"The market being such as it is, and, moreover, being for many classes of goods a new one, the agents employed in it should be carefully selected. Here, again, Americans are at a disadvantage. Very few of the commercial travellers who are sent out from the United States speak Spanish, whereas nearly all those representing foreign concerns do. The Americans are therefore obliged to put themselves entirely into the hands of agents and interpreters, which is always an unsatisfactory way of doing business. In view of the growing relations between the United States and the South American countries, it would seem as if Spanish should occupy a preferential place, in our educational institutions, over French or German. Our business is to invade the Spanish-speaking territories, whereas we are ourselves invaded by the European nations, and this fact necessitates a more perfect equipment on the part of our business agents entering the foreign field. "As regards the classes of goods most needed in Cuba it would be impossible and wholly unnecessary to particularise more fully in this paper. We may broadly say that everything needed in this country is needed in Cuba, within the limits imposed by the difference of climate. They want or can be led to want everything we can furnish that is good and cheap. "I may perhaps be here permitted another digression. We have heard a great deal in times past, and more particularly of late, of 'overproduction,' and it is supposed to account for many of our business troubles. Now overproduction is a strictly relative condition, and its remedy is either to produce less or to dispose of more. Political economists tell us that true material progress lies in commonising the good things of life, so that what to-day are the luxuries of the rich shall become to-morrow the ordinary possessions of the middle classes, who will, in their turn, relegate their previous simple comforts to the poor, thus establishing an ever-ascending scale of prosperity, and raising, as it were, the standard of poverty. It is impossible, I think, to deny the truth of this proposition, which dictates a _levelling up_, instead of the socialistic plan of _levelling down_. In this view it is plainly to be seen that we are not, and cannot be, in any danger from _overproduction_. What we and all the world are suffering from is _underdistribution_. The remedy, as far as the United States are concerned, is not to limit production, but rather to increase it even to its utmost possibilities and then launch out in quest of new markets. It is this policy which has given England her vast commercial supremacy in the past. She has never attempted to restrict the production of her manufactures, but her efforts