282 REPORT ON COOPERATION IN AMERICAN EXPORT TRADE.

The method might not work to advantage on advertised trade-mark goods
or where large selling organizations have already developed an efficient distribution
 for their output. Each industry would solve its own problems.

John D. Ryan, president of the Amalgamated Copper Co., New
York City, also favors combinations, and said in part:

The thing that we want, after all, is the best result for the country, not
the best result for a corporation, or for a group of corporations. We want to
enable people to go and fight for trade. But, first of all, we want to put our
people, whether big or little, in a position where they can command the trade
of the markets they are seeking as against our competitors outside of this
country ; and the bigger they are the more members they need at times to save
the competition, one with the other. They are so strong they will fight one
another and get results that are detrimental.

I think any change in the law that will permit combination, agreements,
and understandings in the export trade is all right; and that the suggestion
 made by the United States Chamber of Commerce, with practical sugrestions
 in the form of a bill, is a very excellent one. But, particularly, that
‘he Federal Trade Commission shall have the same power in the matter of
regulating—breaking up, if you please—disintegrating or dissolving any such
combination if it, the Federal Trade Commission, finds the combination is
anfavorably affecting domestic trade.
I don’t think that it ought to be considered at all to permit combinations of—
et us say, a favored few, whether they are favored because they are small or
because they are large. 1 think it ought to be general. I think it ought to be
in behalf of the committee of this country, in behalf of the manufacturer, of the
laborer, and of everybody who is interested in the production of anything by this
country, rather than on behalf of a few weak, small, struggling manufacturers,
sr on behalf of a few great, big, strong ones. If the principle is right, it is
right all along the line. Competition to-day is depriving this country of a great
deal of money that it ought to have—a great deal of benefit that it ought to
have, in the sale of its natural resources, particularly, and also of its manutactured
 products. The competition which we all know costs money is the competition
 of the big units rather than the competition of the small units. The
small units have not the trade. We ought to permit them to combine so as to
secure it. The large units that have the trade, and that areslargely marketing
our natural resources, ought to be permitted to combine so that they can get
the most money for those products and bring it to this country.
I think that that is sound economic policy, and I do not think there is very
much doubt about it in the minds of anybody giving it serious study, as you
gentlemen are. And I am satisfied that you will come to the conclusion, the
more you study this thing, that it is not for anybody’s benefit, but for everybody’s
 benefit; and that no one step in business legislation, in a generation,
would do as much for America, or that there is anything that America needs
as much as it does this one thing. Because, as I say, outside of the large conrerns
 our manufactures, for export, are negligible—are not important.
+ &amp; * The big manufacturer in any country makes a soft spot for the
little fellow. He educates the trade. He shows him how to get it; and a little
fellow, without any fair proportion of expense or any fair proportion of the
trouble, falls right into the trade that the big fellow has established. What we
want to help the small manufacturer in this country to do, is to establish American
 trade in these manufactures. They will get their share of it, and they will
get it easier and cheaper on account of the big fellows having laid the foundation
 and paved the way for them. You will find, Mr. Chairman, in talking with
small manufacturers generally, that they always have found it easier to follow
a big manufacturer from their own country, and find a market where he was
finding it, than if they had to educate the foreigner to their line of goods, or
sducate him to the way things are weighed and measured and packed and put
ap and all those kinds of things. That is done by the big fellow. His salesmen
break the ground, and the little fellow comes along and takes advantage of it;
and he will do that in this case if he has got enough ambition te go outside of
his own country. The trouble with the small manufacturer in this country is
that he has never gone outside: he has never looked for business outside.