138 Message to the National Foreign Trade Council.
October 29, 1938

My dear Mr. Farrell:

It is with great pleasure that I avail myself of this opportunity to send a message to the National Foreign Trade Council, assembled in convention to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary. I hope that you will kindly convey to the delegates my most cordial greetings and my sincere good wishes for a very successful meeting.

Conventions of the National Foreign Trade Council are unique in the attention which they focus on the importance of our economic relationships with the world outside our borders and in the opportunity which they provide for discussion of the problems created by these relationships. I need not assure you of my personal interest in your discussions on this occasion.

The Council meetings have long been recognized as an occasion when business and government sit down together to review the record of the past year in the field of our foreign trade and to consider the work that lies ahead. In the promotion of our foreign trade both business and government have a definite function and a specific responsibility. The elimination of excessive and economically unjustifiable barriers to world trade is a task that only government can perform. To this task the government has been devoting itself with all energy since 1934 through the trade-agreements program.

As the government makes progress in removing excessive and arbitrary trade restrictions, it becomes the responsibility of business to make the most of the increased opportunities which are thereby created for the carrying on of trade. The trade-agreements program thus provides an excellent illustration of what cooperation between business and government can and should be. The cooperation which government has received from business in its foreign trade work has been highly gratifying.

The nation may well be proud of the work of our exporters, who, in spite of the increasingly complex world situation, will probably succeed this year in selling some three billion dollars’ worth of American products to foreign countries, or more than twice the value of our foreign sales five and six years ago. I am confident that our business men will not slacken their efforts in the coming year to increase both our imports and our exports in a well balanced exchange which will be of advantage to both our customers and producers.

On our part I assure you that we shall go forward with all energy with the trade-agreements program to the advancement of stable prosperity at home, and peace abroad.

Mr. James A. Farrell,
Chairman, National Foreign Trade Council, Inc.,
New York, New York.