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ABUSES OF OUR EXPORT TRADE

Another breeder, the Carnation Stock Farm in the State of Washington, recently produced a reel entitled "How to Judge a Holstein Calf as a Future Herd Sire." To make this picture, the services of a famous Holstein judge were secured and he is shown in the act of judging Carnation King Sylvia, a $106,000 calf, which the Carnation farm recently bought at a public auction sale in Wisconsin. This picture has been sent to a number of agricultural colleges for use in their short courses. is designed to illustrate all the fine points of conformation, in accordance with the

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standard scale adopted by the leading Holstein judges of the world. Among other well-known stock-raisers who have enlisted the celluloid film in their big selling campaigns is mentioned Warren T. McCray, one of the foremost breeders of pure-bred Herefords in the United States, who, with the aid of motion pictures, sold a million dollars worth of cattle last year. His film is merely a series of views on his farm, featuring a great many thorobred Herefords. For general publicity purposes the film is being widely shown at farmers' institutes, agricultural colleges and county fairs.

TRADE TRICKS THAT HURT OUR EXPORT TRADE WITH SOUTH AMERICA

PR

ROPAGANDA against American goods in Latin America and other foreign markets, as inspired by our competitors in other lands, is hampering our export trade far less than it is hurt by the ignorance and lack of principle displayed by certain American manufacturers who, during the last few years, have done nearly everything possible to discredit decent and reliable American firms abroad. 'Such is the serious charge made by E. B. Filsinger, an export trade authority, who goes on to say, in the New York Commercial, that on a recent trip to South America he met, in Buenos Aires, the head of á great Spanish house to whom the word "American" was anathema. With a shrug of disgust, he launched into a tirade of abuse of American business methods in general and of certain firms in particular, backed by convincing proof. He had been repeatedly "stung" and "if he never bought another dollar's worth in the United States one could not blame him in the least." After much discussion he was persuaded to place a trial order for $10,000, but simultaneously an order for $60,000, which should have gone to America, was placed in England. This is one of many instances, notwithstanding which the prospects for American merchandize, properly sold and shipped, are declared to be satisfactory. Many American houses maintaining branches in South America are firmly entrenched.

Others represented by special salesmen or local agents are favorably known. However, "it is farcical to expect an increased business if the same methods are pursued as were followed by un-American houses during the war." The disrepute into which American business has fallen in Latin. America is attributed to these causes:

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1. Ignorance by many houses of export technic and requirements.

2. Unscrupulous agents in Latin America who took advantage of unsuspecting American firms.

3. "War babies" or "fly-by-nights" in the export commission house trade who worked on the "get rich quick" principle.

4. Unscrupulous manufacturers, who, selling direct, took advantage of their foreign customers or of the export commission houses who trusted them with business.

5. Export commission houses, many of good repute, but who unknowingly employed "grafters." The latter worked in connection with unscrupulous manufacturers, permitting the substitution of inferior merchandise. They also accepted private commissions.

6. A widespread lack of organization and inefficient personnel on account of the war.

Direct losses to many concerns have been the result of fines for incorrect declarations on consular invoices, or for delays in sending shipping documents. Heavy claims have had to be faced on account of substitutions of merchandize without permis

sion of the buyer. In many instances shipments have been refused and had to be sold at a loss. In other cases the customers have been "kickers" who unfairly insisted on allowances. Very often agents have sold fourth-class houses and have irreparably damaged their prospects to sell the best firms. This has been a common failing, the agents being bent only on making the largest immediate profits for themselves. In traveling about South America, we read:

"One is struck by the fact that many responsible American firms were victims of the 'adventurer' type of agent. The latter took advantage of unsuspecting manufacturers and 'worked' them to the limit. It was this type that hoodwinked the shipper into the belief that he alone should control the shipping documents. On every hand one hears stories of the results of this system. With the papers in his hands, the 'chicanero' agent took over goods which had greatly enhanced in value since the date of sale and sold them at prevailing prices, pocketing the difference. The original buyer was left to whistle for his goods. This type of agent was not above 'faking' the names of customers and of 'stuffing' orders from legitimate buyers. He counted on being able to sell the goods on arrival at a profit to himself. It was this type also who sold piece goods to barbers, doctors, druggists and even garage keepers. When the 'smash-up' came after the armistice an apparently brilliant business soon became a bitter disillusionment. Goods are still being sold from the Customs House which arrived in November, 1918, and earlier. Obviously there were terrific losses on orders of rejected goods disposed of before the advance in price in April, 1919.

