selfish motives or petty vanities of an individual, may be willing, not only to study the history of a successful nation, but also to profit by its experiences, and thus save the expense and spare the waste caused by experimenting. As a diplomat I am “directed by my Government especially to refrain from public expressions of opinion upon local political or other questions arising within my jurisdiction.” These are the exact words contained in my Instruction Book, and I am obliged to follow them conscientiously. But that does not prevent me, however, from telling you what we have done at home to establish and increase our commerce and what we are doing to improve it and the conditions of our people; and it is for this country, the Balkan States, and Persia to determine how much of it can be adopted by them. It is just fifty years ago that our country finished one of the bloodiest and most expensive internecine wars recorded in history, and you all know that the worst strifes are those that are waged between brothers. All the southern states had been completely devastated; a large part of their white male population was killed during the war; millions of slaves had been set free and were unprepared to take care of themselves and would not work; both the North and the South were in a complete state of physical and financial exhaustion. The cost of the war exceeded 1,500 million dollars; our Government bonds were selling below par and were mostly owned in foreign countries; we had just been deprived of the wise leadership of the great Abraham Lincoln who had been foully murdered. We had fought for a principle and had won, but the hatred of the sections for each other survived and the great problem was to reconcile the combatants to the new conditions and again to absorb into our commercial and business activities the hundreds of thousands of members of the disbanded army and to have our communities resume their normal condition and bring about a reconstruction of the southern states. We were confronted by a tremendous problem, and it took wise statesmanship, great grit, patient toil, and unswerving enthusiasm born from an absolute and abiding faith in the future to solve it. We had only 35,000 miles