The Columbian. [volume] (Bloomsburg, Pa.) 1866-1910, 1900-08-30
PARIS LETTER.
From our Regular Correspondent.


A mutimllionaire may lose hun.
dred thousand here and there without
feeling the loss, for the majority of ms
ventures are profitable and his balance
sheet shows net gains. 1t is thus with
the United States, the mightiest of
the mulimillionaries at the Paris Ex-
position. The Paris Exposition is
undoubtedly losing side speculation
for our country. But we are rich and
will scarcely feel it. 1t would have
been better for us to have stayed at
home than to have appeared at this
feast without our best clothes. 1t will
not do to say we have better clothes
at home. Such an excuse is not good
form. Moreover we will not be be.
lived except by our home folks, and
we must submit to the popular judg-
ment-that half a score of pigmy ma
tionallties, in more splendid apparel
than ourselves are, by these signs, our
commercial superiors. There are of
course those in every land who know
better, but this judgment was and is
an appeal to popular judgment, and if
in the eye of the public, who estimate
country by its display at this Exposi-
tion, we fall below Belgium and Den
mark, to say nothing of Austria and
Germany, our appearance III this held
is failure.
1t is as easy to fix the blame as it
is useless to do so, for by the time for
the next Exposition the lesson and
the moral will be forgotten. A new
President and new Congress will be
ready to repeat the extravaganza and
the blunder. The fault is radical in
our shifting changing governmental
personnel. 1t is in a system which
retires public officers as soon as they
begin to know their business; a system
which imposes little sense of response
bility upon those who know their ten
ure is transient and who are answer
able only for the brief day of their in
cumbency. Our resources are mex
haustible because they are the sources
and forces of nature, but another
country acting as foolishly and ex-
pending as lavishly as we do would be
ruined.
There are those who will ll,whose
business it is to tell different story
about the appearance of the United
States at this Fair. AS a consequence
there are some who will never know
the truth about 1t. There are doubt
less some who are incapable of seeing
or believing the truth, no matter how
plain it may be. l am writing only
for those who want to know the truth
because it is wholesome even when dis
agreeable. The siliest patriotism,
like the silliest family pride, is that
which CLOSES and conceals, and re-
sents the criticism-the diagnosis
indispensable to cure.
We have made ourselves ridiculous
by sending great host of Commls-
sioners to this Fair, and they in turn
have made us and themselves more
ridiculous by insisting through official
channels upon social recognition
Many of them, too many, with their
sisters and their cousins and their
aunts, have got it, and the way they
WELD and flourish and display it makes
the groundlings grin, the judicious
grieve. The fault is at home in the
vicious system which treats every ap-
propriaticn to a worlds fair as junk
citing function to which every Ameri-
can has a right to go at Government
expense, provided his Member Of
Congress has pull enough to put him
on the roll, Would that this vlciou:
system stopped at Paris or were a:
ephemeral as the Paris Exposition
But we know It is the bane of oul
diplomatic and consular services, ant
that it results in our sending aspiring
illiterate ounces TO represent us II
hundreds of foreign cities, where oul
consuls are in sharp contrast with the
elite, educated, polyglot agents o.
England, Germany and Russia. The
crying need of our foreign trade today
is not cheaper production, or more
ships, but an improved corps of com
mercial and consular agents speaking
several languages of cosmopolitan in
telectual range and as intelligent!
jealous for the interests of thel
country as is the average Chicago o
New York drummer Tor the success o
his house. We have the raw materia
for such a corps. The pity is that i
is SO very raw. French, German ant
Spanish should be known by thos
who presume to ask for consula