to expect that results in the Far East will repeat our experience upon the Continent—that British trade in manufacture will be arrested at a certain point, and will have increasing difficulty thereafter in holding its ground.
VIII.
Commerce and the Monroe Doctrine.—To complete the survey, we turn to the next and last great sphere of our neutral trade. We now export to all the States of Central and South America more than twenty millions annually. With Argentina, by far the most valuable single market of the group, we have, as will be explained, special relations, and we shall reserve them for separate consideration. The dominating fact with which we shall have to reckon in all the remainder of this region is that the United States will assuredly concentrate the chief force of its commercial energy and financial research upon the business of securing the mastery of these markets. Americans are perceiving after the war that their future in the Far East is unlikely to be all they hoped. They will return with the more vigour and singleness of purpose to the original idea of achieving commercial supremacy in South America—the 'prolongation of our own continent.'
From the three volumes containing the 'Report and Evidence of the Merchant Marine Commission'[1] one fact pre-eminently emerges. It is the conviction of witnesses and Commissioners alike that the United States only needs to establish subsidized lines of steamers down both coasts of the double continent to secure the bulk of the trade of South and Central America. At present American passengers almost entirely, and American goods to a large extent, have to follow what is called the 'triangular' route: they go to Europe—to Liverpool or Hamburg—and thence to the South American ports. 'The great need of South America,' declared one witness, 'is agricultural
- ↑ Washington: Government Printing Office, 3 vols., 1905.
