EXCERPTS FROM HEARINGS, 297
W. O. Washburn, managing partner of the American Hoisting &amp;
Derrick Co., Minneapolis, Minn., did not believe a joint selling
agency for small manufacturers would be beneficial in his line. He
said :
In our particular line I do not think it would do any good. We would not be
In any such proposition except as a general help to the country, if it could be
figured out, but we do not see anything in it. We have had so many cases of
that sort put up to us by concerns who made it a business to represent some 10
soncerns—for instance, a brokerage concern would undertake to represent 10
first-class concerns and market their product in foreign countries—but it never
turned out satisfactorily at all. We have never had any results to speak of
at all.
* * * But our experience has been that it is necessary for the manufacturer
 to send his own representative or some one who will give his line sufficient
 thought and sufficient care to really find out what is required to establish it.
* * * Jf we were to go into an arrangement of that sort, our first care
would be to see who would represent our line and how much of his time we
could have and whether he would apply it assiduously in looking after our
business. ‘Those are the main things. And the man must understand our business
 ; and, in the majority of cases, if you would go in with a man who did not
understand it, he would not get anything at all.
Herbert H. Bigelow, of Brown &amp; Bigelow, St. Paul, Minn., manufacturers
 of advertising specialties, said:

I do not think that is practical in our line of business. I have turned it
over in my mind several times. We are considerably interested in the South
American business, and I feel that one of our principal people will go there
inside of the next year and a half or two years. But the nature of our product
Is one in which a man i¥ entirely creative, and I do not think that a joint
selling agency would be successful any more than a joint selling agency for
cash registers would be practicable, * * * If you are selling shoes or selling
flour or selling a staple commodity, a Joint selling agency is very practicable
and almost 8 necessity to reduce the overhead expenses.
But in our line of industry the product is more in the nature of something
which people can do without and the desire for which is entirely stimulated.
Howard Coonley, president of the Walworth Manufacturing Co.,
Boston, Mass. (steamfitters’ supplies, plumbers’ supplies, etc.), said:
The reason I hesitate on competing lines is this: Another one of our handicaps
 is the fact that the foreign markets have always been used as the
dumping ground of manufacturers in some of the lines when they have a surplus
 of goods which they can not market in their own country, We want to
keep our shops going and our organizations intact, and for that purpose we
sell our goods even below cost in order to gain that end. This competition in
foreign countries has been at least as keen on account of cut prices as it has
been because of meeting foreign trade. I think nine-tenths of the business men
feel if they want to go into the export trade they must cut their prices, and
that is bad in every way. Now, if competing concerns sell goods through an
agent—I am speaking only of the lines with which I am familiar—they lose
their identity and they lose the value of their quality, and they deserve a return
on the products which they have built up, and it seems to me there might be
langer of losing more of that if competing concerns were allowed to sell
through one concern.

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For instance, take a line of valves we manufacture. Now, every manutacturer
 has a distinct line of valve, and if only he handles them, * * =»
only the quality counts. On the other hand, if I had a representative who was
selling my goods and probably two or three of my competitors’ goods, the value
of those goods would be lost sight of entirely—the value of the product—and
that is what, it seems to me, this country must play for.
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It is natural that only the very largest of the manufacturers can afford
bo have agents in these countries, representing them solely. There are a