12 REPORT ON COOPERATION IN AMERICAN EXPORT TRADE.
SECTION 2. LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY.

Because of the vastness of the subject of foreign trade, the urgency
for action, and the difficulty of getting information abroad at this
ime, it was necessary to limit the inquiry to what was immediately
feasible. There are many forces that determine the movements of
international trade, and to analyze all, even of those that act very
powerfully and widely, would require an immense amount of
research of a most difficult character. Thus, international trade is
powerfully affected by the natural adaptation of countries for the
production of materials; by their adaptation to manufacture in
general on account of physical conformation, climate, ease of developing
 power, and the skill, ingenuity, enterprise, and financial
resources of their people. In the case of any given material or
manufactured product underlying conditions of this character play
an important part. Forces of this kind, obscure as their action may
be, have their sure effect on the cost of production. A study of the
cost of production in other countries, whether with reference to the
underlying factors just mentioned or to only the more immediate
factors of material cost, wages, and labor efficiency, would have been
beyond the present means and time of the Commission, even had the
war not prevented it.
It is needless to state that cooperation in export trade, which is
the feature of the subject to which the Commission by its organic
act is specially directed, can not change some of the deeper currents
of international commerce that are determined by physical causes
which result in costs of production so low as to preclude competition.
But where the nations are more nearly on a par, as they are in
many of the articles of trade, the factors that depend not on natural
zauses, nor on the social development and custom of a people, but
on immediate action, governmental or private, may often be the
Jetermining ones. It was to these lines that the Commission limited
 its study. It might even have confined itself strictly to the
juestion of export cooperation as the means most closely within its
&gt;wn sphere, and have left other departments of the Government to
secure information on the very important subjects of rail and ocean
transportation, banking, credit facilities, etc. But these topics are
s0 vital to foreign trade, and so much valuable information on them
inevitably came to the notice of the Commission, that it has included
a good deal of such data in this report. In its recommendations,
however, it has confined itself strictly to the subject of the legislation
it deems necessary regarding cooperation, leaving the rest for the
consideration and judgment of the governmental departments more
directly concerned therewith.