320 REPORT ON COOPERATION IN AMERICAN EXPORT TRADE.

Of the agents and representatives of the Westinghouse Electric
&amp; Manufacturing Co., Pittsburgh, Pa., in foreign countries, Maurice
Coster, its export manager, said :

It will surprise the Commission to learn shat the American is a very poor
rolonist, and an American, if he is any good at all, is not going to leave
home, and when we do find an American willing to go abroad, after he has
become accustomed, he wants to come home. We have had to employ Englishmen,
 who are natural colonists, and like it. They go to foreign countries,
expecting to stay, and later on retire. You can’t get a good American to do
that, We are obliged in Russia and South America to resort to the employment
 of English representatives. ]
George T. Blow, president of the Western Clock Co., La Salle, IIL,
said :
Business depends largely upon friendship, upon personal influences and
impressions. * * * We all know that England and Germany, our most
successful competitors, are overpopulated, and their best young men, knowing
that there is no future for them in their own country, are educated and trained
for business experience in one of these various countries that we are speaking
of. They are educated not only in the language, but in the politics. They go
out to that country and make 8 home. = They generally, or frequently, marry
there, and they become citizens, and the best possible citizens. It is natural
that those people should have an advantage over one of our traveling salesmen
who goes out for the first time and has a few Spanish or Portuguese phrases.
He has to deal with conditions which are so totally dissimilar to what he has
here, that a first-class salesmen here, who would make a record, would go
down there and starve because he does not understand the conditions, he lacks
the education.
Method of quoting prices—T. Edward Wilder, of Wilder &amp; Co.,
Chicago, Ill, favors the adoption of the metric system, as is shown by
the following:
It is time * * =* that this Government * * * instigated a change
from the haphazard system of the English weights and measures to the unified
 metric system which is adopted by all nations except England. That
would give us some relief, Our leather goes out in feet and pounds, where
they want it in meters and kilograms, and the delay in transferring from one
to the other hinders commerce. We do not get the business because we are not
familiar with it. It should be compulsory, I think, that we should adopt this
system.
George T. Blow, president of the Western Clock Co., La Salle, Ill,
said:
Of all the difficulties that confront an American going into that country, the
greatest difficulty of all is the system of weights and measures.
a3 &amp;* oe &amp; i

The advantage of a uniform system is so great that I firmly believe that if
two salesmen went into the same place to sell the same goods, there is no question
 whatever that the one who sold them by the metric weight measures would
get the order and the man who sold them in pounds of weight and inches or
feet in dimension, would not be considered.
Export agents—Prof. Oliver M. W. Sprague, professor of banking
 and finance, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard School of Business Administration,
 considers the export house an efficient agency in many
cases

Practically all British export trade has been developed by export houses:
not by combinations of producers, and not by means of direct representation
of single producers. It is my opinion that a very large part of the foreign
trade field is still the proper province of the export house rather than of direct
selling agencies. Direct selling, whether by single concern or by groups of
producers, would seem to be advisable where the capital costs of marketing