"It is unpleasant to admit that certain short-sighted American manufacturers seem to have looked upon export houses as legitimate

prey. Several instances in different lines of business have come to my attention where American firms who are ordinarily correct in their domestic dealings have behaved otherwise toward the export house. This unfair dealing took the form of substitution, adulteration, misbranding or overcharge. Some manufacturers who sell direct seemingly did not hesitate to resort to similar practices with their own clients in South America. They now bitterly regret having resorted to such methods. Perhaps they have been cured by their losses. What has surprized me is that the export commission firms have stood for so much from manufacturers who have ill-treated them. The export house ships its own goods and it would be a comparatively easy matter to check or test

every shipment for weight, quality, quantity and details. I know of claims which resulted in enormous losses for certain export houses. They could have been avoided by the simple expedient of tests and checks before the goods left the United States."

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It is emphasized that the Latin-American victim takes little pains to differentiate between the good and the bad American houses, and condemns everything "Americano. Practically no line of goods has escaped criticism. This writer has evidence of claims relating to foodstuffs, steel, parafine, oil, leather, machinery, piece goods, wearing apparel, glass, furniture, and chemicals. A vital point is made of the fact that so many American concerns have entered the export field with no preparation whatever and were bound to make blunders. But, the writer concludes, it is difficult to understand why so many American houses do not send shipping documents and invoices promptly. Some attribute the

delay to the banks who finance the shipments. If the latter are at fault, they should seek to change their system. LatinAmericans can always count on these papers from England and are inclined to be prejudiced against the United States as a whole because of this general carelessness. Fines are the invariable result of delays. The Latin-American also complains of the general carelessness regarding samples, packing, and other details.

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A TALE OF SUPREME SACRIFICE

"FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT

THEY DO"

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According to the award made by the O. Henry Memorial Committee of the Society of Aris and Sciences, this story, by Wilbur Daniel Steele, was the second-best short story published by an American writer in the year 1919. When the five members of the Jury of Award finally sat down to do their voting, three of the five gave first place to three different stories by the same writer. If the awards had been given to the best writer, instead of to the best story, this writer, Mr. Steele, would therefore have been entitled to first place. As it was, that place was given to the story, "England to America," by Miss Margaret Prescott Montagu, reprinted in our March number. The present story was first published in the PICTORIAL REVIEW for July. We reprint the story from a text revised by the author, who has made a number of textual changes and has restored several sentences that were for some reason dropped from the copy, by the printer, in the first publication, so that the author's complete text is here published for the first time. It is an interesting coincidence that the writer, so honored by the O. Henry Memorial Committee, in its final award, was born in Greensboro, N. C., the town in which "O. Henry"-Sydney Porter-also was born. This is a story of supreme sacrifice by a woman.

W

HEN Christopher Kain told me his story, sitting late in his dressing-room at the Philharmonic, I felt that I ought to say something, but nothing in the world seemed adequate. It was one of those times when words have no weight; mine sounded like a fly buzzing in the tomb of kings. And after all, he did not hear me; I could tell that by the look on his face as he sat there staring into the light, the lank, dark hair framing his waxen brow, his shoulders hanging forward, his lean, strong, sentient fingers wrapped around the brown neck of "Ugo,' the 'cello, tightly.

Agnes Kain was a lady, as a lady was before the light of that poor worn word went out. Quiet, reserved, gracious, continent, bearing in face and form the fragile beauty of a rosepetal come to its fading on a windless ledge, she moved down the years with the steadfast sweetness of the gentlewoman-gentle, and a woman. They did not know much about her in the city, where she had come with her son. did not need to. Looking into her eyes, into the transparent soul behind them, they could ask no other credential for the name she bore and the lavender she wore for the husband of whom she never spoke.

They

She spoke of him, indeed, but that was in privacy, and to her son. As Christopher grew through boyhood, she watched him; in her enveloping eagerness she forestalled the hour when he would have asked, and told him about his father, Daniel Kain.

It gave them the added bond of secretsharers. The tale grew as the boy grew. Each night when Christopher crept into his mother's bed for the quiet hour of her voice, it was as if he crept in to another world, the wind-blown, sky-encompassed kingdom of the Kains, Daniel, his father, and Maynard, his father, another Maynard before him, and all the Kains-and the Hill and the House, the Willow Wood, the Moor Under the Cloud, the Beach where the gray seas pounded, the boundless Marsh, the Lilac-hedge standing against

the stars.

