We must train our men for foreign-trade fields; they must know alien languages as well as needs; we must perfect processes of packing that will deliver goods intact. With these goods, we must sell goodwill through service and contact. Secondhand-business getting will have no place in the new rivalry. Our money, too, must go adventuring, and courage must combine with capital. Our dawning international banking system, which first saw the light in South America, needs world-wide expansion. Dollar credit will be a world necessity if we capitalise the opportunity that peace may bring us. No financial aid should be so welcome as ours, because it is nonpolitical. This trade machinery will be inadequate if we have no merchant marine. Chronic failure to heed the warning for a national shipping will make our dependence upon foreign holds both acute and costly. Our trade needs more than a government professedly friendly to business. It requires a definite co-operation with business. An advisory board of practical men of commercial affairs would be of more constructive benefit to the country than all the lawmakers combined. Here, then, is the protection against organised European economic aggression, the armour for the inevitable trade conflict. Unless we gird it on, we shall be onlookers instead of participants. III--_American Business in France_ Two Americans met by chance one day last summer at a little table in front of the Cafe de la Paix in Paris. One had arrived only a month before; the other was an old resident in France. After the fashion of their kind they became acquainted and began to talk. Before them passed a picturesque parade, brilliant with the uniforms of half a dozen nations, and streaked with the symbols of mourning that attested to the ravage of war. "There is something wrong with these Frenchmen," said the first American. "How is that?" asked his companion. "It's like this," was the reply. "I have sold goods from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and yet I can get nowhere over here. I give these fellows the swiftest line of selling talk in the world and it makes no impression." "How well do you speak French?" queried his new-found acquaintance. "Not at all." "Have you studied the ways and needs of the Frenchman?" "Of course not. I've got something they want and they ought to take it." The man who had long lived in France was silent for a moment. Then he said: "The fault is not with the Frenchman, my friend. Think it over." He did, and with reflection he changed his method. He put a curb on strenuosity; started to study the French temperament; he began to see why he had not succeeded.