Administration officials are worried by the fact that one of the effects of war on France and England has been to force those countries to abandon many of the principles advocated by Mr. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, in his trade agreements programme and to adopt measures which are very similar to those of the totalitarian powers. Yet, the trade agreement with Britain, France and Canada still exists, as does the three-power monetary agreement. In fact, Mr. Hull has asked for a renewal of the trade agreement powers and has thus made it inevitable that the trade agreement programme will be di cussed during the coming electoral campaign. He thus realizes that the adoption of control measures is an expediency and not a policy and that when peace has been restored. the belligerent countries will return 45 soon as possible to the principles of free enterprise and unrestricted exchange.
Meanwhile, charges are flying round the halls of Congress and appearing in the columns of the press that more than wartime exigencies are responsible for Allied commercial policy and that America is being discriminated against and American trade unnecessarily hampered. Among the actions criticized is Britain's reported pressure on Chile to accept payment for Chilean wool in the form of British goods, rather than in the form of exchange that might be available for spending in the United States. Another charge is that Great Britain, in order to get more dollar exchange, is raising the price of commodities such as tin, vitally needed by the United States. Congressman Maas charged in a recent debate in the House, "The British nation has been supported by forcing us to pay tribute. They have a monopoly on tin. We pay such an excessive price for tin because we are the major user of tín. The same is true of rubber."
Britain has also been accused of exerting pressure on Argentina and Uruguay to switch from American products to British products. In general, Great Britain and France are charged with welding together their economic resources to the detriment of third Powers. They are jointly accused of laying plans to promote the export of their goods by control prices and by arranging for barter schemes whenever circumstances permit.
Such isolationist leaders as Senators Van-den berg and La Follette, do not consider that the United States should sit idly by while other nations adopt totalitarian trade methods designed to cut into American markets. There are even some officials in the Departments of State and Commerce who feel that retaliation should be taken to prevent the use of practices which are contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of the trade agreements programme.
Neither the President nor the Secretary of State, however, take quite such an extreme view. They realize that countries at war cannot be expected to follow the practices which they would adopt in peace. As Mr. Hull remarked on one occasion, "Armed camps do not make ideal trading centres." They realize that both the British and French will use every trade weapon in their power to check the Germans directly and indirectly. They also realize that Congress by inclosing restrictions in the Neutrality Act has itself narrowed the area of unrestricted trade by withdrawing American ships from dangerous areas and by preventing governments buying on credit. They further realize that much of the opposition to the British and French policies is due to a desire to weaken the trade agreement programme. It comes from economic isolationists, who even before the war regarded American foreign trade as very unimportant and believed that the country could, by making itself self-suficient, withdraw from international affairs almost entirely and work out its problems alone without being influenced by events occurring in other countries over which it had no control.
So far as actual purchases go, the United States might become self-sufficient. This would be even more possible, if the Western Hemisphere were considered instead of continental United States alone. Many products which the United States has to import, such as sugar, coffee and cocoa, come from Latin America. But many sections of the country would suffer severely, far more than they suffer now through wartime restrictions.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.