The mails between South America and Europe are swift, regular, and certain; between South America and the United States they are slow, irregular, and uncertain. Six weeks is not an uncommon time for a letter to take between Buenos Ayres or Valparaiso and New York. The merchant who wishes to order American goods cannot know when his order will be received nor when it will be filled. The freight charges between the South American cities and American cities are generally and substantially higher than between the same cities and Europe; at many points the deliveries of freight are uncertain and its condition upon arrival doubtful. The passenger accommodations are such as to make a journey to the United States a trial to be endured and a journey to Europe a pleasure to be enjoyed. The best way to travel between the United States and both the southwest coast and the east coast of South America is to go by way of Europe, crossing the Atlantic twice. It is impossible that trade should prosper or intercourse increase or mutual knowledge grow to any great degree under such circumstances. The communication is worse now than it was twenty-five years ago. So long as it is left in the hands of our foreign competitors in business, we cannot reasonably look for any improvement. It is only reasonable to expect that European steamship lines shall be so managed as to promote European trade in South America, rather than to promote the trade of the United States in South America. This woeful deficiency in the means to carry on and enlarge our South American trade is but a part of the general decline and feebleness of the American merchant marine, which has reduced us from carrying over ninety per cent of our export trade in our own ships to the carriage of nine per cent of that trade in our own ships and dependence upon foreign shipowners for the carriage of ninety-one per cent. The true remedy and the only remedy is the establishment of American lines of steamships between the United States and the great ports of South America, adequate to render fully as good service as is now afforded by the European lines between those ports and Europe. The substantial underlying fact was well stated in the resolution of this Trans-Mississippi Congress three years ago: That every ship is a missionary of trade; that steamship lines work for their own countries just as railroad lines work for their terminal points, and that it is as absurd for the United States to depend upon foreign ships to distribute its products as it would be for a department store to depend upon the wagons of a competing house to deliver its goods.