822 REPORT ON COOPERATION IN AMERICAN EXPORT TRADE.
can concern, but, up to the opening of the war, they were steadily cutting into
our business in that line.
My own experience in five years of intimate contact with the trend of foreign
trade, while resident in Brazil and four years of even more intimate contact
through the transportation business, leads me to the emphatic conclusion that
it is a question of manufacturing cost and not selling expense. We have to
guote every day on prospective orders and I know, not guess, that in most
cases where business is lost, it is because the exporter is not able to get as
low a price from the manufacturer, laid down in New York, as can his competitor
 in Europe.
H. C. Atkins, president of E. C. Atkins &amp; Co., Indianapolis, Ind.,
aaid

Our chief competition outside of the competition from our own manufscturers
 in the United States is competition that comes from England and Germany.
 The competition from both England and Germany is all price competition.
 Our own cost of manufacture is considerably in advance, evidently, of
the cost of manufacture to our competitors abroad, so that if we take this
business, we have to figure very close and on a very small margin of profit.
The quality competition is mainly from manufacturers in this country.
G. H. Powell, in the citrus fruit business, Los Angeles, Cal., said:
The foreign trade, Mr. Chairman, in the citrus fruit business is a very small
husiness. The reasons for that are, first, the very large quantities of citrus
fruits grown in Spain, Italy, Java, and other foreign countries, which can be
shipped to all foreign markets at a cost of from probably one-fourth to onesixth
 of the cost of exporting our fruits to the same markets, * * *
Woodward Emery, representing the Universal Winding Co.,
Boston, Mass., said:

Now, in the Universal winding machines, the company has maintained the
same price throughout the world. It is just the same on the other side as it
is here. It has met with considerable competition over there, but, in spite of
that, the quality of the machine and what it will do, has enabled the company
to stand up and assert its claim that, even at a greater price, it would pay for
itself ultimately; and that is, really, I suppose, the way you have got to build
ap a foreign business.
Louis K. Liggett, of the United Drug Co., Boston, Mass., said:

I think we American manufacturers are prone to feel that we can take
our surplus stock from here—and sometimes our * lemons ”—and unload them
on our South American trade. That thing has been done in the past, and it has
given us a bad reputation,
(i) Character of Goods.

In this connection O. De G. Vanderbilt, jr., of the Weir Frog Co.,
Cincinnati, Ohio, manufacturers of railroad track work, said:
There is very lttle exportation in this country of railroad track work in
any way, shape, or manner. There has been, up to date, very little buying of
American rails for export in this country, especially in European countries.
The sections of rail used in the European couniries, practically every one
putside of the United States are entirely different from the sections of rail
ased by the American railroads. The track work—that is, frogs, switches,
and crossings—has got to be of the same section of rail as the rail used in the
track. For that reason it has practically excluded the American manufactures
 in our line of business from competing in foreign countries.

In stating that they could meet the English and German competition
 in foreign countries, F. J. Thorsen, president of the Washington
Shoe Manufacturing Co., Seattle, Wash., said:

We can [compete], on account of the reputation that the American shoes have,
narticularly in dress shoes, in better style goods. The European-made shoes
ure not as tasty in appearance as the American-made shoes.