He knew he would have to be a man of men to measure up to that heritage, a man strong, grave, thoughtful, kind with the kindness that never falters, brave with the courage of that dark and massive folk whose blood ran in his veins. Coming as it did, a world of legend growing up side by side with the matter-offact world of Concord Street, it was made to fit in with all things natural, and it never occurred to him to question. He, the boy, was not massive, strong, or brave; he saw things in the dark that frightened him, his thin shoulders were bound to droop, the hours of practice on his violin left him with no blood in his legs and a queer pallor on his brow.

Nor was he always grave, thoughtful, kind. He did not often lose his temper; the river of his young life ran too smooth and deep. But there were times when he did. Brief passions swept him, blinded him, twisted his fingers, left him sobbing, retching, and weak as death itself. He never seemed to wonder at the discrepancy in things, however, any more than he wondered at the look in his mother's eyes, as she hung over him, waiting, in those moments of nausea after rage. She had not the look of the gentlewoman then; she had more the look, a thousand times, of the prisoner led through the last gray corridor in the dawn.

He saw her like that once when he had not been angry. It was on a day when he came into the front hall unexpectedly as a stranger was going out of the door. The stranger was dressed in rough, brown homespun; in one hand he held a brown velour hat, in the other a thorn stick without a ferrule. Nor was there anything more worthy of note in his face, an average-long face with hollowed cheeks, sunken gray eyes, and a high forehead, narrow, sallow, and moist.

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N TO, IT was not the stranger that troubled Christopher. It was his mother's look at his own blundering entrance, and, when the man was out of hearing, the tremulous haste of her explanation.

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He was growing up.

He went away to boarding-school not long after this, taking with him the picture of his adored mother, the treasured epic of his dark, strong fathers, his narrow shoulders, his rare, blind bursts of passion, his new-born wonder, and his violin. At school they thought him a queer one.

The destinies of men are unaccountable things. Five children in the village of Deer Bay came down with diphtheria. That was why the academy shut up for a week, and that was what started Christopher on his way home for an unexpected holiday. And then it was only by one chance in a thousand that he should glimpse his mother's face in the downtrain halted at the Junction where he himself was changing.

She did not see him till he came striding along the aisle of her coach, his arms full of his things, face flushed, eyes brimming with the surprize and pleasure of seeing her, lips trembling questions.

"Why, Mother, what on earth? Where are you going? I'm to have a week at least, Mother; and here you're going away, and you didn't tell me, and what is it, and everything?"

His eager voice trailed off. The color drained out of his face, and there was a shadow in his eyes.

He drew back from her the least way. "What is it, Mother? Mother!" Somewhere on the platform outside the conductor's droning "board" ran along the coaches. Agnes Kain opened her white lips. "Get off before it's too late, Christopher. 'I haven't time to explain now. Go home, and Mary will see you have everything. I'll be back in a day or so. Kiss me, and go quickly. Quickly!"

He did not kiss her. He would not have kissed her for worlds. He was too bewildered, dazed, lost, too inexpressibly hurt. On the platform outside, had she turned ever so little to look, she might have seen his face again for an instant as the wheels ground on the rails. Color was coming back to it again, a murky color like the shadow of a red cloud.

obtrusive, well-gowned gentlewoman, their fellow-passenger. Those that were left after another two hours saw her get down at a barren station where an old man waited in a carriage. The halt was brief, and none of them caught sight of the boyish figure that slipped down from the rearmost coach to take shelter for himself and his dark, tempest-ridden face behind the shed at the end of the platform

Christopher walked out across a broad, high, cloudy plain, following a red road, led by the dust-feather hanging over the distant carriage.

He walked for miles, creeping ant-like between the immensities of the brown plain and the tumbled sky. Had he been less implacable, less intent, he might have noticed many things: the changing conformation of the clouds, the far flight of a gull, the new perfume and texture of the wind that flowed over his hot temples. But as it was, the sea took him by surprize. Coming over a little rise, his eyes focused for another long, dun fold of the plain, it seemed for an instant as if he had lost his balance over a void; for a wink he felt the passing of a strange sickness. He went off a little way to the side of the road-and sat down on a flat stone.

The

The world had become of a sudden infinitely simple, as simple as the inside of a cup. land broke down under him, a long, naked slope fringed at the foot by a ribbon of woods. Through the upper branches he saw the shingles and chimneys of a pale gray village clinging to a white beach, a beach which ran up to the left in a border flight of cliffs, showing on their crest a cluster of roofs and dull green gable-ends against the sea that lifted vast, unbroken, to the rim of the cup.

