se departments are quiet men, trained to the highest
degree of skill, serving for a petty remuneration along lines that are
infinitely useful to mankind; and yet in some cases they waited to be
discovered until this Chamber of Commerce of the United States was
established. Coming to this city, officers of that association found
that there were here things that were infinitely useful to them and with
which the whole United States ought to be put into communication.

The Government of the United States is very properly a great
instrumentality of inquiry and information. One thing we are just
beginning to do that we ought to have done long ago: We ought long ago
to have had our Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. We ought long
ago to have sent the best eyes of the Government out into the world to
see where the opportunities and openings of American commerce and
American genius were to be found--men who were not sent out as the
commercial agents of any particular set of business men in the United
States, but who were eyes for the whole business community. I have been
reading consular reports for twenty years. In what I came to regard as
an evil day the Congressman from my district began to send me the
consular reports, and they ate up more and more of my time. They are
very interesting, but they are a good deal like what the old lady said
of the dictionary, that it was very interesting but a little
disconnected. You get a picture of the world as if a spotlight were
being dotted about over the surface of it. Here you see a glimpse of
this, and here you see a glimpse of that, and through the medium of some
consuls you do not see anything at all. Because the consul has to have
eyes and the consul has to know what he is looking for. A literary
friend of mine said that he used to believe in the maxim that
"everything comes to the man who waits," but he discovered after awhile
by practical experience that it needed an additional clause, "provided
he knows what he is waiting for." Unless you know what you are looking
for and have trained eyes to see it when it comes your way, it may pass
you unnoticed. We are just beginning to do, systematically and
scientifically, what we ought long ago to have done, to employ the
Government of the United States to survey the world in order that
American commerce might be guided.

But there are other ways of using the Government of the United States,
ways that have long been tried, though n