It would be out of place here to talk of this or that defect in British business methods or to suggest possible amendments. Such matters may be left to business men. Mr Herbert Gibson, in the fascinating address which he lately gave in King's College, London, sets the matter on a higher plane. "I do not think," he says, "it is so much a question of this or that system of weights and measures, or of the insularity of our classes of goods, as a question of a more intimate and sympathetic understanding between the peoples themselves. Trade can no doubt go on without such an understanding; but, where it exists, commercial as well as political, social and intellectual relations are strengthened. It seems to me that where our relations with South America have weakened or at least where they have not progressively increased, is in that man-to-man understanding and sympathy that opened the doors of all South America to our grandfathers." CHAPTER V EFFECTS OF THE WAR ON THE REPUBLICS _El país de mañana_, "the Country of Tomorrow." One may hear the proverb any day on the lips of Spaniard or Spanish-American in whimsical self-criticism concerning his own ways and those of his people and country. But the word applies in another sense to the Spanish-American republics. They are the countries of tomorrow, the lands of the future, the lands of promise, this score of Latin-American republics; for they are twenty in number. Owing to want of space and the comprehensive character of our subject, I have been obliged to speak of Latin America as a whole. This is not inappropriate, for Latin America does form a world in itself, as all Latin-Americans feel, and indicate in their intercourse with one another. Thus, one may quite rightly speak of Latin America as a whole, just as one used to speak of Europe as a whole. But this western world, which sprang from the Iberian Peninsula, is a group of twenty republics differing from one another in situation and character and, to some degree also, in ethnology and manner of language. These countries extend through every habitable latitude, and most of the republics contain within their own borders every habitable altitude. Their products are boundless, both in abundance and in variety, and these products might be multiplied indefinitely. Name any one of the republics, and you are naming a symbol of wealth, of existing wealth, and still more, of manifold future wealth.