Christopher was fifteen, and queer even for that queer age. He had a streak of the girl in him at his adolescence, and, as he sat there in a huddle, the wind coming out of this huge new gulf of life seemed to pass through him, bone and tissue, and tears rolled down his face.

The carriage bearing his strange mother was gone, from sight and from mind. His eyes came down from the lilac-crowned hill to the beach, where it showed in white patches through the wood, and he saw that the wood was of willows. And he remembered the plain behind him, the wide, brown moor under the cloud. He got up on his wobbly legs. There were stones all about him in the whispering wire-grass, and like them the one he had been sitting on bore a blurred inscription. He read it aloud, for some reason, his voice borne away faintly on the river of air:

"MAYNARD KAIN, ESQUIRE
1809-1839

This Monument Erected In His Memory By
His Sorrowing Widow,

Harriet Burnam Kain

A TALE OF SUPREME SACRIFICE

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There was no moss or lichen on this windscoured slope. In the falling dusk the old white stones stood up like the bones of the dead themselves, and the only sound was the rustle of the wire-grass creeping over them in a dry tide. The boy had taken off his cap; the sea-wind moving under the mat of his damp hair gave it the look of some somber, outlandish cowl. With the night coming on, his solemnity had an elfin quality. He found at last what he was looking for, and his fingers had to help his eyes.

"DANIEL KAIN

Beloved Husband of Agnes Willoughby Kain Born 1860-Died 1886

'Forgive them, for they know not what they do.'

Christopher Kain told me that he left the naked graveyard repeating it to himself, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do," conscious less of the words than of the august rhythm falling in with the pulse of his exaltation.

THE

HE velvet darkness that hangs under clouds had come down over the hill and the great marsh stretching away to the south of it. Agnes Kain stood in the open doorway, one hand on the brown wood, the other pressed to her cheek.

"You heard it that time, Nelson?" "No, ma'am." The old man in the entrance-hall behind her shook his head. In the thin, blown light of the candelabra which he held high, the worry and doubt of her deepened on his singularly unlined face.

"And you might well catch your death in that draft, ma'am."

But she only continued to stare out between the pillars where the lilac-hedge made a wall of deeper blackness across the night.

"What am I thinking of?" she whispered, and then: "There!"

And this time the old man heard it; a nearer, wind-blown hail.

"Mother! Oh, Mother!"

The boy came striding through the gap the gate in the hedge.

"It's I, Mother!

prized?"

She had no answer.

of

Chris! Aren't you sur

As he came she turned

and moved away from the door, and the old

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man, peering from under the flat candleflames, saw her face like wax. And he saw the boy, Christopher, in the doorway, his hands flung out, his face transfigured.

"Mother! I'm here! Don't you understand?"

He touched her shoulder. She turned to him, as it were lazily.

"Yes," she breathed. "I see."

He threw his arms about her, and felt her shaking from head to foot. But he was shaking, too.

"I knew the way!" he cried. "I knew it, Mother, I knew it! I came down from the Moor and there was the Willow Wood, and I

knew the way home. And when I came, Mother, it was like the trees bowing down their branches in the dark. And when I came by the Beach, Mother, it was like a roll of drums, beating for me, and when I came to the Hill I saw the Hedge standing against the sky, and I came, and here I am!"

She expressed no wonder, asked no question. "Yes," was all she said, and it was as if she spoke of a tree coming to its leaf, the wind to its height, the tide to its flood.

Had he been less rapt and triumphant he must have wondered more at that icy lassitude, and at the cloak of ceremony she wrapped about her to hide a terror. It was queer to hear the chill urbanity of her: "This is Christopher, Nelson; Christopher, this is your father's servant, Nelson." It was queerer still to see the fastidious decorum with which she led him over this, the familiar house of his fathers.

He might have been a stranger, come with a guide-book in his hand. When he stood on his heels in the big drawing-room, staring up with all his eyes at the likenesses of those men he had known so well, it was strange to hear her going on with all the patter of the gallery attendant, names of painters, prices, dates. He stood before the portrait of Daniel Kain, his father, a dark-skinned, longish face with a slightly protruding nether lip, hollow temples, and a round chin, deeply cleft. As in all the others, the eyes, even in the dead pigment, seemed to shine,with an odd, fixed luminosity of their own, and like the others from first to last of the line, it bore upon it the stamp of an imperishable youth. And all the while he stood there, drinking it in, detail by detail, his mother spoke, not of the face, but of the frame, some obscure and unsuspected excellence in the goldleaf on the frame.

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